The Music

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  This was obviously inadequate.

  ‘Everything tends to this point?’ I offered timidly, remembering the famous quotation much repeated by our brushwork tutor.

  ‘That could rightly be said about anywhere in the universe. I warn you, I won’t put up with philosophy. I want detail.’

  After a long pause in which I remained helplessly silent he said wearily: ‘Close your eyes.’

  Of course it’s easy now to be surprised at my surprise, intolerant of my slowness. I would only say in my defence that I was infected by impatience. I was still upset by what felt like the wanton destruction of my treasured tabori and was vaguely expecting that Adeptus had brought me to this enchanted place as a demonstration of how contemplation of the beauties of nature could restore one’s humility and bring one’s petty turbulences to rest. It is indeed shameful for a musician to have to admit that until I shut my eyes I had heard nothing but the random sounds of water and pipits, my senses overwhelmed by the crude majesty of the view. But at once I was amazed by how loudly the waters sounded. Perhaps the dell itself acted like a conch, magnifying the slightest noise and focusing it precisely into the ear of the listener seated on that carefully positioned stone. The more I listened, the more I heard. The genius of the place had so arranged that each rivulet was clearly audible, with its own character, its own notes, so that one could concentrate on its individual song or, by an exercise of discriminatory control, blend it with those of its neighbours. The better one perceived how to play these games, the more arresting the effects. The slightest turning of one’s head added further subtleties. Finally, all the voices could be heard together, still separate but concordant, individual yet harmonising.

  ‘Oh master!’ I cried in awe.

  ‘It has taken me more than twenty years to arrange this place,’ he said.

  ‘You mean it isn’t natural?’

  ‘Of course it’s natural, boy. I’ve simply taken the landscape and tuned it. Once upon a time the stream fell along its own bed near where you’re sitting. Its sound was charming enough, to be sure, but unexceptional. With judicious damming and diverting I gradually obliged it to divide and subdivide again and again, each freshet following its own distinct course along a series of precisely graduated falls into cups and hollows of calculated size and depth. It was an act of will, just as hearing is itself an act of will. If you close your eyes again and listen you should be able to tell me how many streamlets there are.’

  What a challenge for a musician’s ear! It was useless trying to cheat and count them surreptitiously from beneath lowered lids since they were nearly all invisible from where I sat except as intermittent tufts and gushes scattered here and there among the rocks.

  ‘Twelve, sir,’ I said at last.

  ‘Only twelve? Are you taking into account the one like frogs in a paddy?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And the one like crickets in a July dusk?’

  ‘I think so, sir.’

  ‘But not the wind-harp one? Like three swans flying south on a frosty morning?’

  ‘Might there be thirteen, sir?’ I concentrated still harder and then it suddenly struck me. ‘The Thirteen Modes! That’s it, isn’t it? Yes, I can hear them now.’

  ‘So,’ said Adeptus, ‘I was right. You’re not altogether a worthless, baize-eared dunderhead. Nearly, but not quite. The Thirteen Modes it is. Nature is fine by itself but may always be improved by Art, you see. A boy such as yourself is a perfect example. I look upon you as a natural creature badly in want of tuning – or attuning, since it’s only a matter of making you aware of abilities you already have. You should accustom yourself to sitting on that stone since I shall expect you to work daily in this place. Some of the time we shall work together but mostly you will be on your own. You think you already know the Thirteen Water Modes, don’t you? I’ve no doubt you can play an approximate version of them on a tabori. But that’s only an academic reading, the version one’s taught with all the right degrees of stoppling and quilling on appropriate notes. To be able to hear the Water Modes as water – ah, that’s a very different matter.’

  Was this, after all, the great secret of the Adeptus’s miraculous playing, which by common consent exceeded that of any other flute-master as the mountain overlooks the dunghill? I had certainly never heard such a theory advanced in the Academy, where attention was always rigorously focused on the techniques as laid down by the old masters in the time of the Spice Kingdoms. But from the lessons I was privileged to receive over the next month I gathered the Adeptus believed the old masters themselves had derived their methods from the true Ancients, whose original practices had been lost or reduced to faint shadows by the discontinuities of time and warfare, of burnt libraries and civil unrest, of fashionable perversions and sheer indolence. He believed, in short, that the Ancients had long ago discovered the secret of tuning a garden or a landscape, that this secret had been lost, and that now by diligent research, meditation and inspired labour he had once more uncovered the source of our entire music.

