Powers, Richard - Orfeo

But his daughter likes the song, and she’s all the audience he needs. Sara is his experiment in what the ear might come to hear, when raised on sounds from a happy elsewhere. She giggles at his sudden melodic turns. Her face crinkles in puzzled glee. Her turn now to ask him: What are you saying? But it’s only music on a summer’s evening, even as a bouncy ballpark organ floats into the window, blown through the air from Fenway, the bat’s crack, the distant whispered roar of a crowd, and a berceuse that leaves the saucer-eyed girl squealing in primal delight.

Outside the apartment, there are gas lines, wildfire inflation, the Middle East heading to Armageddon again. But inside, their days bring the real dramas. A cough. A fever. A fall against the coffee table that makes her bite through her lower lip. Two short years ago, he wanted to write music that changed what music was. Now he just wants to keep his daughter from changing too much, too fast.

Pushing Sara’s stroller through the Victory Gardens, Els sees with terrible clarity the hubris of his twenties. He can’t for his life imagine why he ever signed on for the full Faust ride. For years, he’s struggled to write something thorny and formidable, as if difficulty alone ensured lasting admiration. Now he sees that what the world really needs is a lullaby simple enough to coax a two-year-old to lay down her frantic adventure each night for another eight hours.

On the playground near the art museum, Sara stands and chants to the sky: “This Old Man.” The words are babble, the rhythm rough, and the melody little more than a crayon smear. But to Els, the old man is as recognizable as God. Rebelling is itself a passing fashion, as fragile as any. Hemlines rise and fall, but the present is forever convinced it has found the Tailor’s pattern. The manifestos of Peter’s twenties — the movements and lawless experiments, the crazy climbs up onto the barricades — feel like a tantrum now, like his daughter refusing to take her nap. Who can say what the academy champions these days? Els has been away too long to know. But he knows that cool will give way to warm, form to feeling, as surely as a leading tone tilts forever toward the tonic. Music cut from new whole cloth? No such material. The emperor will always be as naked as a jaybird, as nude as Sara slapping the waves of her bath, shrieking those patty-cake melodies she makes up on the spot.

The girl is in love with music. At four, she blossoms with solfeggio. By four and a half, she stumbles through the Mozart Sonatina in C with what strikes her besotted father as real feeling. She plays for him, improvised instruments: Horns made of rubber shower hose. Oatmeal boxes strung with rubber bands. The game must always go a certain way, and she never gets tired of playing.

What am I saying, Daddy? she demands, and lays into the piano with every finger she has.

He listens. You’re saying, “Okay, Mom; I’ll eat green food.”

Yes! Maddy calls from the kitchen.

No! Sara shouts, and tries more furious chords.

I know! You’re saying, “I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”

Wrong! she says. Try again! And her tune goes as frantically jagged as anything Els has written.

Wait, he says, tipping his head to hear. Keep going. I almost have it. You’re saying, “I’m loved, and life is good!”

The music collapses, suddenly bashful. She turns her face away from him, her mouth crumpled in a shy maybe.

FIVE YEARS IN the Fens apartment pass like the Minute Waltz . His fellow Illinois grads have scattered into university music labs across the U.S. He listens to their gnomic tapes, studies their gnostic scores. Musical resistance still strikes him as worthy. Between Nixon, the endless war, and a radio spectrum filled with bland self-pity and sales jingles, there’s more to resist than ever. But he listens, and can’t get traction.

One night, bent over the low kitchen radio, nursing a bowl of butter pecan while the ladies sleep, he hears the spectral wails of Crumb’s Black Angels , for electric string quartet. Thirteen images from the dark land, barbaric and glorious, a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse. The sounds come from another galaxy. Infinite sonic possibility unfurls in front of Els, and he can’t move. He can’t even think which way he would move, if he could.

The very next night — heaven’s DJ toying with him — it’s George Rochberg’s third string quartet. Rochberg, rigid serialist, now serves up a bouquet reeking of lyric consonance, right down to bald-faced imitations of Beethoven, Mahler, and Brahms. It’s like a heretic giving the benediction: a serious composer surrendering, turning his back on the last hundred years, and sinking into prettiness.

And yet: what courage in this backsliding. Els shakes his head at the loveliness of the florid finale. It makes him remember old pleasures condemned for reasons he can’t now retrieve. The piece sounds naïve at best, at worst banal. But strangely willing to sing.

Afterward, the announcer explains: Rochberg’s young son, dead of a brain tumor. Now the archaic tonality makes perfect sense. The real mystery is how Rochberg could write anything at all. If something happened to Els’s daughter, fast asleep on the other side of the bedroom wall, composing would be done forever.

MUSIC GETS AWAY from him. In this one town alone, fantastic new inventions premiere every week at dozens of venues on both sides of the Charles. From a distance, it’s hard to tell the Brahmins from the bohemians. Els no longer needs to; he and his daughter wander hand in hand through the rose bower in the Fens, chattering to each other in a secret language, collaborators in a whole new genre of spontaneous invention.

Let’s make something, he tells her.

Make what? she asks.

He picks a fallen flower out of the dirt. Let’s make a rose nobody knows.

She pouts, lip like a slug. What do you mean?

Something good.

Good how? she says, but her face has already begun to guess.

Good slow, he suggests.

No, she corrects. Good fast.

Okay. Good fast. Something that’s never been. You start.

She sings a little. He adds some notes. They walk and invent, and the day is the song they’re making. They finish the piece at the keyboard when they get home.

IT BECOMES THEIR rolling litany. Let’s make something. Make what? Something good. Good how? Good and grumpy? No: Good and gentle. Good and treelike. Good like a bird.

Maddy catches them out one evening, giggling at some private nonsense over dinner.

What is it with you two? What’s the big secret these days?

Secret what? Els says, words that send his daughter into hysterics.

Sara holds her finger up, japing. Tips her head. Secret good!

Maddy swats at them. Fine! Be that way.

Jealous? Els asks.

Maddy stands and clears the dishes. Forget I asked.

Sara, anxious: No, Mom! You can know. We’re making things.

What kind of things?

Songs. Songs that nobody knows.

HE FINDS THE girl on the day after Christmas, under the small blue spruce filled with popcorn strings and paper ornaments, laying out her new alphabet blocks in patterns on the floor. She spaces them at varied distances, in gaps that she adjusts and readjusts until each one is perfect.

Els watches awhile, but can’t break the code. Bear? What are you making?

They’re our songs , she tells him. Look.

And she shows him how the system works. The distance between blocks, the height in the line, the colors like the keys of her xylophone: she’s invented notation. Written down secrets for the distant future, for no one, or for anyone who wants to hear. Els can’t stop looking — at the blocks, at the score, at the girl. It’s music from out of something that, a few dozen months before, was nothing but the sequences hidden in a single cell.