The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  The conservatory was my country. Arkansas was no more than a distant nightmare. I don’t know what Jonah thought about Little Rock. We spoke of it only once, sitting in front of Da’s first black-and-white television, watching a news clip while waiting for a thriller that didn’t last past the following summer. On screen, a thin, white, bulldog crew-cut teen nosed up to a beautiful girl in sunglasses and whispered a muted threat. Jonah, next to me in the dark, said, “He touches her and he pays.”

  We, in our new world, lived like princes. Every afternoon had another free recital, the highest caliber of pleasure performed for mostly empty houses. Every few weeks—as often as we could talk Da into letting us stay out—we could have a symphony or even an opera for a student pittance.

  I studied and practiced, needing eight more hours in each day. I had my first run at repertoire so mythic, I almost rebelled at stroking the notes. With my teacher, George Bateman, I went back and relearned opus 27, no. 1, this time properly. The Well-Tempered Clavier was my daily bread. I read my way through a chunk of book one, keeping to safe tempi on the tricky fugues.

  Mr. Bateman was an accomplished accompanist. He still performed often and canceled as many lessons as he kept. He moved through my lessons in a state of distraction. But he could hear like hell’s watchdog, and he did with two fingers of his left hand what I couldn’t do with my entire right. His crumbs of praise fed me for weeks.

  He tucked his criticisms so deeply amid that praise that I often missed their bite. I played Chopin’s Mazurka in A Minor for him. Its trick is that little dotted rhythm—how to make it lilt without listing. I got through the first repeat without incident. Then I made that turn into C, the burst of relative major—the most predictable surprise brightening on earth. Mr. Bateman, eyes closed, maybe even dozing, jumped forward. “Stop!”

  I jerked my hands off the keys, a dog whacked with the newspaper he has been trained to fetch.

  “What did you just do, there?” I was afraid to look up. When I did, Mr. Bateman was waving. “Do that again!” I did, crippled with self-consciousness. “No, no,” he said, each rejection oddly supportive. “Play it the way you did the first time.”

  I played it exactly as I always played it. Each time, Mr. Bateman’s face rose and fell in whole storm systems. Finally, he lit up. “That’s it! That’s beautiful! Who taught you that?” He waved his arms around his head, happily warding off a swarm of fact. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Just keep doing it, no matter what else I tell you to do!”

  For days afterward, I wondered if I might not, after all, have a gift I didn’t suspect. I knew what Mr. Bateman was trying to do: move me from fingers to feeling, from mechanics to mind. He called a little Schumann fantasy piece I played “brilliant,” and all that afternoon, I thought I could change worlds. I wanted to tell Mama what Mr. Bateman had said, as soon as I got home. Then, remembering, the pleasure of accomplishment turned to a bitterness deeper than I’d felt at her death. Nothing made sense. My crippled tune dragged through more unprepared keys than I knew how to survive. I was the most contemptible teenager alive, to feel such elation, so soon after elation should have ended for good. To go on shamelessly growing, while Mama would not.

  That leaden pointlessness fell away when I practiced. Still, I hated myself for letting it go, even for a minute. I don’t know how Jonah survived. We saw little of each other once he started the college track. He needed me less. Yet when we strolled back through Morningside Heights at the end of a day, he’d recap his hours, irritated that I hadn’t been there to experience it all with him firsthand. On weekends, as we bummed around the music shop on 110th, he could go exultant again over nothing, launching into the horn blare from the third movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, expecting me to be right there, in tempo, a third below him in the second horn, no later than the score’s marked entrance, as if no one had died.

  Juilliard was so big, even Jonah shrank in it. The cafés around school babbled like a musical UN. Until Juilliard, we’d only noodled away at little Dittersdorf duets. Now we’d landed somewhere in the middle risers of an international Symphony of a Thousand.

  There were even a couple of Negro students. Real ones. The day I saw my first—a wide, preoccupied grad with dark glasses and a sheaf of scores under his arm—I fought the urge to greet him like a long-lost cousin. He caught me out of the corner of his eye and called, “Hey, soldier,” flicking me a two-fingered salute of shared, unlikely membership. White people never knew for certain. They took us for Indian or Puerto Rican. They never looked. Blacks always knew, for the simple reason that I looked back at them.

