Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

Detaching required a plan of severance: a secret move to another borough, along with breaking from all mutual friends and places, and almost, she felt, of ideas. Walking alone to a drab new bagel shop, she felt like a part of her brain had been excised. She worried for months about Layla showing up on her street holding a knife, posed just like her mother at that church brunch.

THE COMPUTER SIMULATION

It had not been long before a bored music writer had uploaded Baird’s sheet music to be played by a computer and then written three thousand words about it. It was good music, he argued, but when you took away the gimmick, it was second-rate good. It did not make itself immortal. When letters flowed in chastising the man, he made the audio of the computer simulation available on the website.

Another music writer managed to sit with Baird while he listened to it for the first time. “Piss in my coffee while you’re at it,” Baird was quoted as saying as the opening notes began. He was described by turns as distraught, amused, scornful, and gleefully scornful. He called it a crippled attempt, and he was not referring to the aural limitations of the stereo system. It was the cold logic of the playing. The computer player made the pieces meaningless, Baird said. You could not hear the impossibility.

THE AUDIENCE

Darin is impossible to miss, of course, with a ridiculous bouquet the size of an overstuffed carnival bear. She scans the back for Layla—a ridiculous thought, but that is where she would be standing, improperly attired, if she were to resurface. In every crowd, there’s someone who looks like Charlie would have if he’d grown old enough to cultivate a proper beard. It buoys her, sometimes, to close her eyes and imagine that it is Charlie, and that she is playing to him. But that is not for tonight. This music is already crowded with ghosts.

She wonders if she could tell, had she more time to scrutinize them, which have come to see her play and which have come to see her fail. Probably not. It’s always hard to tell a wolf. Havelin is out there. She can hear his haughty voice surfing the top of the hush. They wear tuxedos and gowns, armor against being interesting.

She pumps the pedals a few times, loosening her feet, and puts one atom of each fingertip against the flat plane of white keys, and listens to the silence become absolute. The last utterances of conversation carom from wall to wall until the curtains soak them up. There is always something dumb about an audience—dumb in the old sense: mute and staring. The opposite of deaf, not just by convention, but by design, by definition. Listening only. Seeing pictures of old gramophones, she always imagines the horn of the player to be a receiver, an ear, when that is the opposite of its purpose. Why is it so comforting, this idea that she could be wrong about everything?

The first étude is already playing. She is glad to be thinking of something else. The undistracted mind creates its own ripples. Still, she tries to listen for a moment, to see if she is keeping Schrödinger’s cat both properly alive and properly dead.

HOW HER FATHER TOOK IT

He cried and he didn’t at properly surprising times: at breakfast three days later, but not at the wake; at the viewing, but not at the funeral; not at the pool where he went to swim his laps, or anytime he walked down by the docks, but, for reasons no one understood, every time he went to the grocery store. It petered out: a slow curved line that never quite reached its asymptote.

Sometimes it could be years between little meltdowns. Sometimes they seemed to have gone away forever.

Charlie grew mythic, just a touch, in her father’s discussions of him. He would have gotten those swim scholarships to Michigan and Stanford. His height chart had never flattened out: Charlie might have spurted past both him and Marie and been the next Michael Phelps. You should have seen him after a meet. He’d put down four cheeseburgers and a bucket of fries. Did you know he wrote poetry? We didn’t, but we found it in his journal. Beautiful stuff, truly. It sounded like Yeats.

The next summer he was back in his chaise longue, though now he did read, and what he read was appropriately affirming and humanistic: Man’s Search for Meaning , The Long Goodbye , Tuesdays with Morrie . “Pablum,” Marie said when she was feeling generous. “Dreck,” she said when she was not. In this way he became golden again, while his wife turned to salt. He became better in conversation, more philosophical and circumspect. His laugh was less frequent, but it now had an anchor. Though she tries not to, she sometimes resents him for being improved by tragedy.

Some have said he grieved perfectly.

PERFORMANCE

She sweats. It is not a sexy, shimmery sweat. It is not a surprise. She made the strategic choice not to wear white. Regardless, she feels it highlighting the hotspots of her body in scalloped penumbras of wet cloth. She remembers Billie Jean King running Bobby Riggs around the court on the marionette strings of her angle-work. She imagines the cockpit chair of Sally Ride vibrating into space strapped to a million pounds of rocket thrust.

The room is quiet. She knows only that she is playing, that she is creeping along the staff four beats at a time. In the moment there is no telling if she’s also rising up into the ether. But she divides her mind properly for the first étude, and that allows her a foothold, a first step up onto the impossible road. Midway through, her fingers feel like boiled hot dogs. The heat radiating from them warms her face. In the last études, which become more mazelike and branch in many paths, her vision blurs and her brain aches. The air is always thin, she thinks, in the rarefied frontiers of the atmosphere. At this point only memory and dull habit guide her through the woods.

She’s gasping for breath when she finishes. Sweat drips from her elbows to the piano bench in quick little plop plop plops that land in 3/2 time. She should stand and offer some pageantry: a bow, a sweep of the arm. Forget that, she thinks. She’s not going to stand up until she has to. She stares instead at the ring finger of her left hand. At the top left corner, where the nail meets the skin, is a tiny drop of frank red blood. Each of her fingertips is underlaid with a light purple bruise. Only she knows whether or not she has brought it off, but if the audience stands, if they applaud, how much does it matter?

TONAL VS. ATONAL

The argument has been put forward that atonal music has a lower bar of difficulty than tonal music because in tonal music an audience can tell when a note is out of place. The argument is that atonality is a veil. If the devil is tumbling down a staircase, will an audience take note of how many steps he misses? She thinks this is an evasion. She knows Ligeti well enough that she can hear when someone fumbles.

The two styles present divergent philosophies. Music should comfort. Music should discomfit. People should be comforted. People should be jarred from comfort. Binaries again. Gaspard de la Nuit is rapid and bustling but still founded upon a resonation with the expectations of the mind. Invention is like going mad. Like being driven mad.

Atonality may offer the veil, but tonality provides a blanket. Atonal: like being pinned mute and naked to the piano in front of all those people. Tonal: buoyed by the music, which has its own soul.

Tantalus is mostly tonal. Some études are rousing, some sweeping, some surprisingly gentle given the difficulty. Even an untrained listener will have the sense of where a piece is going. But tucked in the score are chords and notes and phrases that are paths to nowhere. Anyone who knows his or her theory will pick up the cues, and even as the tenth étude ends will be left waiting for those phrases to resolve. Anyone who can’t help but wait for resolution risks waiting forever.