Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"That's just the point. Each note reduces the choices that are left. What pitch could possibly come after such a setup? And if you already know the next pitch, then you know the piece."

Todd persisted, confused. "Tell me: could you conceivably Name That Tune in three?"

"Not if the notes formed an ascending triad. The whole question is, within acceptable tonal syntax, how likely the sequence of intervals becomes. Where do they point? Is the next pitch already telegraphed? Some sequences are so free, so without redundancy, that they might lead anywhere. Others are more constrained. Every melody heaps up improbability until, by the cadence, it can only be the one thing it is. If your three pitches were improbable enough, they might suffice to prove the private domain of, say, Shostakovich. Or Dragnet"

"And two notes, then? Still possible?"

"Don't push your luck."

"One?"

"Pure potential! No edge; no message. One note could be the start of any tune at all."

It took a trained reductionist, someone who arrived at effusion relatively late in life, to see the shape of songs governed by information theory. Perhaps he did so simply to lead Frank on, force him to toughen his own indulgence toward washes of sound. Whatever the case, Ressler tested the first, tentative equation relating music to constituent melody and melody to strings of frequencies, simple sequence.

Q: I'm just your middle-distance listener. Forgive me asking: if it's really language, a matter of tending toward tonic, being driven back, how can fragments of phrase, motives, voices stacked into chords, moments that strain toward greater departure or return, how can these explain, begin to account for, the terrace of light, mottled rays guttering back to dark, joy, loss, the scent of my own ending in this syllable-free tune? Layman's answer please.

J. O'D.

Sound, he pronounced, always means more than it says. The parts only start to explain the thing waiting to spring out of them. So it is in every organized hive. Because we live on the seam between formula and mystery, because I can recognize in the harmonic vicissitudes the hummable tune is put through some similar, metaphorical bend, music marks out the way all messages go. Its contours deliver themselves, bent from the chance of experience. They live for a minute in ephemeral pattern, then collapse back to a uniform void that says nothing, carries no knowledge, far less information. The silence they fall back into, the nothing that they contrast with, is what notes make, for a measure, audible.

What else is there in a melodic phrase? However much it wrenches me on the promise of sound, signals from a place lost beyond recovering, a musical line has nothing in it but notes. A choice of twelve possible pitch-equivalents, durations scored out by a simple-minded system of ten or so lengths based on powers of two. What else is there in an allegro but phrase, phrase, and development of phrase? What is there in the Jupiter but allegro, andante, minuet, plus allegro? At bottom, only notes.

But notes passed through a transforming key: nothing is what it is except in where, when, and how it goes about unfolding. Push that pencil box of notes, pitch it faster, prolong it, pinch it, prod it upwards, follow its fall, attach it to a line, stack voices on top of it, slacken, shift it off into unlikely relation, let it breathe, grow, summon, augment, enhance, startle everything around it, and suddenly, out of those ridiculously constrained initial building blocks, those neutral frequencies meaningless in themselves, with only the most elementary grammar or enzymes to shape them:

I am (at first modulation) coming home late, pressed under the hot but changeable air, studying the warnings, the bruise-blue striations of a storm-sky. Someone — my mother? — runs before me, entering, crashing through the house, slamming shut windows, spreading towels across the soaked sills. A cascade of flats, sudden appassionato, about-face at the double bar, and I am elsewhere: watching frigate birds dip in a graceful circle into fresh pools, an enchanted oasis of animals studied through a slight break in the vegetation.

And yet: that's still not it, exactly. It's no more an excuse to free-associate than it is equations. Besides, those associations— house, storm, birds, pool — are all too literal. Everything Ressler ever said to us was an exercise in how words might fit to music. But music into words? Don't push your luck. It will run from any description like floaters skidding across the cornea when and only when you look directly at them.

Yet it is, beyond doubt, language. It may be closer to the architectural plan for that ruined Tower than any other available approximation. I once read, when combing the literature to save Jimmy from his hemorrhage, of the way CAT scans reveal sonatas ravishing the cerebral cortex. A single tone shows up as stagnant Sargasso. Scales create regular ripples of red, yellow, blue. But tune it, trip it into a sequence, three-three-four-five-five-four-three-two, clothe it in vertical harmony, and it storms, splashes across a mass of uncontrollably firing neurons, exploding into the rose window at Chartres.

We know all the rules of air, but we will never predict the weather. Something happens on the rungs of order above the chromatic scale; something happens between the four first pitches and Four Last Songs. According to the scan, even the simplest compositional rules are enough to awaken primitive wonder, release the brain from the conventions of verisimilitude, free it from its constant dictionary of representation. But the scan shows something even more surprising. Composers, skilled in theory, hear music differently. CAT profiles of their listening brains show more verbal hemisphere activity, as if they don't just let the associative sensations of timbre and rhythm swell through them, but somehow eavesdrop on a point being argued on thought's original instruments. Can the effect be any less beautiful for being better articulated?

What message could anyone hear there, what terrible conversation except the same, out-of-place, inexecutable instruction carried in the Linear B script deep in the nucleus: feel this, grow, do more with what is scored here? Harmonize it every time you open your throat, but know you will never come close to saying, naming what it is.

Even those who can look at a score, a graph of the raw wavelengths in annotated two dimensions, who can see an ingenious inversion or stretto and feel there in the soundless study a cold stab up the spinal column, who can leap from the single cut stone to the completed dome: even they are not replying just to the notes on that particular page. They are hearing in the sigh of the appoggiatura the covert, coded, Latin joy at the approach of the Spanish Armada transcribed in Byrd's motet. They are remembering Lully putting the time-beating stick through his foot and dying of infection. They are repenting to Mendelssohn, unable to premier Schubert's Ninth in London because the players wouldn't take the work seriously. They are reliving late Beethoven's obsession with variation form. They are reading, where they still lie open, extant, the notebooks in which an unbearable humanity addressed the deaf man. They are scribbling addenda in those notebooks, adding unanswered questions there.

Our game was only Name That Tune. "I can name that tune in five notes, in four, three." The pieces whose names Ressler supplied had nothing to do with these snippet clues. The real works were interplays of huge motions, movements that stormed inexorably toward arrival or were forcibly restrained, parts progressing in the collision and collusion of themes, themes that constantly built toward breaking down, recombining from their phrases, lines that urged certain stabilities, expectations, setbacks, the tendencies of chords in their given instant, five or four or three of those delinquent, namable, and straying intervals sounded at once. Notes that gave nothing at all away about the ineffable message urgently taking shape so many levels above them, in the weather, in the storm.