The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  Will laughed out loud as we fell into line. “Knew you could, brother Joe. Knew you had it in you.” So long as he didn’t expect me to chat back, we were in business. We got through the stray modulations, then started to head back to home and the theme’s recap. Will flicked his head and said, “Here we go, now, Mix.” Before I knew what was happening, his fingers dropped into bottomless places. They untied the long, mournful melody and lifted out the contents hidden inside.

  I saw the moves and heard each sound he built: clusters that weren’t in the score, yet might have been, in some world without a Mediterranean. The core of Will’s chords came from Rodrigo. Yet the blind romantic could never have written them. The line that Will unrolled shared its parent melody, but his hands bent the slow troubadour tune into another arc, away from Iberia, down old, forced Atlantic crossings. He challenged that fake antique tune, like some unacknowledged half brother come knocking on your front door one afternoon wearing your nose, your jaw, your eyes. You don’t know me, but … Mixed. All mixed up. Wasn’t a horse alive with a clean pedigree.

  My fingers were clubs. I heard each thing Will did before he did it. But I tagged along behind each change, getting there only after Will had already left me in his harmonic wake. I knew the shape of the music he made. You couldn’t live in this country and not breathe it. But I’d never learned the rules, the laws of freedom that kept these improvisations aloft, just out of reach of a clean conservatory death.

  I felt myself tracing pitiful clichés. My left hand reached out for the safe cartoon, no closer to Will’s outpouring than a minstrel show to a spiritual. He cracked Iberia open and freed every Moor who had ever strayed into it. I bobbed in the Strait of Gibraltar, looking for a sandbar or a splinter of driftwood. The clash of his intervals traced dark, intricate places. Mine were just gratuitous dissonances. Mistakes.

  Will chuckled at me over his improvised waves. “Witness? Can’t I get a witness here?” He figured I’d ease in after a few bars. When I didn’t, he went grim. He slowed, surprised. His disappointment made it harder for me to find the elusive groove.

  I gathered myself and dove forward, drawing on every scrap of theory I’d ever squirreled away. I thought my way into the modulations. For a few phrases, I came alive. Will settled into a sequence I grasped, and I quit my little cheater’s stagger-syncopated tagalong and headed out to meet him in the open seas. I pegged his wanderings and we were there together, skimming along in concert a few feet above the swells. I don’t know how long we flew along together—maybe no more than a dozen bars. But we were really there. A rumble in the back of Will’s throat opened up alongside us. Over the blanketing sadness of notes, he laughed a muffled, chamois laugh. “You got it, Mix. Go on, tell me!”

  Will nudged me on, moving me out of sight of shoreline, into the coldest currents. His modulations held back, waiting for me to take over. He handed me the rudder. Like that novice pilot who has just shot through the most dangerous shoals and now faces only openness in all directions, I turned from exhilaration into panic. I hung there, treading water, until Will took over again. But he wasn’t done with me yet. He eased out on the line, and I heard, in a burst of thirty-second notes, just how far he’d taken in the boundaries, to keep me alive. Snippets of familiar songs bubbled up to the surface of his bouillabaisse, hints of anthems I recognized by reflex, tunes I knew everything about except for their names. He took us on a giant-step, lightning tour of subterranean America, the rivers just now percolating up into the main stream—the music I’d shied away from all my life, crossing the street to avoid the threat of its oncoming silhouette.

  Now and then, Aranjuez itself poked back through his inventions and struggled for sunlight. Everything we’d done—the free-form quotes, the random wandering—was just a huge unlimbering of the harmonic journey hidden in that original material. But the Spain we made was rocked by that same Civil War that Rodrigo had fled to write his piece. Will stacked up the chords, widening his palette of surprise intervals. He was sure I could free myself, find my way forward into a new song by thinking myself back, back to forebears who’d discovered the secret of this flight. Will cut me a path, note by note, sure I could get there with him. His faith in me felt worse than death.

  I stumbled and fell back on cheap banalities, slopping up wallpaper sounds like a hack in a Bourbon Street bar, grinding out twelve-bar seventh chords to please the tourists. Every shred of technique I’d ever mastered held me shackled to the block. I was a drain on him. He could do more with his two hands than the two of us could do with four. I fell back on skeletal fills. My riffs thinned out. I pulled back into a long diminuendo and stopped.

  Will finished out solo, and with an ingenuity even greater than he’d shown on the voyage out, he brought the key back to tonic and led his fingers home to Aranjuez. He looked at me. “You can’t make it go, on its own? You need it out there in front of you, on the page?” He meant to be kind, but his every word made things worse. My face went hot. I couldn’t look at him. “Don’t make no difference, brother Joe. Some folks need the notes. Other folks don’t even care what the notes are called.”

  He stirred the keys again. The chords were fading comments, trickles under his fingers, his latest reflections on the matter.

  I wanted to make him stop. “Where did you learn to do that?”

