The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  Our game was only Name That Tune. “I can name that tune in five notes, in four, three.” The pieces whose names Ressler supplied had nothing to do with these snippet clues. The real works were interplays of huge motions, movements that stormed inexorably toward arrival or were forcibly restrained, parts progressing in the collision and collusion of themes, themes that constantly built toward breaking down, recombining from their phrases, lines that urged certain stabilities, expectations, setbacks, the tendencies of chords in their given instant, five or four or three of those delinquent, namable, and straying intervals sounded at once. Notes that gave nothing at all away about the ineffable message urgently taking shape so many levels above them, in the weather, in the storm.

  It was a night like any other. Outside, six blocks away, people were being murdered. At a middle distance, rain was falling upstate, over the border, rain that left pines as dead as if they had been stripped for sadistic pleasure. In the wide lens, we had at last opened up our long-sought hole in the atmosphere. According to best projections, extrapolations from that week’s Facts on File, the world was moving into a terminal late afternoon. Ressler guessed Brahms’s Fourth in four.

  We sang and quizzed and stumped each other a few times. “No, no. Listen. This part’s beautiful. Damn, I’ve lost the thread. You have to hear it with harmony; here, hold this D.” In a few months, Todd and I would split, Jimmy would be crippled for life with a ruptured aneurysm, and the professor would succumb to galloping cancer. All of that lay hiding in those melodies we had by ear. We played name-that-hosanna, but the only quote that lasted past that night was the Dostoyevsky that wound up on the board: In life, sheer hosanna is not enough, for things must be tested in the crucible of doubt.

  Above us, well into the solar system, a deep-space satellite drifted; in addition to pictures of the planet we had just finished poisoning (drawings and coded information theoretically understandable to any alien creature, whatever their language), it bore a record player and recording of a Brandenburg concerto. Colossal misrepresentation, exaggeration, lie, really, about who we were and what we might be able to accomplish. Homo musica.

  But that was the language we spoke for a night, a grammar of one trick: tension and release. How likely is the next note, its pitch, its catch, its duration, its tonal envelope? Where does it need to go? What detours must it be put through? Delays, silences, that brief flash showing how close beauty was to the germ of hopelessness. The poignancy of a pattern lifted beyond identity, beyond the thing it was mimicking, past metaphor, into the first mystery: the bliss beyond the fiddle, but not, for a night, beyond fiddling.

  Music was no use for anything. It would not protect us from the disaster about to happen, nor even predict it. It was the one pattern not rushing to accomplish or correct current event, not condemned to be about anything else. It was about itself, about singing and breaking off from song. Its every phrase continuously flirted with the urge to return to constituent pitch, to give up, go back to Do. We sat quizzing, guessing, comparing recognitions, trading affections for certain expositions with no idea of the development section already in store. Ressler was as happy as a widower who, through force of habit continuing to buy two season tickets years after his wife had gone, discovered that he might give one to the child on Symphony Hall steps who until then had had to be content with echo.

  I can still hear them, softly at night, trickling through the open window from the next apartment over. Those tunes still hold, locked in their sequence like the foundations of older temples beneath the nave, not only the complete morphological steps for recreating each similar April night I have ever lived—the color, the wrap, the attitude, the inclination, the range of emotional casts: how I turned from a similar window in just such a light back to a sheet of sums that had to be completed before bed—but also the difference, the closed door, the knowledge that I am no longer in any night but this.

  There is only one way for day to pass into dark; today has done so along a predictable sliding scale since the Precambrian. There are only a few barometric pressures, a narrow band of allowable temperatures. But however reducible to parts—degree, pound per square inch, lumen, hour by the clock, latitude, inclination and season—however simple and limited the rules for varying these, something in the particular combination of elements is, like twelve notes and ten durations compounded into a complex cortex-storm, unique, unrepeatable, infinitely unlikely. Today in History: Bach knocks out another cantata.

