William Gass - Middle C

In my home my desk is yet another haven — for my pencils and the seat of my pants — and when my mother calls from her garden her sound will be one I go to as if it were a beacon. Meanwhile, noises on the street I shall ignore. They are not a part of the composition. They revolve about other suns, have other eyes and other axles. Yet you know … that when you arrive home — leave and arrive, yin to yang, come to go — this familiar cycle and its center won’t roll sweetly on forever, because you expect to have a job one day, a car and dog and garage of your own, an office to go to, a kitchen to cook in, main and subsidiary bases like a diamond, to traverse — ball diamond don’t you play on? bases to stand safely at, stages on any journey, on life’s way, don’t you say? — and so you expect the future will be full of places to return to. You expect homes to be here and there all over the place all the time. To spring up like spring does every year, and fresh blooms crack open, birds sing, new leaves hatch. Imagine. Homes to come home to, homes to leave. Everywhere. Imagine.

Who is imagining as you were instructed? Hands. Hands up.

Home is not just the last square on the Parcheesi board — oh, I beg your pardon once again — occult reference — shame makes my cheeks redden — I try again — it is not just the tape you break at the end of the race or the plate you run to to put your foot on … score … that’s clearer for you? … But it is a set of things, habits of using them, patterns of behavior, met expectations, repeated experiences. Ho! Ho! Ho! makes it Christmas.

I know that in your dorms you call me Dr. Digress … do I do so? or am I a comet returning to tell on my tale?

Now then take notice, pay a quarter, will you? … for my voice and your attention: these homey spaces — so many — familiar voices, scents, satisfactions — comfort food, don’t you say? — will be more important to you than other things, they can even dominate your thinking, monoply your feeling, they will be in the major keys, but there will be minor keys, too, lesser variations, hierarchies will appear like old royalty arriving at a Viennese café where there will be requests from the customers, preferences in tables, order in the kitchen, ranks throughout the staff, competition in the silver, even among the pots and pans, bowls fit for barons shall sit on peasant plates, an ordinance will promulgate itself, a sub ordinance will sound like a summoning to church.

How many of you knew I was speaking of music all along? its inherent higherarchies? show of hands, please. Hah … You are such good students. Why do I complain?

Because many of you have not turned in to me your analysis of that little tune I gave you. Such a simpleton task. A simpleton could do.

Where there is alter there is sub alter. Where there is genus please expect species. Order among the tones. Order among the instruments. There is no note born that doesn’t have a lineage, a rank, a position in the system. The force of past performances. Imitations of the masters. Traditions of teaching. Centers of learning. Habits of listening. Among them who will rule? for someone must rule. The horns? … surely not the winds. Some particular view of quality and composition shall be current. This theory, instead of that, shall be preferred. Therefore the French style will be enforced, the German manner obeyed, the Russian soul — it is always the Russian soul — obliged. They also come and go like cuckoos in and out of clocks.

Where music is, Vienna is. The maestro is. You think music takes place in isolation, in some hermetic solitude? Cakes, coffee, gossip, and the gypsy violin — loopy swoons and much mealy schmaltz surround the violinist’s form and dismal dress. Huge, too, the opera haus . High the hats. Gaiety. Flirtations. The hunt. The waltz. Vienna tuned out the terrifying world to listen to Strauss. To Fledermaus . A social round of balls. Yet there must be a leader or there will be chaos, all those instruments braying at once. There must be a home to come home to, didn’t the Austrians at one time suppose, while longing for the Reich to envelop them like a mother’s warm milk-white arms? There is a home for you.

The bosom of the family. The leader raises his baton, Stukas scream from the skies.

Did not Odysseus strive to reach his wife kid dog and palace — you remember him? ah many of your hands need washing, I can see — too few pink palms … through countless trials and tribulations, too, remember the delays, the teases — Sirens, enchanters, giants lurking — one two three ten twelve thirty troubles, trials, tribulations, did I say? — lures of ladies, comforts of creatures — in wait like rocks — to bring the wayfarer down, to sink his soul to his sandals. So, too, we depart from the tonic, we journey farther and farther afield — yes, we digress — until it seems we’ve broken all ties with the known world, we are farther away than anyone has ever been, we are at the edge of the earth, we can forehear … forehear the Wagnerian downfall, we stand at the brink … the brink that splashes into silence … when … lo, behold … magically … the captain, the composer, sees a way, steers us through the storm, and we modulate, do we not? sail ride walk to the warm and welcoming hearth again, the hiking path winds but takes us to our hotel in safety just as the signs said they would: what relief at what a climax … the sight of a spire, familiar stones at one’s feet, the smell of a pot on the stove. Nice walk, good hike, healthy return.

Poor Miss Rudolph. Glad you’re back. Nice of you to cough in the hall. No music there.

Or shall we let a cough be music? music made of cough and sniffle? chance and error? the music of the blown nose, the phone call, the unwrapper’s annoying rattle? With our new instruments of bedevilment might we not record all sorts of sounds out there in the world that calls itself — that call themselves — real; where squeaks and squeals and screams are on the menu, where dins assail us by the dozens — the crinkle of cellophane, whishiss of small talk, the fanning of five hundred programs — where we fill our ears with one noise in order not to hear another … yes, record, preserve not only the roil of the sea but the oink of pigs and moos of cattle, the wind rattling the cornstalks like the hand of an enemy on the knob, and put them in … in the realm of majesty, of beauty, of purity, in … in music, let them in — poor Miss Rudolph’s cough included — why? — why would we come to such a detrimental thought? or why should we learn to sigh at silence as if it were a sweet in the mouth, as if it were a pillow soft as a sofa, why should we order our instruments off! as if silence were an end? Only to invite the ruckus — of which we are the ruck — to rumpus us, to ruin our holy space?

[…………………………………………….…]

Just then we had a silence, did you hear? a rest. Broken like a pane of glass by … explanations.

Because music has its holies, has its saints; because music has sounds all its own that no one else, no else like thing, no motion that the muck of matter makes: nowhere is one tinkle like them, these tones that musicians know. Pure tones, resolute tones, resonant tones, redolent, refulgent, confident tones. We have artisans whose ancient art is to fashion instruments so different from the heartless machines that now can capture a starling’s idle clacks and chop the resultant cacaphones into eekie-screechie parts in order to blast them — these ultra audibles — earclapped, earboxed earrings — save us, save us, save us from such ruffians, yes … give us smooth-wooded polished fine-tuned bodies instead, that glow in anticipation of being played, shining trumpets proud of their purpose, soothing tubes from which much love emerges, and virtuosos who have devoted their lives to learning how, from these wily and noble objects, to elicit the speech of the spirit. Consider: a quartet of them: four men or women. Centuries of preparation will go into their simplest tuning — into a single scrape of the bow — nor will they be togged like Topsy or some ugly ragamuffin, but garbed and gowned for these rites, these magical motions that make truly unearthly sensations. Our costumes, our manner of bowing or blowing, shall not be upstaged by clown costumes or gyrations. Shut up, world, while we hear the sounds the soul makes. This is where we should worship if we had the wit. Today Köchel Five Fifteen will pray for us. Play on our behalf. Be our best belief. Besides, this C-major quintet is assigned. You will note how the apparently harmless theme sinks into C minor only to startle us with a chromatic passage meant to be stunning and achieving a vibrant numbness. That’s the way to talk to God.