Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

That much, already a tour de force of both conception and execution, would have easily engaged Ressler the scientist and pattern-seeker. But the primary structure of informing theme and the secondary emergence of canons at increasing intervals does not yet account for his lifelong devotion to the piece. A third level of structure, emerging after a week of my nonstop listening, hints at the successive layers of fascination peeling from the piece, bringing the man constantly back to listen, to make his next discovery.

I have just come to hear how the variations group locally, how they arrive in threes, triplet codons together spelling out a fundamental word of human experience. The third of each set is a canon, as the second level of ordering dictates. But after the first triplet set, a regular rotation also generates the form, color, and scope of the other two members of the triplet. The first of each codon is a dance, strikingly rhythmic or in a unique musical form. These moments of clarity are followed by brilliant duets, outbursts of virtuosic display, two-manual arabesques tearing across the keys. Dance, arabesque, canon: the variations produce a triangulation of feeling, sensing, and thinking that could only have arisen from a three-chambered arrangement of body, soul, and mind in perfect coordination. Harmony consists of propositions about harmony.

The dance variations explore a variety of musical genres: a complete, compact fugue without episodes. An outrageous French overture, that most stylized of Baroque puff pieces, opening with a vertical flourish in the jungle of surrounding counterpoint and proceeding with eighteenth-century aristocratic optimism. A vigorous, syncopated alia breve. A four-voice stretto-fit of well-being over before you can say hallelujah. Two transcendent adagios, one in poignant, resigned major, the other a heart-stabbing minor where every pitch in the chromatic scale puts in an appearance, the two together an unendurable duet of deliverance wedded to dissonance, promise unwinding in pain.

Each of these formal dances is built upon clear renditions of the Base. The difficulty of satisfying the constraints of variation within the bravura of overture or the rigor of fugue is considerable. But more disconcerting than the technical accomplishment is the plan. Take the variation number and divide by three. If the remainder is 1/3, the piece is a formal genre or dance; 2/3, and it's a toccata. No remainder, and the piece is a canon built on the interval given by the quotient.

Each dance stands in utter emotional contrast to the previous canon. And each is followed by a two-manual tear that draws the ear up in a second reversal of decision upon appeal. This constant broadening of technical and emotional contrast must have taken Ressler years to train for: each variation is so arranged to throw off the spell of the previous, and before the ear has time enough to savor any crystallization of mood, a reaction at once pitches the listener into new tempi, meters, and melodic figures probing radically opposing kernels of feeling, pulling open the full complexity of the piece, the inexhaustible variety extracted from the modest four-by-four-by-four sarabande. Each variation asserts its own myth, its own melody, its lack of precedent. Yet underneath, shining through each arpeggiated outburst, the theme asserts itself as master gene.

My attending ear learns not to give over entirely to the sorrow or exuberance of the moment. The most stupendously brilliant piece in the set is also a premonition of the emotional devastation that must follow. The variations each announce the consequence each itself creates. Just after a variation harboring harmonies that will not surface again until this century comes the most rococo of diversions. Grief spills over into buffoonery. Every beauty has its bitter answer. Yet each reversal doesn't dispel its sibling. They are all obedient, first-filial offspring of the same parent; while different phenotypes, they carry the same underwriting code. They exist side by side, superimposed in my unforgetting ear, apparent incommensurates, but one at the core.

And they are a unity in a way that becomes clear to me only as I discover an even higher order of order imbedded in the set. The aria, itself just another organism synthesized from the Base, is repeated — completely overhauled, although note for note the same — da capo at the end. So there are not thirty but thirty-two variations in the set, one for each measure in each variation, for each note in the generating Base. Any reductionist attempt to capture the work in its understandable particulars, dropping from the set down to the variation down to one measure, produces a germ that is not a part of anything but a microcosm of the infolded whole.

The theme is all thirty-two notes, the Goldbergs, all thirty-two variations. Each moment is a miniature globe, an encoding of everything above it., The Goldbergs are layered all the way from bottom to top and back down again, with every layer of ordering — from canonically entering canons to contrasting triplet groups, from note to measure to line to variation to entire work and back to note — contributing to, particularizing, and lost in the next rung of the hierarchy it generates.

But the severe mathematics of recursive architecture are lost in the first ornament of aria. By the time the potential of the original sequence emerges, no ear can trace any but the faintest line of that all-embracing ground plan. No; Ressler was not listening to inversions and midpoint symmetries and numerologies and the closing of the diatonic circle. He was following the death of his friends, listening to how love fled, anticipating the dissonance of Jimmy's crippling, detecting and replaying his own departure from science: hearing, in the descent of four notes from Do, the script of life's particulars, brute specifics that too often became too much, too full, too awful to bear, too unendurably, transiently beautiful.

The canons proceed beyond the octave, start all over again at the ninth, as if to suggest, "We could do this for eons." The Goldbergs threaten to expand the modest four-note germ of the thirty-two note Base to the scale of infinite invention, a perpetual calendar. I hear Ressler talking to his love every night for thirty-two years, using no words other than those built on the alloted four letters, and never exhausting all he had to say to her. Once a grammar passes the complexity threshold, no algorithm can list all possible well-formed sentences. The diversity of language defies physical law, or rather, endless sentence-generation displays law in a new, unprecedented predication.

Sufficiently complex, the Goldbergs no longer know their own sarabande. They are no longer about permutation, manipulation, pattern. They are about the bliss of the sixth, the cut of the seventh, this drooping cadence, the suspension selecting for sorrow or serenity, a snowed-in weekend, late nights of conversation, anger, abandonment, disaster, the decision to act, to rejoin for a last moment the condition of human politics, a brute insistence modulating worlds from G before coming home. The Goldbergs reach the threshold where each variation denies that it is a variation. And at that point, they no longer are.

Like proliferating species, the variants do not improve or advance. There is no question of progress here. Under the pressure of evolutionary restlessness, they simply spread out across the map of available biomes, unearth more of the embedded germ material, bring some as yet unrealized alternative — similar to all others, only different — into existence. The sarabande is never escaped, however much migration takes place. Its shape squarely inhabits mid-measure. It may wander freely across voices and beats, be for a few bars almost unbearable. But it is always there. The distance between any two incarnations is immense, as wide as the immigrant's awe at native idiom. It is improvisation in here tonight. We listeners can do nothing but stand back and wing it as it wings. Where will the next dance step come from, the next flying arabesque, the wilder, more cunningly contrived canon?