  The second time I saw the man, he stopped. “You’re Jonah Strom.” I corrected him. “Heaven’s sake. There’s two y’all?” He was from the South, and harder to follow than even Janos Reményi. He was a bass named Wilson Hart. He’d gone to a black college in Georgia, a state I’d never even considered before, where he’d graduated in teacher training. “Only line of work I thought a black concert bass could follow.” A visiting professor had heard him sing and persuaded him to think otherwise. Wilson Hart was not yet convinced.

  I could hear, even in his speaking voice, what resonance the man had. But Wilson Hart had a dream that went beyond singing. “Tell you what I’d do, if the world was well?” He opened the portfolio he always carried under his arm and spread the cream-colored pencil-filled staffs in front of me, right there in the corridor. I sounded out the notes, notes this man had written. However derivative and dreamy, they had riches.

  He wanted to compose. It filled me with wonder, to my lasting shame. Yes, because he was a member of my mother’s race. But more because he was living, here, talking to me. I stood looking out over my own life. Composing had never occurred to me. New music was every minute streaming into this world, from every quarter. We could do more than channel it. We could write our own.

  Wilson Hart looked at me like God’s spy. “They always asking you how a black man got interested in this line?”

  “We’re mixed,” I said.

  The word came back to me, turned around in his face. “Mixed? You mean like all mixed up?” He saw me die. “That’s okay, brother. Isn’t a horse alive who’s a purebred.”

  Wilson Hart became the first friend I ever made all by myself. He’d smile from down long hallways and sit with me in crowded concert halls. “You stop crucifying me with this ‘Mr. Hart’ business, now. Mrs. Hart’s the only one I’m gonna let call me Mr. Hart, once I find her. You, Mr. Mixed, you call me Will.” When he passed me in the corridors, he’d pat his portfolio of freshly penciled music. It was our private conspiracy, this stream of new notes. You and me, Mix. They’re gonna hear our sounds, before we’re done with this place. The thrill of his singling me out to stand with him oppressed me worse than any racism.

  Will and Jonah finally met, although I was in no hurry to introduce them. They were like fur and fire. Jonah had exploded with the avant-garde, the making and unmaking of new freedom. The first time Jonah heard the Second Viennese School, he wanted to round the rabblerousers up and execute them. The second time, he just sneered. By listen three, the smoldering threat to Western civilization started to rise like its star shining in the East. Time’s arrow, for Jonah, now pointed mercilessly forward, toward total serialism or its paradoxical twin, pure chance.

  Jonah looked over Wilson Hart’s scores, singing out lines with a voice as forceful as the instruments they were written for. For that treatment alone, Will would have shown him everything he’d ever written. But at the end of a bravura sight-sing, Jonah tossed up his hands. “Will, Will! What’s with all the beauty? You’ll kill us with kindness, man. Single-handedly drag us back into the nineteenth century. What did the nineteenth century ever do for you, except wrap you up in chains?”

  I’d sit between them, waiting for the world to end. But they both loved the fight.

  “This here’s nothing about the nineteenth century,” Will said, gathering in his wounded troops. “This is your
first look at the twenty-first. Y’all just don’t know how to hear it yet.”

  “I’ve already heard it. I know all those tunes by heart. Sounds like a Copland ballet.”

  “I’d give twice my eyeteeth to write a Copland ballet. Man’s a great composer. Started out messing with that chicken-scratch music of yours. Got tired and gave it up.”

  “Copland’s okay, if you dig crowd-pleasers.”

  I prayed to Mama’s ghost to come pummel him, as she should have done so often while she was alive.

  “And here I was, thinking pleasure was what music’s all about.”

  “Look around you, man. The world’s on fire.”

  “That’s right. And we’re looking for a nice big ocean to douse it in.”

  “You study with Persichetti?”

  “Mr. Persichetti studied with Roy Harris, just like our own Mr. Schuman.”

  “But Persichetti’s gone past all that. No more recycled folk and jazz. He’s gone on to richer things. So should you. Come on, Wilson! You should be listening to Boulez. Babbitt. Dallapiccola.”

