Powers, Richard - Orfeo

It seemed to Els, as another slice of his brain filled the screen, that classical music’s real crime was not its cozy relations with fascism but its ancient dream of control, of hot-wiring the soul. He pictured Faust looking at his own neurons on a monitor — his bottomless hunger laid bare, his desire for mastery swirling through his brain like cigarette smoke curling in the air. As full knowledge filled the seeker at last, Mephistopheles, at his elbow, would sing, Now we’re both paid in full .

Once such an infant opera would have flooded the folds of Els’s brain in spikes of color. Now he looked at a stilled sea.

Els pointed to a speck of gray-black Sargasso. What’s that?

Dr. L’Heureux nodded, confirming a diagnosis Els didn’t even know he’d made. That’s a lesion. A small dead spot.

Dead?

A small transient ischemic attack.

The doctor pointed out another.

The scans of many people your age show the same thing.

Ah , Els said. So there’s nothing to worry about .

Dr. L’Heureux nodded. Perfectly normal. Perhaps a lesion had taken out his sarcasm detector.

Els asked how much of a person’s brain could be dead and still qualify as normal. The question confused Dr. L’Heureux. He seemed not to make a strong distinction between normal and dead. And all the medical evidence was on his side.

Yet the tiny gray islands in his silver brain reassured Peter. Whatever musical facility he’d lost was not his fault. He wasn’t being punished. The scattered dead spots on the screen joined together into a pattern. The islands of silence shaped the still-surging ocean of noise around them. He’d always told his students that rests were the most expressive paints in a composer’s palette. The silences were there to make the notes more urgent.

Dr. L’Heureux described the virtues of exercise. He mentioned possible medications and dietary changes. But Els had stopped listening. He asked, What about my musical facility?

Dr. L’Heureux’s shoulders made a helpless appeal. He mentioned a name: acquired amusia. It had a variety of possible causes. There was no treatment.

Something in his words tipped Peter off. A tone he could still hear.

This is going to get worse?

Dr. L’Heureux’s silence suggested that it would not get better.

Els went home, into a world of changed sound. Listening to music felt like looking at a flower show through sunglasses. He knew when the intervals shocked or surprised, soothed or blossomed. He just couldn’t feel them.

Rain and thunder, the sides of mountains bathed in flowing orange, frantic delight, the sizzle of cities at night, feasts of self-renewing tenderness, the heaven of animals: the most ravishing harmonies turned into secondhand, summarized reportage. Music, the first language, direct transcription of inner states, the thing words used to be before they bogged down with meaning, now read like a curt telegram.

For a few days, he could still tell what sounded different. Then, little by little, he couldn’t. The brain got used to anything, and soon Els’s new ears were all he’d ever had. He listened less for subtle rhythms and harmonic contour, more for melody and timbre. Everything he heard was new and strange. Two-tone, four-by-four garage, rare groove, riot grrrl, red dirt, country rap, cybergrind, cowpunk, neo-prog, neo-soul, new jack swing. . He’d never dreamed that people could need so many kinds of music.

A year of listening to the new world confirmed him. He’d waited his whole life for a revolution that he’d already lived through and missed. The airwaves were full of astounding sound — a spectrum of grief, craziness, and joy so wide he couldn’t step far enough back to make sense of it all. As more and more people made more and more songs, almost every piece would go unheard. But that, too, was beautiful. For then, almost every piece could be someone’s buried treasure.

His students grew younger and the music wilder, but Els went on teaching the same basic rules. While he trained students how to hear seventh chords in the third inversion, the globe went over the financial brink. The entire web of interlocking con jobs came unraveled. Trillions of dollars disappeared back into fiction. The college lost half its endowment. They asked Els to retire. He volunteered to keep teaching for free, but the law forbade it.

He returned to the life of a sole proprietorship, but now without a way to pass the days. Still, the days passed, many in a major key. He had his phone calls with his daughter, whose every word delighted him. He had her gift, Fidelio, his elated companion on long walks nowhere. There was nothing more pressing to do all day, every day, except think about the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?

At sixty-eight, Els could think about the question only a little at a time. He read what he could find — the distilled knowledge of hundreds of experts. He couldn’t follow all the physiology. The body had evolved to feel fear, hope, thrill, and peace in the presence of certain semi-ordered vibrations; no one knew why. It made no sense that a few staggered chords could make the brain love an unmet stranger or grieve for friends who hadn’t died. Nobody could say why Barber moved listeners and Babbitt didn’t, or whether an infant might be raised to weep at Carter. But all the experts agreed that waves of compressed air falling on the eardrum touched off chain reactions that flooded the body in signals and even changed the expression of genes.

Deep in his stuffed armchair, Els read about the chemical cascades that music set off inside the body of a listener. Sometimes, he felt as if that night with Clara by the banks of the Jordan River back in Bloomington had never happened, and he’d stayed a chemist instead of heading down music’s mirror fork.

People now made music from everything. Fugues from fractals. A prelude extracted from the digits of pi. Sonatas written by the solar wind, by voting records, by the life and death of ice shelves as seen from space. So it made perfect sense that an entire school, with its own society, journal, and annual conferences, had sprung up around biocomposing. Brain waves, skin conductivity, and heartbeats: anything could generate surprise melodies. String quartets were performing the sequences of amino acids in horse hemoglobin. No listener would ever need more than a fraction of the music that had already been made, but something inside the cells needed to make a million times more.

In the fall of 2009, while fast-walking Fidelio around the long loop of the arboretum, Els watched a wet oak leaf fly through the air and stick to his windbreaker. He peeled it free, studied its surface, and saw rhythms inscribed in the branching veins. He sat down, a little dazed, on a boulder at the side of the path. His hand grazed the rock’s surface, and the pits played pitches like a piano roll on his skin. He looked up: music floated across the sky in cloud banks, and songs skittered in twigs down the staggered shingles of a nearby roof. All around him, a massive, secret chorus written in extended alternate notation lay ripe for transcribing. His own music had no corner on obscurity. Almost every tune that the world had to offer would forever be heard by almost no one. And that fact gladdened him more than anything he’d ever written.

Fidelio strained at the leash. The tug pulled Els to his feet and dragged him toward the duck pond. The dog splashed into the water, her paws churning up a pattern of dotted rhythms and accented attacks. Duets, trios, even a brash sextet spread outward across the pond’s surface. The tiny maelstrom of intersecting ripples contained enough data to encode an entire opera. Find the right converting key and the score might tell any musical story there was: Man uses tunes to bargain with Hell. Man trades self for a shot at the lost chord. Man hears his fate in the music of chance.