Powers, Richard - Orfeo

The music works its way to a whirling waterspout, then explodes into strobing suspensions. Jen leans forward into the breakers of her own ocean, grinning like a demon. She’s managed to delight herself again with her God-given right to strike a pose, to play on the fantasies of any willing listener.

The piece plunges off a cliff into blissful silence. In the aftermath, the maker can’t suppress a satisfied giggle. Huh? she teases him. Where does such confidence come from? Whadya think?

I have two words for you, he intones. And one of them is Holy. .

The praise makes her levitate. He stands and crosses to the piano, where he demonstrates for her a better way to handle a clumsy moment near the piece’s climax. She has reinvented a kind of quasi-fauxbourdon, lush and archaic, like the kind Brahms might have used. But her voice leading is all wrong. She doesn’t know the models, the ones that have solved all her problems already. There’s too much more to hear than the mere past. She listens to music all day long; her tastes are catholic and indiscriminate. She has shown him the tunes on her player, scrolled through the titles in her promiscuous trove. Now and then she leaves gifts in his in-box, music for the end of time: Radiohead, Björk, the Dillinger Escape Plan. The songs startle Els. They’re jewels, rich with dissonance and unstable rhythms. They sound like the experiments of half a century ago — Messiaen or Berio — reborn for a wider public. Maybe that’s how long it takes to go from germ to general acceptance in this world. Maybe the key to acclaim is simply to live long enough.

But then, maybe acclaim is just the foyer to death.

For every solo discovery Jen makes, Els must point her toward dozens more. The world’s bounty has overflowed, and the young are washed away in it. Human ingenuity was doomed from the first, to do itself in with abundance. Of the making of many musics, there is no end.

His fingers step through the keys, spelling out his proposed alternative. He glances up as he plays. His gaze locks onto her chestnut eyes as he talks her through the solution. The girl shakes her head.

God, I wish I could do that.

Do what? He’s done nothing but trace out a well-mapped progression, one known for centuries.

Stand at the keyboard and knock those things out. While talking!

Oh, stop. You just played me a fifteen-minute piece with a billion notes in it.

That’s not me, she says. That’s Sibelius!

Confusion lasts only an instant. Not the Finn: the composition software. The program that turns an average tunesmith into Orpheus. And if a student were to ask Els where to put her energies — into mastering the past or mastering that interface. .

He recrosses the room and sits next to her again. He waves his finger at her screen. Time for surgery . For him, Jen is always ready to repair. She goes to work on her own keyboard, like a kid releasing global thermonuclear war. He marvels again at the sheer power of the tools: cut-and-paste harmonies, point-and-click tone painting, one-button transposition. With a few deft flicks, a handful of raw building blocks becomes a new two-minute stunning tutti. Els wags his head in sad astonishment: five weeks of work for him, back in the day.

Oh, you children are like gods.

Children? she asks, her eyebrows aerobic. Is that how you see me?

It’s the most coquettish thing she has ever said. She’s still high on the power of her piece, the sheer trip of playing it for her mentor. Yes, he thinks. A child with breasts. With brains. With the most delicious insouciance he has come across in decades.

When I was your age , he tells her, we used to have to find a nice flat stone, polish it up, get a chisel. .

She listens, brows furled. Then she tsks and shoves his shoulder. Sure, Gramps.

Again, he says, pointing at her machine. He feels himself enjoying her, enjoying this, enjoying even music again. From the top. Once more with feeling.

She does as commanded, and though the reprise of the revised piece sends their lesson into overtime, neither of them gives the minute hand a second thought. Sounds fill their ears and the notes scroll past. The music is everywhere again, lush and naïve and searching out the best in both Apollo and Dionysus.

For a few short measures, the layers turn strange and cold as moonlight. Oh! Els says, clapping. I like that bit!

You should , she says. I ripped you off!

He thinks she’s joking. She’s not. The pulse drives on ahead, but his ears turn wary. He waits for the piece to end before confronting her.

You did what?

Her face is shaped for grinning. I found it in a piece you wrote. . Your Borges songs?

We are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. He’s forgotten the work was ever published, and if she’s gone and ordered a copy of the score, it will be the first dollar of royalties Els has made in years.

I owe you an ice-cream cone.

What’s that supposed to mean?

Means she has done something good with his old obscure formulas. Putty, sanding, and a paint job, and the thing is all shiny again, better than new.

What were you doing, hunting down my old stuff?

The words scare her, a key he’s never seen. Gramps? she asks. She looks at the offending passage. It’s pretty beautiful.

Oh? So beauty’s back, is it?

How much must have changed in the world of musical taste, since he last took its temperature, for those old provocations to be accused of such a crime. He smiles at sounds from very far away — the antics at the piece’s premiere, Maddy and the players dancing around the little auditorium to Richard’s imperial bidding.

What? Jen says. She’s ready to laugh along, if she should. What’d I say?

He shakes his head. Old friends, he says. Crazy people.

She frowns, wondering if she’s supposed to understand. But perplexity rolls off her as easily as recent history. She belongs to the first generation to use the mantra whatever without exasperation. It doesn’t matter to her what he’s babbling about. His words are nothing; she wants his tunes.

It’s Monday, 6:20. She’s late for something — dinner at the dorm, a lover’s tryst, a week-starting pub crawl with friends. But her eyes search upward in the air, as if the score of his old songs were printed there. I learn so much from what you write.

Wrote, he wants to say. Her zeal seems genuine enough. But then, she’s capable of extracting instruction and delight from a ten-second ad jingle.

He wants to tell her: Hold on to what you know right now. Let no one persuade you of a single thing. Study your hunger and how to feed it. Trust in whatever sounds twist your viscera. Write in the cadences of first love, of second chances, of air raids, of outrage, of the hideous and the hilarious, of headlong acceptance or curt refusal. Make the bitter music of bumdom, the sad shanties of landlessness, cool at the equator and fluid at the pole. Set the sounds that angels make after an all-night orgy. Whatever lengthens the day, whatever gets you through the night. Make the music that you need, for need will be over, soon enough. Let your progressions predict time’s end and recollect the dead as if they’re all still here. Because they are.

He folds his hands behind his neck. We had some strange notions back then.

I know. The sixties! Even the name excites her. A daughter of a revolution that did not happen as she imagined.