Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Then, education. In the sixth week of his twentieth century formal analysis class, he arrived breathless over the previous night’s performance of Barber’s Hermit Songs . The class hooted. A stunned Els appealed to the professor.

It’s a great piece, don’t you think?

The man stifled his amusement and looked around for the hidden camera. Sure, if you still dig beauty.

Els sat through the session humiliated. He raged against the man at the grad student Murphy’s happy hour, but no one backed him up. When he checked out a recording of Hermit Songs from the music library the following week, he found them banal and predictable.

He’d learn the truth from Thomas Mann later that semester: Art was combat, an exhausting struggle. And it was impossible to stay fit for long. Music wasn’t about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war over taste.

The idea sickened Els. He flirted with dropping out. He lay in bed until noon, planning to head back East to a job sweeping floors or delivering the mail. He could start over in chemistry. But bewilderment forced him back onto campus. Bewilderment and the need to hear whatever that hooting consensus was hearing.

He was sitting in that same formal analysis in late November, staring at the professor’s winklepickers as the man danced around the Carter Variations for Orchestra , when the door to the classroom flew open. A senior doctoral candidate in musicology burst into the room saying, They’ve killed him. They’ve killed him. The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything. The messenger’s face was as washed out as an unfixed Polaroid, and his right hand traced odd, gnostic signs in the air. The president , he said. They shot him through the head.

Someone said, Jesus God . Els looked to the professor for an explanation, but the man’s face fisted up in fear. The co-ed at the desk behind Els began to sniffle like an engine that wouldn’t turn over. Someone said, Get a radio. Someone put his arm on Els’s shoulder, a last awkward innocence. And the thought — three parts dread and one part thrill — passed through the mind of the beginning composer as if one of them had spoken it out loud: Make what you want, now. The place is up for grabs.

You carry around ten times more bacterial cells than you do human ones. Without their genes, you’re dead.

Els returned to school after that Christmas break with a single-movement octet — cello, violin, viola, clarinet, flute, horn, trumpet, and trombone. Music for uncharted times. The piece had started out studious, even reverent, but something happened as he fleshed it out. The lines insisted on more room, more play, more heat and light. The thing turned demonic, as reckless and motor-driven as those rock and roll anthems that his brother once forced him to admire.

He assembled a group of grad performers and cajoled them through several rehearsals until he produced a satisfying tape. The piece felt strong enough to win him lessons with any of the faculty’s alphas — those men who locked themselves into the Experimental Music Studio for days at a time, outdoing even the north campus scientists in rigor and formal perfection.

For his pedagogical parricide, Els settled on Matthew Mattison. A working-class boy from Lakehurst, Mattison went about in bomber jackets, three-day stubble, and loosened ties that looked like sliced-up Pollock canvases. The man was a dervish of dark energy, not yet forty-four, but his music had been performed in a dozen countries; he seemed to Els like a study for a bust in tomorrow’s Museum of Iconoclasm. His most recent twenty-five-minute tour de force was a contrapuntal pitched-speech chorus for virtuoso verbal ensemble built from the phrase, “So what if it’s so?”

Mattison invited Els to his house to listen to the octet. The home of a real composer: it wasn’t possible. Els stumbled on the loose, weed-covered flagstones twice while coming up the front walk.

The meeting began at eight p.m. and didn’t break up until one in the morning. And in those five hours of vicious back-and-forth, Els found himself defending a musical philosophy he never imagined anyone having to defend.

Els liked arguing as well as the next rebel acolyte. He and Clara had once stayed up all night fighting over which three piano concertos to take down in the fallout shelter for the final stay. But Mattison meant war. He began with a ferocious volley, not merely against the octet itself, but against all the foundations that Els took for granted. He called it cheap of Els to hide behind a melody that the audience would leave the hall humming. That meter so regular you could skip rope to it, those thrilling chord progressions: Why not just send a cozy Christmas card?

The front room where the two men clashed was almost bare aside from three wood-plank chairs, built by Swedes for mannequins. A stand near the window held a fishbowl filled with cobalt marbles. In the middle of the room a wrought-iron cube supported a thin surfboard of glass, a coffee table that had never seen coffee, let alone magazines. On a ledge jutting from one wall sat a sculpture made of bolts and washers and nuts that looked like an engineer’s upgrade of an elephant. Taped to the wall were unframed newsprint printouts — skeins of radiating black lines, generated by Illinois’s massive mainframe computer. Three years later, every child in America would be making similar webbed designs with their toy Spirographs.

For hours, Els and Mattison battled over first principles, and all that time, the master never offered his prospective disciple food or drink. For a while, the student held his own. But at last, herded into a corner, Els broke.

Isn’t the point of music to move listeners?

Mattison smiled. No. The point of music is to wake listeners up. To break all our ready-made habits .

And tradition?

Real composers make their own.

So Gustav Mahler wasn’t a real composer?

Mattison regarded the ceiling of the bare room and stroked his stubble with the back of his knuckles. He considered the question for forty-five seconds — half the length of Els’s octet scherzo.

Yes. I would have to say that Gustav Mahler was not a real composer. A songwriter, perhaps. But caught in the grip of the past.

It was beyond late. Els rubbed his mouth and said nothing. He was hearing things, faraway things approaching, faint and impenitent and electric.

If you come study with me, Mattison said, your very first piece will be about the stop sign at the end of my street.

Els looked around the bare room. The white plaster walls caught the light of the paper lantern and bent it into a cubist bouquet. He listened to the future for a long time. Then he turned back toward his next teacher and squinted. Fine. But I’m going to write it in C.

Life is nothing but mutual infection. And every infecting message changes the message it infects.

The war between Peter and Matthew Mattison lasted years, without any hope of peace with honor. They fought not simply over Els’s tenderfoot soul but over the whole project of music. Week after week, Els tried to revive the once-audacious inventions of the past and make them dangerous again. And week after week, his mentor dismissed his études as pretty sentiment.

The wildest things Els dared to make were too tame for Mattison. And in time, Mattison’s constant harping on freshness began to stale. Still, the rolling clashes taught Els a great deal about theory and harmony, despite Mattison’s contempt for those spent games. Els learned a lot, too, about the human ear, about what it would and wouldn’t hear. But above all, he learned how to weaponize art.