  “You think I haven’t wasted hours listening to that? If I want noise, I can stand in the middle of Times Square, get me some. If I want chance, I can play the nags. God told us to build this place up. Make it better, not tear it down and feed it to the dogs.”

  “This is building. Listen to Stockhausen. Varèse.”

  “If I want police sirens, they’re right outside my apartment every night.”

  “Don’t be a slave to melody, man.” Jonah didn’t even hear the word.

  “There’s a reason we invented melody, brother Jon. You know the best thing Varèse ever did? Teach William Grant Still to find himself. Now there’s a composer who knew how to sound. You ever ask yourself why no one plays that man’s music? Why you never even heard of a Negro composer until you came nosing around me?”

  Jonah shot me conspiratorial grins. I stood between them, band-sawed down the middle.

  Will worked on me when Jonah wasn’t around. “I’ve spent years listening to your brother’s deaf gentlemen. Nothing new down that way, Mix. Certainly not the freedom brother Jon hopes to find. You listen to me. That brother of ours gonna come running back to us, ears covered, soon as he tires of the squeaks and bangs.”

  Will showed me every new piece that came out of him—dressed-up concert cadences flirting with swing and cool, reverent gospel quotes buried in Dvorak-driven lower brass. He made me swear to him that I’d never forsake melody just because of some bad dream of progress. “Promise me something, Mix. Promise me that someday you will write down all the notes that are inside you.” It seemed a safe-enough vow. I was sure there couldn’t be more than a couple of half-note measures in there, all told.

  He had this thing about Spain. I don’t know where it came from. Sancho and the Don on horseback. Low, arid hills. Will was going to travel there as soon as he could pay for the trip. Barring Spain, Mexico, Guatemala—anyplace that sparkled after midnight and slept at the peak of the day.

  “Must have lived there once, brother Joe. In another life.” Not that he knew the first thing about the place or spoke a word of Spanish. “My people must have paid that land a little visit once. Lived there for a couple of centuries? The Spaniards are the finest Negroes north of Africa. Germans wouldn’t know what to do with this much soul except lock it up.” His hand flew up to sinning lips. “Pay me no mind, Mix! Every people have their notion of what this world’s after.”

  Wilson Hart wanted to bridge Gibraltar, to reunite Africa and Iberia, those twins separated at birth. He heard one coiled in the other, where I never could hear any relation at all. What little I learned about African music at Juilliard confirmed that it was an art apart. But Will Hart never gave up trying to get me to hear the kinship, the rhythm joining such disparate rhythms.

  I often found Will in one of the cubicles off of the library, hunched over a 1950s turntable with its stylus arm the size of a monkey’s paw, listening to Albéniz or de Falla. He grabbed me one visit and wouldn’t release me. “Just the pair of ears this piece was calling out for.” He sat me down and made me listen to an entire guitar concerto by a man named Rodrigo.

  “Well?” he said as the third movement sailed triumphantly into harbor. “What do you hear, brother Joe?”

  I heard a dusty, tonal archaism, wanting to be older than it could honestly admit to being. It flew in the face of history’s long breakdown of consonance. Its sequences were so formal, I completed them before I heard them. “It sure dances.” The best I could do.

  His face fell. He wanted me to hear some thing in particular. “What about the man who made it dance?”

  “Besides that he comes from northern North Africa?”

  “Go ahead and fun me all you want. But tell me what you know about him, now that he’s told you everything.”

  I shrugged. “I give up.”

  “Blind from the age of three. You really couldn’t hear?”

  I shook my head, reaping his disappointment.

  “Only a blind man could make this.” Will placed his right hand on his own closed portfolio. “And if God would let me make something even one-tenth as beautiful, I’d be as glad as a—”

  “Will! Don’t. Not even in jest.” I think I frightened him.

  I asked Jonah if he’d ever heard the piece. Concerto de Aranjuez. He scoffed before I could finish the title. “Total throwback. Written in 1939! Berg had been dead four years already.” As if the true trailblazers would be ahead of anyone, even in dying. “What’s that Will doing to you, man? He’s going to have you whistling to transistor radio by the time we’re out of this joint. Music and wine, Joseph. The less you know, the sweeter you heed them.”

  “What do you know about wine?”

  “Not a damn thing. But I know what I don’t like.”

