Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

You know what I mean by old music of course you do. I mean the old art songs and the ballads of old. I was raised on these songs and I’m afraid that they have spoilt me because nothing else in music can compare with them. I had long given up that this kind of music was around today as a living form but that’s ‘O.K.’. I simply don’t expect to hear the old music of my youth performed today and its essence intact.

It was a stroke of good luck that I had my radio tuned to Bettina’s Bathtime on the evening that you were on. I was having some ‘bath time’ of my own. I rarely leave the radio on when I’m in the bath because if something offends my ears it’s hard to change it in a hurry and then there’s always the risk of electrocution. There was nothing offensive about this show on that night however. I stopped turning the dial when I heard ‘Clair de Lune’ by Claude Debussy and there I left it. Then came some Hoagy Carmichael I think and then the Moonlight Sonata. And then the presenter introduced this great new singing group. Well you know who!

I can honestly say that I have not had an experience like it since I was perhaps fifteen years of age. I felt more than that — no! — I was transported further! I felt like one of those rose-cheeked girls in a Pears Soap advertisement from the nineteen hundreds, reclined there in my bath tub under imaginary velvet and green jungle plants! ‘Who were these men with these magical voices?’ I wondered. Magic! It’s the only word to describe it. A cracked and haunted quality that I have not heard from living men. I mean to say ‘live’ but ‘from living men’ is as good a phrase for it.

I mean, I’ve gone to concerts by the Galway Tenors and the Shamrock Singers but these acts are terrible — don’t you think? perhaps you wisely don’t attend their concerts? or do you know them personally? oh God! if you do — because they seem to me like parodies of great artists like McCormack and they don’t treat the music they sing seriously at all, they are like circus acts, although technically they can be quite good, not that I know fully because I am technically illiterate, but there is no life in their music somehow and they are not for me I’m afraid.

Those Irish ballads when sung must hold a certain spirit, a mysterious spirit which the phonograph companies of the early years of the last century captured on those cylinders and later those great heavy discs. This is the spirit that rubbed up against and warmed my own when I first sensed it through the records my mother owned. I was raised surrounded by Irish families close to the water in Steinway. This must have been where my mother developed her interest in authentic Irish music. She acquired her collection over many years. Possibly some of her discs were ‘hand me downs’ from her own mother who was also a lover of Irish song. I grew up with a great attachment to all things Irish. I sometimes feel that I’m ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’! I had an obsession with the Kennedys at the height of the days of Camelot and do you know I felt a spiritual attachment to Black Jack who was the riderless and well-behaved horse that took part in Jack Kennedy’s funeral procession?

Anyway what I mean to say to you is that the music on my mother’s records was the sound of my youth and that it nourished my spirit in those and my later years. Since hearing your singing my soul has not for a long time felt so well fed! The Free ’n’ Easy Tones — what an apt and evocative name! But I must say I almost caught pneumonia waiting until the last note was sung — the bathwater went cold and cloudy around me!

Now let me get to the nub of why I am writing to you. I am the patron of a charity for nervous illnesses. On March sixth we are holding a benefit concert at the Amsterdam Avenue Armory. We already have a girl who does show tunes and a soprano who will sing some arias but if you were to accept my invitation I would love to add you to the bill. Indeed on the basis of what I heard on the radio you will receive star billing! Please do accept! We have a little under a fortnight until then but could you take not more than two days to confirm your availability? Perhaps that is enough time for you to fret and say no! Please don’t!

Yours admiringly, Delma Rosenberg.

PS I noted on the radio that you sang a cappella . If you like you could use an accompanist of my recommendation or you may choose to use your own.

Denny took a moment.

‘And there you have it,’ he said. ‘Clive?’

‘I’m still here.’

‘What do you make of it?’

‘I’m as mystified as you are. Except, perhaps … When we rang the record company that time, and sang down the phone —’

‘What?! We were singing into space , man! There was no one on the end of the line. The line was dead. You heard it yourself.’

Both went quiet.

Then Clive said, ‘Still, we’re being offered a concert. You know? Denny?’

‘So it seems.’

‘And —’

‘But …’

‘Hello?’

‘This is not the answer.’

‘The lady is offering us a concert, Denny. Top of the bill, she says!’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What is there to know?’

‘This, exactly.’

‘Maybe we should just —’

‘I have a hazy … pre-Christian sentiment about it.’

‘I know she says it’s not a paid concert, but —’

‘Give me some time to think this through.’

‘But she says we only have —’

‘Just give me some time, man!’

‘Yes, Denny. Of course.’

Denny put the phone down and went immediately to his kitchen, took some mince from the refrigerator and tipped it into Bit’s bowl. The dog had been fed less than an hour before but did not complain; it ate the mince with gusto. Then Denny went to the living room, and his piano stool. He sat in the heat, dripping, elbows on knees, and later also in the dark. He did not turn on a light. Always in the colder months the apartment was hot like a botanical glasshouse. Below the building Jeremiah and his goblin brothers made sure the boiler was full and firing through the day.

At some point in the evening the smell of Bit’s faeces drifted into the room. He heard the dog warble.

‘Good boy,’ he said, seeing the sparkle of Bit’s eyes in the doorway.

He held its gaze for some moments.

‘Come here now.’

Bit did not respond. Its eyes disappeared in the dark. Denny resumed his slumped posture. Later he turned to face his piano square. His right hand idled over the higher notes. He felt the faint and satisfying shup of keys, then held down a chord. The words of one of Arthur Sullivan’s songs came to mind:

‘I know not what I was playing,

Or what I was dreaming then,

But I struck one chord of music,

Like the sound of a great Amen.’

He allowed the notes to decay as a melody swirled in his head, building and collecting. Clamor. Clamor .

Before the notes had faded to silence he had it. In the dark night all noise is quieted: Otello and Desdemona’s renewal of their vows of love. ‘ Già nella notte densa s’estingue ogni clamor ’: the peerless tenor Francesco Merli, his favourite performer as Otello.

He tried singing the Moor’s lines himself but nothing would come; his throat — tightening, stoppered — ached with the effort. Now his fingers did the leading, searching for the melodic accompaniment to Otello and Desdemona’s great love duet. It was a kind of automatic playing: harp and horns and bassoons filled the auditorium of his skull while in the dark outside he pushed for a way through. But his playing was heavy, his joints stiff. Clamour, clamour, it went. With the quiver of violins that brought the first act to a close his fingers weakened on the keys until the soft beat of wires on felt came to him again.