  The excitement of being the first witness to this extraordinary project – as he assured me I was – helped make up for the loss of my flute. I still missed the conforting tap of its sheath at my thigh, the feel of its length in my fingers, the familiar bristling of its quills and stopples, but I was willing to submit to my master’s knowledge and experience. If I would be better off without a tabori for some weeks, then so be it. Each day at dawn I sat in the dell and listened for two hours without moving. Then I went and described my work to the Adeptus who would make excellent suggestions for achieving greater discrimination, for preventing other sounds such as birdsong from being a distraction, for maintaining a light alertness without fatigue. After this I would go into the forest and chop wood for the cooking fire, gather berries and fungi, dig for tubers, set snares and lime for the abundant small game. Boiled bell-bird became, I’m glad to say, something of a dietary staple for us. As far as I was concerned the species was well served for having been instrumental in my humiliation on the way up. Apart from cold mists at dawn and dusk which came ravelling through the trees like shawls the weather was fine, a noteworthy matter less for reasons of our comfort than because rain would surely affect the dell.

  The Adeptus confirmed this. ‘You may have noticed the earthworks upstream? In the case of a heavy shower I can more or less divert excessive flow; but winter rains and the spring melt produce torrents which swamp everything. It’s a great task for early summer to restore everything to its place. It takes many days to remove the rubbish and re-establish exactly the former channels, uncover the chords and intervals. It’s a very pleasurable job and one I look forward to in the sad days of winter. I did once try to build a series of ice chimes to wile away the hoar season but they weren’t very successful. It’s a source of great contentment just going from one little pool to another, adding a stone here, removing one there, taking a dead twig from a channel where it juts over the edge and forms a false spout. All these things can instantly be heard.’

  Since I’m in part writing this as a memorial to him, the greatest musician of the modern age, to the Finch of Bado himself, I ought to set down those of his sayings which fixed themselves in my retentive, if wilful and boyish, mind. I deplore absolutely the increasing sentimentalisation of his life and achievements, suspiciously undiscouraged by those jackanapes at the Ministry of Pilgrimage who stand to benefit from the ever-swelling hordes tramping up and down a once-lovely mountain path to his once-simple hut. To refer to him semi-officially as ‘The Sublime Linnet’ is frankly vulgar; while the stubborn refusal to restore his dell to its former auditory glory is little short of a national scandal and should redound to the Academy’s eternal discredit. This cult of my Adeptus as a ‘personality’ obscures – as is no doubt the intention – the radical element in his thinking.

  ‘It is better to remain wordless, but not necessarily silent,’ I remember him saying one day in answer to a naive question of mine about
the relation between Nature and Music. ‘We have the gift of comment but we should play our remarks. When the cuckoo calls from the wood or the bell-bird chimes to the morning sun we should never mimic them. That would be a gross disrespect. The idea of trying faithfully to imitate a particular bird or animal is anyway crude, let alone the sounds we might make. We musicians should leave that to the huntsmen. As we don’t understand what they are saying it would be like trying to talk with an outlander by mindlessly repeating his every phrase. That would soon lead to blows because mimicry always has a satirical streak.

  ‘When a Zen master give a koan the proper response must be immediate, unthought, its validity often being all the greater the less appropriate it seems. The master will know at once if his pupil is faking by using intellect to furnish authentic-sounding gibberish. Now this is the same gift which the true tabori player has: that if his understanding is genuine he can make the cuckoo and the bell-bird listen to him. They won’t listen to stringed instruments, no matter how well they’re played. Remember the story of fat Gokin and his lyre: the herd-boy who sat and played while the birds and fieldmice crept up to listen? And how his rival in love, the envious and sharp-witted Apat, pointed out that they only crept up during lunch, being dead to his playing but fascinated by his crumbs? Lyrists pluck and strum in vain and the most accomplished drummers, too, are wasting their time if they want Nature’s attention. But a tabori master has the ear of all creation.’