  Jonah was right. Will Hart lived on the school’s suspect fringe. Juilliard still dwelled in that tiny diamond between London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin. Music meant the big Teutonic B’s, those names chiseled into the marble pediment, the old imperial dream of coherence that haunted the continent Da had fled. North American concert music—even Will’s adored Copland and Still—was here little more than a European transplant. That this country had a music—spectacularly reinventing itself every three years, the bastard of chanted hymns, spirit hollers, cabin songs, field calls and coded escape plans, funeral rowdiness gathered by way of New Orleans, gutbucketed and jugged, slipped up the river in cotton crates to Memphis and St. Louis, bent into blue intervals that power would never recognize, reconvening north, to be flung out everywhere along Chicago’s railhead as unstoppable rag, and overnight—the longest, darkest overnight of the soul in all improvised history—birthing jazz and its countless half-breed descendants, a whole glittering Savoy ballroom full of offspring scatting and scattering everywhere, dancing the hooves off anything whiteness ever made, American, American, for whatever that meant, a music that had taken over the world while the classical masters were looking the other way—had not yet dawned on these Europe-revering halls.

  Jonah’s friends were white, and my friends, aside from Will, were Jonah’s. Not that my brother sought white friends out. He didn’t have to. Dr. Suzuki’s movement was just ten years old; several years would pass before the Asian tsunami hit the States. The handful of Middle Eastern students there had come by way of England and France. Juilliard’s cosmopolitan sea was still more or less a restricted swimming hole.

  My brother hung out at Sammy’s, a coffee shop just north of the school. Jonah chose the venue, knowing, as his new friends didn’t, where he could sit with his buddies and still get served. The dive had a state-of-the-art Seeburg jukebox, its little claw grabbing the vertical records and slapping them down for a nickel a play. The highbrow student singers claimed to hate the thing, even while guzzling down all the pop culture it served up. After practice hours, half a chorale would hole up at Sammy’s, carrying on in a back booth. Jonah held forth at the singer-infes
ted table, and his friends would always squeeze out a little room for his kid brother.

  At Sammy’s, the angelic performers sat for hours playing some variation of the musical ratings game. Who could hit the highest highs? Whose lows were the richest? Who had the cleanest passage points? It was worse than the TV quiz shows they all watched in secret, and just as rigged. The rating judges were never so blatant as to rank one another by number, and they’d only rate singers who weren’t present. But in the constant pegging and scoring, each figured out his own place in the pecking pyramid.

  The group’s clown was a deadly eared baritone named Brian O’Malley. With a few tremulous semiquavers, he’d have the others rolling on the linoleum. He could imitate anything, bass through coloratura, without ever needing to tell anyone whom he was mocking. His listeners laughed along, even knowing they’d be next as soon as they were out of earshot. Hands clasped primly in front of his chest, Brian launched into a nightmarish Don Carlos or Lucrezia Borgia, taking a friend’s familiar, small vocal blemish and magnifying it to horrific scale. Afterward, we’d never hear the hapless target the same way again.

  O’Malley’s gift mystified me. I asked Jonah one night, from the relative safety of 116th Street. “I don’t get it. If he can reproduce anybody, down to the pimples, why …”

  Jonah laughed. “Why can’t he make a voice of his own?” Alone among Juilliard voice students, O’Malley’s voice was featureless beyond parody. “He’s making himself as small a target as possible. He’ll have a career, you know. He’d make a great Fra Melitone. Or a Don Pasquale kind of thing.”

  “Not for the voice,” I said, horrified.

  “Of course not.”

  Jonah could sit for hours and listen to the clique’s ranking games. Their need to evaluate was every bit as great as their need for music. For these athletes in training, the two things were equivalent. Song as competition: fastest, highest, hardest—the soul’s Olympics. Hearing them made me want to lock myself into a practice room and refuse to come out until I’d tamed some snarling Rachmaninoff. But I stuck close to my brother among his friends, the two of us swinging together in the deadly breeze. Jonah picked up their idiom like a native speaker. “Haynes’s middle five notes are just about perfect,” or “Thomas has a girl in every portamento.” His verdicts always had an innocent wonder to them. He never sounded like he was slandering anyone.