  I hear him listening with a code-breaker’s urge, taking noise and turning it to pattern, thinking to find with ear and voice a surrogate, an emblem for the melody of the self-composing gene. The absurd conclusion I cannot help but reach—that singing means something—is rooted in Ressler’s choice: either be a physician, cropping the delinquent tissue, or a researcher, a musician, mapping anatomy, the way the tissue lies. Two choices that amount to one thing. To feel the pattern flash, summoning an account for the gut-twist in a deceptive cadence. In either case, conspire to produce and deliver that new song the obsolete Lord requires.

  Listen and sing. That’s all he wrote.

  And I can name that tune in one note.

  BREAKING AND ENTERING

  “So you see, Jimmy, we’ll need access.”

  I listened as the professor sat on the hospital bed and explained. It became clear to me what he had in mind. It even became clear to Annie, who leaned over during Dr. Ressler’s explanation and whispered, “So it’s time to get our feet dirty.”

  How he could imagine that stroked and broken Jimmy, who had wanted pitifully to tell us of his father’s death twenty years ago, was in any shape to assist was beyond me. Yet Ressler spoke to him without condescension, apologizing for spelling out the obvious. His words had a confidence in the ability of signals to survive the shattered receiver. I watched Ressler reach into his jacket pocket and momentarily thought he was about to pull out a hand-held terminal and plug it into the wall jack in that hospital room. Instead, he retrieved a lower-tech spiral notepad and flipped to a blank page. The pad was packed with illegible scrapings, although I had never once seen Ressler make a single mark into anything resembling it.

  He printed methodically, in large block letters down six columns of six, the letters of the alphabet and the ten digits. “I’m sorry we have to resort to this, Jimmy. But I have to be sure we get it right.” Jimmy made no sound. I thought: He might as well be talking to himself. “Let’s start with the operating system lockout. You lie still. When I get to the first letter, let me know.” He smiled reassuringly, betraying none of the hopelessness of this attempt, the only shot we had for getting Jimmy reinstated under the umbrella of an institution that, understandably, had no stake in private welfare. Dr. Ressler began at the top of the first column, pointing to each letter and pronouncing the corresponding name.

  I stood and walked to the door. I could not stand to watch them get to the bottom of the last column, Ressler pointing and naming while Jimmy lay in confusion. Then, an agonizing twenty letters into the list, Jimmy made a noise. Not a howl or sigh. An indicative yes. Ressler’s shoulders dropped in relief. He noted the letter and brought his pen back to the top.

  It was a grueling process, and Jimmy had to rest twice. But after the first letter, we were home. Jimmy gave us dozens of crucial bits of information—passwords, memory locations, patch names—that until then had been the secret domain of the Operations Manager. Whatever else the flood of blood had wiped out—muscular control, speech, emotional perspective—it left Jimmy still able to remember the system words Ressler was asking him to spell. Nowhere in the dialogue was the message passed, “Betray your professional confidences, look the other way while we break the law, and we will do what we can to keep you from being killed.” Ressler said only the letters of the alphabet; Jimmy made only grunts. But the transmission was there, intact, awful in its implied risk. Uncle Jimmy was the classic Picardian third: minor his whole life, promoted to major at the last chord.


  XXVII

  THE GOLDBERG VARIATIONS

  Its published name is wildly unassuming: “Keyboard Practice, Part IV. Composed for music lovers to refresh their spirits.” One of only a handful of his thousand compositions to be published in his lifetime, in a form he never cared for, although perfected here.

  Bach’s first biographer tells the story, already thirdhand, of how Count Kaiserling, former Russian ambassador to Saxony, employed a young harpsichordist named Goldberg, one of Bach’s star pupils. Goldberg’s duties included making soft music in an adjoining room on those frequent nights when the Count had trouble sleeping. The Count commissioned Bach to compose for Goldberg something “of a soft and somewhat lively character,” to assist against this periodic insomnia. A musical calmative, a treatment that now consists of two tablets and the low drone of talk radio.

