Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

I’d return to my cage for another two hours of dismantling and rebuilding. My body threatened to collapse and my brain tried to slip into a permanent coma. The drill was maddening, dulling, grueling, thankless, exhilarating, addictive, consuming, consummate. It felt like love, like a refiner’s fire. I was a child at the beach with a sieve, improving the infinite expanse of sand. In the focus of my will, the sheer hammering repetition, I could burn off all of the world’s impurities, everything ugly and extraneous, and leave behind nothing but a burnished rightness, suspended in space. I closed in with microscopic steps on something I couldn’t see, something clean and unchanging, pure form and purer pleasure, a delivering memory, music, some glimpse of a still-unmade me.

But even such a focused blaze couldn’t burn off the teenage body that fueled it. I’d sit rolling the stone up the hill for half an hour before admitting the stone was rolling back over me. When every key press felt like mud, I’d hunt down someone else to distract — Jonah, or, more often, Wilson Hart.

When he wasn’t off in his mind’s dusty Spain, Will, too, spent his days in a practice room. But he never practiced as much as he should. He had that splendid muscular bass, overflowing the resonators of his chest and head. But it slipped in and out of control as he drew it through scales. His low-range power alone might have landed him a teaching job at a college like the one he had left to come to Juilliard. At his best, he might have held any stage on either side of the Mason-Dixon. But he only hit his best around half the time.

Will’s vice was his wanting to make music, not just be someone else’s messenger boy. He’d start to air out those magnificent pipes of his, but the piano in the practice room corner proved too much temptation. I ambushed him one day, working at the thing that was not his work. He sat at the keyboard, the indicting evidence of a new score spread around him. “You should be in the composition program. You know that?”

Something in my joke went wrong. “Yes, I do.” Then, forgiving me my ignorance, his fingers broke into a quotation of the Rodrigo guitar concerto’s middle movement, a tune sad enough to deflect my stupidity. He scooted over on the bench. “Sit down. We’re going to make something happen.”

I sat to his left and awaited instructions. None came. Will went on teasing out the Spaniard’s phrase, all there was to know about abandonment. His hands found their marks on nothing but foreknowledge. I sat still for a few measures until a nod from Will pointed out the obvious. I was supposed to fill out the lower lines, on nothing but the same.

I’m cursed with a near-perfect musical memory. One listen, plus my sense of the rules of harmony, and I can find my way to just about any lost chord. I’d only heard the Rodrigo once before, when Will played it for me. But the thing was still in me, intact. Under Will’s melodic promptings, I recovered the spirit, if not the full letter, of the thing.

Will laughed out loud as we fell into line. “Knew you could, brother Joe. Knew you had it in you.” So long as he didn’t expect me to chat back, we were in business. We got through the stray modulations, then started to head back to home and the theme’s recap. Will flicked his head and said, “Here we go, now, Mix.” Before I knew what was happening, his fingers dropped into bottomless places. They untied the long, mournful melody and lifted out the contents hidden inside.

I saw the moves and heard each sound he built: clusters that weren’t in the score, yet might have been, in some world without a Mediterranean. The core of Will’s chords came from Rodrigo. Yet the blind romantic could never have written them. The line that Will unrolled shared its parent melody, but his hands bent the slow troubadour tune into another arc, away from Iberia, down old, forced Atlantic crossings. He challenged that fake antique tune, like some unacknowledged half brother come knocking on your front door one afternoon wearing your nose, your jaw, your eyes. You don’t know me, but… Mixed. All mixed up. Wasn’t a horse alive with a clean pedigree.

My fingers were clubs. I heard each thing Will did before he did it. But I tagged along behind each change, getting there only after Will had already left me in his harmonic wake. I knew the shape of the music he made. You couldn’t live in this country and not breathe it. But I’d never learned the rules, the laws of freedom that kept these improvisations aloft, just out of reach of a clean conservatory death.

I felt myself tracing pitiful clichés. My left hand reached out for the safe cartoon, no closer to Will’s outpouring than a minstrel show to a spiritual. He cracked Iberia open and freed every Moor who had ever strayed into it. I bobbed in the Strait of Gibraltar, looking for a sandbar or a splinter of driftwood. The clash of his intervals traced dark, intricate places. Mine were just gratuitous dissonances. Mistakes.

Will chuckled at me over his improvised waves. “Witness? Can’t I get a witness here?” He figured I’d ease in after a few bars. When I didn’t, he went grim. He slowed, surprised. His disappointment made it harder for me to find the elusive groove.

I gathered myself and dove forward, drawing on every scrap of theory I’d ever squirreled away. I thought my way into the modulations. For a few phrases, I came alive. Will settled into a sequence I grasped, and I quit my little cheater’s stagger-syncopated tagalong and headed out to meet him in the open seas. I pegged his wanderings and we were there together, skimming along in concert a few feet above the swells. I don’t know how long we flew along together — maybe no more than a dozen bars. But we were really there. A rumble in the back of Will’s throat opened up alongside us. Over the blanketing sadness of notes, he laughed a muffled, chamois laugh. “You got it, Mix. Go on, tell me!”

Will nudged me on, moving me out of sight of shoreline, into the coldest currents. His modulations held back, waiting for me to take over. He handed me the rudder. Like that novice pilot who has just shot through the most dangerous shoals and now faces only openness in all directions, I turned from exhilaration into panic. I hung there, treading water, until Will took over again. But he wasn’t done with me yet. He eased out on the line, and I heard, in a burst of thirty-second notes, just how far he’d taken in the boundaries, to keep me alive. Snippets of familiar songs bubbled up to the surface of his bouillabaisse, hints of anthems I recognized by reflex, tunes I knew everything about except for their names. He took us on a giant-step, lightning tour of subterranean America, the rivers just now percolating up into the main stream — the music I’d shied away from all my life, crossing the street to avoid the threat of its oncoming silhouette.

Now and then, Aranjuez itself poked back through his inventions and struggled for sunlight. Everything we’d done — the free-form quotes, the random wandering — was just a huge unlimbering of the harmonic journey hidden in that original material. But the Spain we made was rocked by that same Civil War that Rodrigo had fled to write his piece. Will stacked up the chords, widening his palette of surprise intervals. He was sure I could free myself, find my way forward into a new song by thinking myself back, back to forebears who’d discovered the secret of this flight. Will cut me a path, note by note, sure I could get there with him. His faith in me felt worse than death.

I stumbled and fell back on cheap banalities, slopping up wallpaper sounds like a hack in a Bourbon Street bar, grinding out twelve-bar seventh chords to please the tourists. Every shred of technique I’d ever mastered held me shackled to the block. I was a drain on him. He could do more with his two hands than the two of us could do with four. I fell back on skeletal fills. My riffs thinned out. I pulled back into a long diminuendo and stopped.