  On another occasion he said:

  ‘In this matter I firmly believe the Ancients were right: that it is useless to teach anyone to play an instrument until first they have been taught how to hear. For years an apprentice tea master never touches a teapot. Instead he is trained to discriminate. He learns to identify four hundred teas by smell alone. He learns to tell the taste of water made from November snow from that of February snow; to judge between roof snow and mountain snow; between this well and that well, one spring and another. All this until his palate has the required sensitivity and it is worth teaching him the actual brewing of tea. Your true musician is the same. He should refine his ear before he even picks up an instrument. Anyone can learn technique and anyone can be taught to play with the simulacrum of musicianship. But it is the ear and not the fingers which finally identifies the true master. This was the Ancients’ great lesson to us. And this’ (he indicated the tuned dell) ‘its proof.’

  And on still another:

  ‘You have learned to hear the thirteen streamlets as thirteen streamlets or as one. Now you must hear yourself in them. Where is your own heartbeat in all this? Does it knock in your chest, or tick in your throat, or hum in your ears? It’s there somewhere. Listen for it, then give it its place in the general panorama. Without the constant awareness of your heart your breathing will be wayward; and wayward breathing contravenes the second of the Eight Disciplines.’

  ‘Ah, the Eight Disciplines!’ I said to myself satirically, for I was in my own springtime and found it hard to sit for hours just listening to streams or even to pay sufficient attention to the Adeptus as he spoke. Today this will sound outrageous, a typically impious confession. Yet it was so; and it was an early symptom of the most painful part of my story.

  After a month the Adeptus decided he would return for a while to the Academy but that I should stay behind and improve my listening. So that I shouldn’t be lonely and become depressed up in the forest on my own he said he would immediately arrange for someone to fetch me up a fresh sack of rice. Then, he said, when he himself returned he would bring me a tabori. The day after he had left a figure appeared on the track stumbling beneath a heavy load. It was – and this is where the Adeptus showed his understanding – a deaf-and-dumb girl from the town with muscles far stronger than her fourteen years would warrant. Her condition precluded idle chatter, which was no doubt the idea behind her choice, while her taking over the cooking and foraging released more of my time for self-improvement. That, too, was no doubt the idea, although it didn’t quite work out to plan. I spent far too much time learning from her certain other fine discriminations which the Adeptus – genius though he was – would have been as incapable of teaching as I should have been loath to learn from him. Nevertheless, in a mere three weeks I could honestly claim that every one of my senses was much improved.

  But all this while, doubts were massing in my mind in a way which was to lead eventually to great sadness. On the day before he had left I asked the Adeptus what it would sound like to play on the tabori the songs the peasants sang. He had looked at me in genuine bewilderment. ‘But they could easily be played,’ I persisted, ‘simple tunes that they are.’

  ‘Inconceivable,’ he replied when he could speak.

  ‘But it could be done,’ I persisted in my temerity. ‘Just as a cantonal potentiary could marry a prostitute.’

  ‘Hush, boy!’ he rebuked me, casting a glance around us at the unheeding forest. ‘Watch your mouth! Some might construe that as satire, and the tongue-puller has often been summoned for less.’

  That was, as a matter of fact, my first political joke, since just such a man had recently married just such a woman in a neighbouring canton. Still, the point had been made. Peasant songs were for harsh, drunken voices and one-stringed fiddles in taverns: they would have defiled the noble tabori. Even the thought ought not to have been thought; and yet it had been, and it stalwartly refused to un-think itself. During the Adeptus’s absence I had pondered this and other related matters which, when he had duly returned, would surely have to be aired.

  Yet when he did come back he brought me one of his own treasured taboris which he presented to me formally, together with a scabbard and a mother-of-pearl box containing spare magpie quills and springs of bear’s bristle. I knelt before him, overwhelmed by fondness and gratitude.

  ‘Get up, boy,’ he said. ‘You can’t play on your knees. Give me a scale of the Ninth in Water.’

  Oh, to hold such an instrument in my hands! I checked the quilling, blew gently down the helical bore to warm it, played the scale.

  ‘And now try the Third in Mist.’

  I did; and all humility apart, it sounded to me as though I had much improved, and all without touching a tabori in over two months.

