Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Will finished out solo, and with an ingenuity even greater than he’d shown on the voyage out, he brought the key back to tonic and led his fingers home to Aranjuez. He looked at me. “You can’t make it go, on its own? You need it out there in front of you, on the page?” He meant to be kind, but his every word made things worse. My face went hot. I couldn’t look at him. “Don’t make no difference, brother Joe. Some folks need the notes. Other folks don’t even care what the notes are called.”

He stirred the keys again. The chords were fading comments, trickles under his fingers, his latest reflections on the matter.

I wanted to make him stop. “Where did you learn to do that?”

Will smiled, as much at his hands as at me. His fingers crawled over the keys like puppies in a giveaway wicker basket. He was as amazed by their freedom as anyone. “Around, Mix. Same place you’re gonna learn it.”

Same place I could have. Should have.

He let out a train of staccato block chords, a parody of the opening of the Waldstein, my current nemesis. Will Hart was surprised at me. I’d lost my inheritance. If I could do everything Beethoven wanted of me, I ought to be able to please myself. I didn’t even know what such a thing might mean. But I could still hear the sounds he’d just unleashed, rolling in my ears, humbling the material they came from. “Why don’t you…write music like that?”

He stopped and stared. “What you think we two just did?”

“I mean, write it down. Compose it, instead of… I mean, not instead of… Along with?” His academic, written-out music felt almost wilted and window-boxed, compared to the music he’d just grown out of his head. If a person could do what he’d just done, launch raw possibility out of the empty air, why would he waste a minute writing down well-behaved conservatory music that stood little chance of being played even once?

“Some songs are for writing down. Some songs are for freeing from writing.”

“What you just made? That was better than the stuff you made it from.”

He just grimaced at the blasphemy. Nobody was better than that blind Spaniard. He scooted through another elaborate sequence of chords that took me a moment to recognize as a hotted-up, cooled-out circle of fifths. He lifted his hands and offered me the keyboard. I brought my claws toward the keys, knowing, before I closed with them, that it was no good. There was nothing in my digits but Lyric Pieces. Nineteenth-century northern Europe’s airbrushed studio portrait.

“I can’t.” He’d caught me out. Exposed me. My hands fell to the keys but did not press them.

His left hand grabbed my neck as if it were the root of his next wild chord. “That’s okay, brother Joe. Let every soul praise God in his own fashion.”

I jerked at the words. But I was old enough, now, not to ask where he’d learned them. He’d picked them up the same place my mother had: around.

I set aside a few minutes each day, at the end of my practice, when further repetition of the day’s passage would do more harm than good. Ten minutes — a prayer to myself, an exercise in remembering how Wilson Hart made music on the fly, out of emptiness. My fingers began to turn without any notes to propel them. But the hardest printed music came easier for me than the simplest indigo riff.

I told Jonah. “You have to hear Will Hart improvise. Out of this world.” My words damned my friend with understatement. Something in me was protecting both men, hiding out where neither could ask anything more of me.

“Not surprised. How come he doesn’t hang out with the jazzers?”

Jonah couldn’t have heard, then, even if he had come listen. His own musical sea change preoccupied him. He came to me one day, swollen with nonchalance. “They’re setting up lessons for next term. William Schuman wants me to study with Roberto Agnese. Schuman. The president of the school, Mule. I didn’t think he knew undergraduates even existed.”

Agnese, old workhorse tenor, was among the most venerable of the vocal arts faculty. “That’s fantastic, Jonah. You’re on Easy Street.” I had no idea what borough I thought that street ran through.

“Small problem, honorable baby brother. Number-one son also desired as student by Mr. Peter Grau.” Grau, the Met star, who never took more than a few of the most promising graduates.

“You’re joking. How?”

“He came and asked me!” The punch line to a dirty joke. We giggled at the inanity, our old conspiracy of two. “He must imagine I’m still teachable!” My brother, who at seventeen, knew more than he ever afterward would.

“Jesus. What are you going to do?”

“What the hell can I do? It’s not like I can say no to either one.”

“You’re going to study with them both?”

Jonah gave a doomed stage cackle.

He spent a season in hell. He took a lesson each week from each great man, putting in twice the hours, struggling to remember which teacher had asked for what. He kept each one in the dark about his rival. The whole thing played out like some sordid French farce, Jonah dashing from one studio to the other, hiding the evidence, changing his sound depending on the day, swearing fidelity to two contrary approaches. “I’m fine, Mule. Just gotta make it until the end of term. Few more weeks. Then I’ll figure something out.”

“No one can keep this up, Jonah. You’ll break down.”

He glowed. “You think? A nice sanitarium on the top of some snowy mountain?”

His two mentors were each other’s spiritual opposites. Agnese was all touch and feel, the bodily mechanics of sound, his hands perpetually sculpting my brother’s jaw, practically moving his lips, his Neapolitan mass forever exploding in vast semaphores of grief or ecstasy. “The guy squeezes my gut while I’m singing. ‘Come, Strom. Everything comes from low down inside you.’ Pervert. Like I’m in basic training or something.”

Grau, at his antilessons, made the body disappear in a cloud of thought. He’d never dream of touching Jonah. He stood as far away as his studio allowed, speaking in a motionless haze. “Feel your head backward and up. No! Do not push. Think it so. Think the larynx down. Do not move it! Do not use the muscles. The muscles must vanish. You must become a ghost to yourself, full of the power of not doing.”

Musicians speak of bliss, but that’s just to throw the uninitiated off the scent. There is no bliss; there is only control. All the orphic gymnastics that each coach demanded of Jonah pushed down into his nervous system, hitched to the traces of every emotion Jonah had ever felt. Both coaches believed that a given muscle set was the emotion that produced it. The symbol produced the thing, and the ability to reverse create, by muscle movement, the full spectrum of human feeling represented the ultimate artistic power.

His mentors differed violently over how to produce this power. Agnese ran about the studio, flapping his massive wings, shouting, “Move your sound. Above the upper lip. Out in front of the teeth. Put the brain away. Let the pitch correct the vowel. Ah, eh, ee, oh, oo. We must hear joy! Love! Desolation! Ma-je-sty!” Grau stood still, a pillar of transcendence, musing. “Draw in your breath with your thighs. Drop as you rise. Sing on the air, not with it. Conceive the sound before you make it. Start your sound before your throat, in your mind!”

Roberto Agnese gave Jonah his first crack at reading a famous role. He toyed with the experiment, settling on Donizetti’s Elixir of Love — the poor, swarthy Nemorino, in particular the devastating cavatina, that one fat, famous, secret tear stealing down the lead’s cheek in the dark. Jonah took a stab at the part, penciling up his expensive foreign edition with articulations.