  Theme and variations, a form limited to “the sameness of the fundamental harmony” throughout, was just the ticket: sedative, soporific permutations jumping like counted sheep over a stile. From beginning to end, the Goldbergs were conceived, if not as an attempt to sing the listener to sleep, as a catalog that would at least keep the sleepless sufferer company, to hold at theme’s length the nightmare of wakefulness. The best one can be is either doctor or musician. Both, if possible.

  For this work, legend has it, Bach was rewarded with a goblet of one hundred gold louis, more than he was paid for scores of other works combined. The ambassador got off cheaply, taking possession of one of the supreme works in music history. Throughout the rest of his life, he referred to the piece as if it were his own composition. “Dear Goldberg, do play me one of my variations.”

  So much for the reading tale. The stuff any librarian can turn up. As for the architecture: the Goldbergs are twice as long as any previous variation collection. They form the most virtuosic and demanding piece for solo keyboard in any form until middle Beethoven. The set is built around a scheme of infinitely supple, proliferating relations. Each of the thirty is a complete ontogeny, unfolding until it denies that it differs at conception from all siblings by only the smallest mutation. Together they achieve a technical inventiveness and profundity unsurpassed in the rest of music, a catalog hinting at every aspect of tonal experience.

  And the whole archive is hatched from an insipidly simple theme. One musicologist tried to convince a fellow scholar that the germ aria, a heavily ornamented period piece, was not even Bach’s own. The eminent colleague disappeared into his study, emerging some time later (like Von Neumann affirming the obvious) shaking his head. “You’re right. It’s a piece of French fluff.”

  Bach’s first act out of the block is to strip down this aria bacterium to its even simpler bass. For the longest time, until Ressler pointed it out, I couldn’t hear how the wayward offspring had anything to do with parent. That’s because the variations aren’t descended from the aria per se. Rather, the aria itself is just another variation, built upon the all-generating, sarabande Base:

  The Goldbergs are not even variations in the modern sense, but an imperceptibly vast chaconne, an evolutionary passacaglia built on the repetition and recycling of this Base. Music that goes nowhere, that simply is, hovering around the fixed center of diatonic time.

  A line of pitches can be heard as a melodic sequence or as a series of harmonies. Bach’s Base is both, at times even hybridizing horizontal and vertical. As with 90 percent of standard tonality, it is no more than an exploration of the possibilities hidden in the scale. The sequence is symmetrical to an extreme: two paired, complementary halves of sixteen notes each. Each half comprises four similar-shaped paired phrases— tension, release, tension, release—four notes long. Each pair of four-note phrases creates an eight-note harmonic section, four in all, tracing the fundamental journey from tonic to dominant to relative and back to tonic. Sixteen twos, eight fours, four eights, and two sixteens: with repeats, the trip from home and back takes sixty-four notes.

  Dr. Ressler—already fighting gnostic tendencies—must have loved discovering in Bach two paired strands, four phrase-building blocks, a sixty-four-codon catalog. Bach had a habit of imbedding mystic numbers in his compositions; these ones happen to correspond to the number-game nature imbeds in its own. But this coincidence was the least of the qualities that made this music Ressler’s best metaphor for the living gene.

  I begin to hear, too late, how the Base’s symmetry ripples through the piece, unfolding ever-higher structures, levels of pattern, fractal self-resemblances. Having made my layman’s survey of the synthesis his science was after, I begin to hear in this encyclopedia of transcription, translation, and self-replication something of the catalog he carried around inside of himself for a quarter century.

  Like the master molecule and its living scaffolding, the Goldberg schema is a self-spun hierarchy. First: the transcription of the Base into each variation, even those transposed to relative minor, is faithful, either note for note or harmony for harmony. Oh, it strays from its source, sometimes implying the sarabande while straining to leave it, sometimes filling out the step with jarring accidentals. At times it too becomes a new thing, a new theme, overhauled for all its treading water. But the basic sarabande bass, its thirty-two-note journey, completely informs each child, in turn thirty-two bar-equivalents long. The code is universal throughout creation.