  ‘Seventh in Air.’

  Soon I was playing texts instead of scales. I managed ‘Cranes in Flight’ and ‘Catching the Ox’ but the ‘Wagtail’s Lament’ defeated me. At which point the Adeptus produced another instrument and took the music up from where I had left off and I could feel the gooseflesh rise on my arms and neck, such was its beauty. How did he achieve that abstracted melancholy, the leaves’ fall, the shiver of wind on the water’s face, and all without losing the wagtail’s lonely song? But after all, wasn’t this exactly what I was here to learn?

  Not altogether. And even after all these years it still grieves me to remember how powerfully that foul dissent rose in me.

  ‘Who gave us the Seven Hundred Texts, sir?’ I asked one evening after his return.

  ‘The Ancients, of course.’

  ‘Are you sure, Adeptus? Is it certain that it wasn’t the old masters?’

  ‘Where tradition is concerned, questions of certainty don’t apply.’

  ‘But the Texts had to come from somewhere,’ I insisted. ‘There must have been an occasion when they were played for the first time.’

  ‘No doubt. That’s only reasonable. There are musicologists who study such things. We’re musicians. It’s enough that we play the Texts as they have been perfected.’

  ‘Supposing,’ I began, and I could hear the nightbound forest surrounding the hut hold its breath, ‘supposing one wanted to invent a text of one’s own?’

  For a long moment I could feel my master’s eyes on me across the dying fire. ‘And are these the sort of thoughts you’ve been having up here in my absence?’ he asked sadly. ‘I send you the comfort of peasants and you begin to think like one? Once you asked me about playing folk ditties on a sacred instrument and now you wonder
if you mightn’t invent tunes?’

  ‘Not tunes, sir. Proper texts.’

  ‘Improper texts, you mean. There are seven hundred Texts, no more, no less. They comprise all music, as bequeathed us by Nature and the Ancients. There is no other. All else is trivia and heresy.’

  In cold print, I suppose, my part in this conversation reads like the triumphal rebellion of youth. In fact it was causing me nothing but pain. Uppermost in my mind was the sense of my own treason. Was this the way to express joy and gratitude to my Adeptus for giving me his marvellous instrument? Did it show me as worthy to share his laboriously rediscovered secret of tuned landscapes? Yet the irony was that the magic dell had itself inspired these thoughts, setting them free like geese which hear their companions calling in the mist and know it is time to migrate. There was nothing for it but to fly on; there could be no turning back. With a heavy heart I asked:

  ‘Why is it, sir, that there shouldn’t be fourteen modes? Or forty? Or four hundred, even? Why just the Thirteen?’

  ‘That’s like asking why there shouldn’t be thirteen months in the year instead of just the twelve. The moon’s periods are ordained by Nature. So are the Thirteen Modes.’

  It was a useless, sterile conversation and we soon lapsed into an unhappy silence which lasted three days. I sat in the dell for hours at a stretch as a kind of penance so that Adeptus would recognise my submission. As soon as I did the peaceful sunlight, the stipple of the pipits’ song and the artfully contrived rills all conspired to fill me with a sense of its completeness. Why look further and imagine vanities? Here I could safely gather about me the boundlessly subtle cloaks of the Ancients, of my own Adeptus. I could be secure beneath his aegis and in due time be virtually guaranteed an enviable post as a Court musician or as a cantonal lord’s musical attendant. Was I ready to throw all this away, besides causing my master the unhappiness and offence I could already read in his face?

  The answer must have been yes, evidently, for that is the way history turned out, with my entire life a political joke. How am I to express my utter grief for all that happened, yet without a trace of remorse? For instead of returning to the Academy I headed on over the mountains to a life of penury and notoriety. Since my music is officially banned I shall never hear it performed in the country of my birth, which is a sad matter to me. But of course that private regret is insignificant beside the great earthquake, whose twenty-third anniversary is today, which destroyed so much more than my own chances of making amends to a man I loved and revered. Not long after I took my leave of him the Adeptus was crushed beneath a boulder as he was seated on the very stone where I had sat long hours. He was only the most illustrious casualty out of many thousands sustained in the region, including those caught beneath the Academy’s collapse.