Powers, Richard - Orfeo

With two brisk tweaks of pitch the bird launched another descending arpeggio, like a pranking Beethoven having one over on the audience:

Fa me do-do-do-do-do-do-do. .

The bird might as well have chirped Eureka or sketched out a circle in the dirt with a twig in its beak. Much of twentieth century music had been lost to the idea that the diatonic scale was arbitrary and exhausted, part of the bankrupt narrative that had led to two world wars. Nothing mattered but finding a new language. Now this feathered thing sat up in the branches, singing its triads and making a fool of him. Evolution had its innermost needs, tens of millions of years old.

The goddess startled Els; he couldn’t imagine how she’d lapped him again so soon. She saw him standing paralyzed under the trees and stopped. She pulled the white wires from her ears.

Are you okay? Her accent — thick, nasal, and Mid-Atlantic — came straight out of Philly.

Els pointed. The bird answered for him, its perfect phrase. The goddess’s eyebrows pulled down; her lips twisted.

White-throated sparrow! She opened her mouth wide, and a clear, bright alto poured out. Poor Sam Peabody-peabody-peabody. .

The bird answered, and the imitator laughed.

Thank you, Els said. I’ve never heard that one.

Oh-migod. I love that bird. I wait for him, every spring.

She backed away, turning on one heel as if she’d never broken stride.

Wait, Els said. The lone benefit of age: you could ask anything and frighten no one. He raised both hands and pointed at each ear. What are you listening to?

She should have jogged off without saying another word. But the young knew that life would henceforth be forever lived in a fishbowl, and they liked it that way. The names of her tracks were doubtless being beamed to her social networking page, even as she nixed them.

The buds lay draped across her shoulder, like a stricken stick insect. She took them in her fingers.

I’m sorting through some new stuff. Tagging things for later.

I hope you have a tag for “sooner,” too?

The words wrinkled her forehead. Song came from the trees. Sam tried out a fresh new triad. Delight distracted the girl, and she forgot the question.

When she looked back down, Els grinned. Why listen to anything else, if you can hear that?

The goddess laughed, not getting the joke.

You have a lovely voice, Els said. He wanted to say: Worth waiting for every spring.

Pleasure reddened the jogger’s face. Thanks .

She edged away. Els ached to call her back. Faust’s parting shot to life: Stay awhile; you’re so beautiful. But then, he felt like saying that to everything, these days. She smiled, put the buds back in her ears, waved, and looked again up into the tree, at the invisible maker. Then she turned back to the jogging track, and, like so much else that Els took for granted on that disastrous morning, vanished forever.

Prodigiosins kill fungus, protozoa, and bacteria. They might even cure cancer. Their red is the color of pure possibility.

It’s 1963, Els’s final month at that massive musical factory pumping out performers from the fields of rural Indiana. All winter long, he’s studied with Karol Kopacz, and now it’s spring, his last undergraduate May. Old Klangfarben Kopacz: Polish by way of Argentina, one of those aging terrors from the era of cultural giants who died in the war and were resurrected in the Americas, the marble guardians of a lost art. From what Els can tell, Kopacz hasn’t put a note in front of the public for twenty years. The man seems to care nothing for music anymore, though he knows it better than most people know how to breathe.

Els sits in his mentor’s office in a corner of the Old Music Building. Every surface of Karol Kopacz’s lair, including the baby grand, is heaped high with moldering books and papers, loose scores, records long divorced from their cardboard sleeves, brass Shiva Natarajas, a broken bandoneón, a stringless oud, plates of forgotten sandwich, and a framed photo of an almost handsome younger man underneath the bear paw of Stravinsky that Kopacz has never bothered to hang. Channels through the clutter lead from the door to the desk, the desk to the piano, the piano to the veined leather love seat where cowed composition students sit and take their weekly beatings.

Every seven days, Peter Els brings the man the best that his green soul can generate. Kopacz sits and scans Els’s systems in silence. Then he tosses the scores back, saying, Lots of traffic and no cops , or Too many peaks, not enough valleys. For days afterward, Els rages against the man’s glib dismissals. But a month later, he’s always in complete agreement.

Today Els brings a thing of antic splendor for solo piano. It feels fresh, quirky, and young, everything art ought to be. It’s an openhearted gamble, keen with both reason and love.

His professor looks at the first measure and grimaces. What is all this?

It’s a compact chromatic phrase, packed with every one of Western music’s twelve available notes, twice over. Els stole the idea from Henry Cowell, who may have stolen it from Scriabin, who surely stole it from someone even older.

Go to the piano , Kopacz commands. Peter does as told. He may be a budding revolutionary, but he’s an obedient one.

Hit a key .

Els reaches out one finger. Which. . ?

The émigré presses one hoary hand over his eyes, as if the genocidal century has finally caught up with him and he can flee no farther.

Peter hits a key.

Thank you , his mentor says, oozing grace . What do you hear?

C? Peter tries. His brain scrambles for the real answer. C-two. Great C.

Yes, yes, Kopacz snaps. What else? Again!

Bewildered, Peter restrikes the note.

Well? Mother of God. Just listen.

Els strokes the key. He doesn’t understand. It might be a foghorn at night. It might be the singing radiator from his childhood bedroom. It might be the first note of the first prelude of the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier . He strikes again, harder, but says nothing.

His teacher hangs his head and groans for civilization’s sad waste. Just listen , he begs. Stay inside the sound.

Els does. The building’s torrent of heating switches off, audible now that it stops. He hears the plosives of two people bickering. Down the hall, someone runs through the Adagio from the Pathétique. Someone else grinds out four measures from the Elgar Cello Concerto until it sounds like Fluxus. A soprano vocalizes in rapid chromatic swells and dips, the cartoon cue for seasickness. Something that sounds like a large cardboard box knocks against the brick wall at six-second intervals. Outside, a young couple flirts in muffled Spanish. Blocks away, a siren makes its way toward someone’s life-erasing disaster. Through it all, Karol Kopacz sits slumped at his desk, face in his hands, drowning in bitter music.

Els blocks him out and listens. He focuses until the note he keeps striking breaks in two. Obvious, what else is there, now that he stops assuming that there’s nothing else to hear.

I also hear C-three .

He braces for abuse. But his teacher barks in triumph.

Thank you. Maybe your ear does function, after all. What else?

Relief turns back into panic. Surely there’s more to the game. But since Peter can now hear the G above that octave C, a perfect fifth shining out like a ray through cloud, he’s forced to say so.

Go on, the displaced Pole commands. Now the game is flushed out into the open. Above that perfect fifth, a perfect fourth. Els has never before taken the fact seriously: hovering above any tone is twice that tone, and triple it, and on up the integers.