William Gass - Middle C

Now, children of our century, inheritors of what is left of the earth: calculate the consequences. Of a cough.

The musicians begin. After sufficient silence is imposed on the audience — for the slate is being wiped, a space cleared of all competition (note that, but return all the notes you’ve made before you leave, we dare not lose any) — then, and only then, they play. There are vibrating hides, vibrating tubes, vibrating strings. Vibrating air in vibrating spaces. Vibrating ears. Vibrating brains. Do the notes fall out of them like spilled beans? out of these instruments as if they were funnels?

By the way, did you know that “spill the beans” means to throw up? Hands please. You others may sit upon yours and be uncomfortable.

No, the notes do not have anything to confess. They emerge like children into an ordered universe; they immediately know their place; they immediately find it, for the order you hear was born with them. Did I not just say so? Hands? Every one of them, as they arrive in their reality, immediately flings out a sea of stars, glowing constellating places. As a dot does upon a map or grid. As a developer on an empty field sees himself standing on a corner in a city that’s yet to be. For these notes are not born orphans, not maroons surrounded by worse than ocean, but they have relatives, they have an assignment in a system. Did I not just say so? do you suppose that this will be on an exam?

Relations … As you have in your family. Aunts, uncles, haven’t you? oh, I dare say, and addresses, underclothes, honor codes, cribs. The whole equipment of the gang. Yes, for even gangs have their organization, their nasty-nosed bullyboy boss and the boss’s chamberlain — First Violin.

But now … now remember the honest reality of that home — so sweet — a home … there’s no place like it, just as the song says. Let us have a second thought about that collection of clichés … Those relatives — remember them? — arrived like ruinous news: they broke the peace; they ate the candy; they spoiled naps; they brought their own rules. Their kids cried. And you were punished for it. Sweet home? Dad is seeing his secretary on the sly, Mom is drinking long lunches with her female friends or shopping as if a new slip or a knickknack would make her happy. Sweet home is where heartfelts go to die. Sweet home is where the shards of broken promises lie, where the furniture sits around on a pumpkin-colored rug like dead flies on a pie. Home is haunted by all the old arguments, disappointments, miseries, injustices, and misunderstandings that one has suffered there: the spankings, the groundings, the arguments, the fights, the bullying, the dressings-down, the shames. Yes, it is a harbor for humiliations. A storehouse for grudges. A slaughterhouse for self-esteem.

Families are founts of ignorance, the source of feuds, fuel for fanatical ideas. Families take over your soul and sell it to their dreams.

[…………………………………………….…]

That was not a silence but a hush, and a hush is filled with awe and expectation. It is a pause, an intake of breath, release of steam.

Somewhere during the slow course of the nineteenth century, the children of the middle class woke up to the fact that they were children of the middle class — well, some of them did. They woke one morning from an uneasy sleep and found they were bourgeois from toe to nose; that is to say, they cherished the attitudes that were the chief symptoms of that spiritually deadly disease: the comforts of home and hearth, of careers in the colonies, of money in the bank where God’s name was on the cash, of parlor tea and cake, of servants of so many sorts the servants needed servants, of heavy drapes and heavy furniture and dark-wood-walled rooms, of majestic paintings of historic moments, costly amusements, private clubs, a prized share in imperialist Europe’s determined perfection of the steam engine and the sanitary drain. Daughters who could demand dowries were in finishing school where they were taught to tat, paint, play, and oversee kitchens; sons were sent to military academies or colleges that mimicked them, where they would learn to love floggings, reach something called manhood, stand steady in the buff, and be no further bother to their parents. And in these blessed ancient institutions both sexes would learn to worship God and sovereign, obey their husbands or follow their leaders, serve and love their noble nation, and dream of being rich.

It was inevitable. It was foregone — the drift of the young to Paris. Where the precocious began to paint prostitutes; they began to write about coal miners; and they began to push the diatonic scale, and all its pleasant promises, like the vacuum cleaner salesman, out the door. They took liberties as if they had been offered second helpings; they painted pears or dead fish instead of crowned heads; they invented the saxophone. They shook Reality in its boots. Fictional characters could no longer be trusted but grew equivocal. First there was Julien Sorel, then Madame Bovary. Novels that undermined the story and poems that had no rhymes appeared. Soon there would be no meter. Though you would still have to pay for parking. Painters tested the acceptability of previously taboo subjects, the range of the palette, the limits of the frame. With respect to the proscenium, dramatists did the same, invading, shocking, insulting their audiences. Musicians started to pay attention to the color of tones. They pitched pitch, if you can believe it, from its first-base position on the mound. They fashioned long Berliozian spews of notes, composed for marching bands as well as cabarets, rejected traditional instrumentation, the very composition of the orchestra, and finally the grammar of music itself. Notes had traditional relations? they untied them. Words had ordinary uses? they abused them. Colors had customary companions? they denied them. Arts that had been about this or that became this and that. The more penetrating thinkers were convinced that to change society you had to do more than oust its bureaucrats, you had to alter its basic structure, since every bureaucrat’s replacement would soon resemble the former boss in everything including name. Such is the power of position when the position is called the podium.

Who shall build from these ruins a new obedience?

They … who are they, you ask? they are the chosen few, chosen by God, by Geist , by the muse of music: they are Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern. They chose, in their turn, the twelve tones of the chromatic scale and thought of them as Christ’s disciples. Then they sat them in a row the way da Vinci painted the loyals. I don’t want to convey the impression that this disposition was easy, no more than for da Vinci. Suppose out of all the rows available, the following was the order of the group — ding dong bang bong cling clang ring rang chit chat toot hoot — and that we found the finest instruments to produce each one, the finest musicians to bring them forth, and sent them — the musicians, I mean, but why not the notes? — to Oxford to Harvard to Yale to Whittlebauer, to Augsburg even — thank you for the titters — to receive the spit of polish.

Yes, it is true, this music will be keyless, but there will be no lock that might miss it. Atonal music (as it got named despite Arnold Schoenberg’s objection) is not made of chaos like John Cage pretended his was; no art is more opposed to the laws of chance; that is why some seek to introduce accidents or happenstance into its rituals like schoolboys playing pranks. Such as hiccups. Miss Rudolph’s cough. No, this music is more orderly than anybody’s. It is more military than a militia. It is music that must pass through the mind before it reaches the ear. But you cannot be a true-blue American and value the mind that much. Americans have no traditions to steep themselves in like tea. They are born in the Los Angeles of Southern California, or in Cody, Wyoming, not Berlin or Vienna. They learn piano from burned-out old men or women who compose bird songs. Americans love drums. The drum is an intentionally stupid instrument. Americans play everything percussively on intentionally stupid instruments and strum their guitars like they are shooting guns. But I have allowed myself to be carried away into digression. Digressions are as pleasant as vacations, but one must return from them before tan turns to burn.