  The variations unfold a second level of emerging pattern. Every third variation is a canon, a strict imitation of staggered voices. “Row Row Row Your Boat” self-replication taken to terminal degree. In the first canon, the duplicating voice begins on the same pitch a measure later. In the second canon, the interval between voices is a second: the replication begins one tone higher than the original. The third canon is a canon at the third, and so on through every interval of the major scale plus one—the same scale the theme is built upon. Two canons occur in inversion: whatever happens in the first voice is mirrored upside down in the second. A rising interval is answered by equivalent fall. But in all the canons the situation is the same; the melody harmonizes not with another tune but with itself, a replica of its immediate past and future.

  The second voice in every canon is determined: the template first voice right-shifted, transcribed into new scalar position. Two copies twist about each other with helical precision, at ever-increasing steps, coding for their own continuation. Some of the canons are content to be canonical: the template is still audible when the replication arrives. Others push the form’s limits, holding a note away from falling into a single voice or mapping out intervals so dissonant that each constrained part seems to insist on its own, discrete decisions—strict, deterministic contrapuntalism forcing freedom.

  In each canon but one, strict imitation takes place over a third, persistent, unifying voice across the widening intervals. The second level of order enfolds the first: underneath each canon, the original Base matrix continues to churn. Canons at every scalar interval arch across the work like a giant backbone. But at each vertebra, the canonic lines are tied into position by the spinal cord of a theme that released them, the last to anticipate what spreading skeletons swirl around it. In the final canon—the replication at the ninth, the interval beyond the octave—the imitative voices draw up into their tag the contour of the Base itself.

  That much, already a tour de force of both conception and execution, would have easily engaged Ressler the scientist and pattern-seeker. But the primary structure of informing theme and the secondary emergence of canons at increasing intervals does not yet account for his lifelong devotion to the piece. A third level of structure, emerging after a week of my nonstop listening, hints at the successive layers of fascination peeling from the piece, bringing the man constantly back to listen, to make his next discovery.

  I have just come to hear how the variations group locally, how they arrive in threes, triplet codons together spelling out a fundamental word of human experience. The third of each set is a canon, as the second level of ordering dictates. But after the first triplet set
, a regular rotation also generates the form, color, and scope of the other two members of the triplet. The first of each codon is a dance, strikingly rhythmic or in a unique musical form. These moments of clarity are followed by brilliant duets, outbursts of virtuosic display, two-manual arabesques tearing across the keys. Dance, arabesque, canon: the variations produce a triangulation of feeling, sensing, and thinking that could only have arisen from a three-chambered arrangement of body, soul, and mind in perfect coordination. Harmony consists of propositions about harmony.

  The dance variations explore a variety of musical genres: a complete, compact fugue without episodes. An outrageous French overture, that most stylized of Baroque puff pieces, opening with a vertical flourish in the jungle of surrounding counterpoint and proceeding with eighteenth-century aristocratic optimism. A vigorous, syncopated alla breve. A four-voice stretto-fit of well-being over before you can say hallelujah. Two transcendent adagios, one in poignant, resigned major, the other a heart-stabbing minor where every pitch in the chromatic scale puts in an appearance, the two together an unendurable duet of deliverance wedded to dissonance, promise unwinding in pain.

  Each of these formal dances is built upon clear renditions of the Base. The difficulty of satisfying the constraints of variation within the bravura of overture or the rigor of fugue is considerable. But more disconcerting than the technical accomplishment is the plan. Take the variation number and divide by three. If the remainder is 1/3, the piece is a formal genre or dance; 2/3, and it’s a toccata. No remainder, and the piece is a canon built on the interval given by the quotient.