  Will smiled, as much at his hands as at me. His fingers crawled over the keys like puppies in a giveaway wicker basket. He was as amazed by their freedom as anyone. “Around, Mix. Same place you’re gonna learn it.”

  Same place I could have. Should have.

  He let out a train of staccato block chords, a parody of the opening of the Waldstein, my current nemesis. Will Hart was surprised at me. I’d lost my inheritance. If I could do everything Beethoven wanted of me, I ought to be able to please myself. I didn’t even know what such a, thing might mean. But I could still hear the sounds he’d just unleashed, rolling in my ears, humbling the material they came from. “Why don’t you … write music like that?”

  He stopped and stared. “What you think we two just did?”

  “I mean, write it down. Compose it, instead of … I mean, not instead of … Along with?” His academic, written-out music felt almost wilted and window-boxed, compared to the music he’d just grown out of his head. If a person could do what he’d just done, launch raw possibility out of the empty air, why would he waste a minute writing down well-behaved conservatory music that stood little chance of being played even once?

  “Some songs are for writing down. Some songs are for freeing from writing.”

  “What you just made? That was better than the stuff you made it from.”

  He just grimaced at the blasphemy. Nobody was better than that blind Spaniard. He scooted through another elaborate sequence of chords that took me a moment to recognize as a hotted-up, cooled-out circle of fifths. He lifted his hands and offered me the keyboard. I brought my claws toward the keys, knowing, before I closed with them, that it was no good. There was nothing in my digits but Lyric Pieces. Nineteenth-century northern Europe’s airbrushed studio portrait.

  “I can’t.” He’d caught me out. Exposed me. My hands fell to the keys but did not press them.

  His left hand grabbed my neck as if it were the root of his next wild chord. “That’s okay, brother Joe. Let every soul praise God in his own fashion.”

  I jerked at the words. But I was old enough, now, not to ask where he’d learned them. He’d picked them up the same place my mother had: around.

  I set aside a few minutes each day, at the end of my practice, when further repetition of the day’s passage would do more harm than good. Ten minutes—a prayer to myself, an exercise in remembering how Wilson Hart made music on the fly, out of emptiness. My fingers began to turn without any notes to propel them. But the hardest printed music came easier for me than the simplest indigo riff.

  I told Jonah. “You have to hear Will Hart improvise. Out of this world.” My words damned my friend
with understatement. Something in me was protecting both men, hiding out where neither could ask anything more of me.

  “Not surprised. How come he doesn’t hang out with the jazzers?”

  Jonah couldn’t have heard, then, even if he had come listen. His own musical sea change preoccupied him. He came to me one day, swollen with nonchalance. “They’re setting up lessons for next term. William Schuman wants me to study with Roberto Agnese. Schuman. The president of the school, Mule. I didn’t think he knew undergraduates even existed.”

  Agnese, old workhorse tenor, was among the most venerable of the vocal arts faculty. “That’s fantastic, Jonah. You’re on Easy Street.” I had no idea what borough I thought that street ran through.

  “Small problem, honorable baby brother. Number-one son also desired as student by Mr. Peter Grau.” Grau, the Met star, who never took more than a few of the most promising graduates.

  “You’re joking. How?”

  “He came and asked me!” The punch line to a dirty joke. We giggled at the inanity, our old conspiracy of two. “He must imagine I’m still teachable!” My brother, who at seventeen, knew more than he ever afterward would.

  “Jesus. What are you going to do?”

  “What the hell can I do? It’s not like I can say no to either one.”

  “You’re going to study with them both?”

  Jonah gave a doomed stage cackle.

  He spent a season in hell. He took a lesson each week from each great man, putting in twice the hours, struggling to remember which teacher had asked for what. He kept each one in the dark about his rival. The whole thing played out like some sordid French farce, Jonah dashing from one studio to the other, hiding the evidence, changing his sound depending on the day, swearing fidelity to two contrary approaches. “I’m fine, Mule. Just gotta make it until the end of term. Few more weeks. Then I’ll figure something out.”

  “No one can keep this up, Jonah. You’ll break down.”

  He glowed. “You think? A nice sanitarium on the top of some snowy mountain?”

  His two mentors were each other’s spiritual opposites. Agnese was all touch and feel, the bodily mechanics of sound, his hands perpetually sculpting my brother’s jaw, practically moving his lips, his Neapolitan mass forever exploding in vast semaphores of grief or ecstasy. “The guy squeezes my gut while I’m singing. ‘Come, Strom. Everything comes from low down inside you.’ Pervert. Like I’m in basic training or something.”

  Grau, at his antilessons, made the body disappear in a cloud of thought. He’d never dream of touching Jonah. He stood as far away as his studio allowed, speaking in a motionless haze. “Feel your head backward and up. No! Do not push. Think it so. Think the larynx down. Do not move it! Do not use the muscles. The muscles must vanish. You must become a ghost to yourself, full of the power of not doing.”

  Musicians speak of bliss, but that’s just to throw the uninitiated off the scent. There is no bliss; there is only control. All the orphic gymnastics that each coach demanded of Jonah pushed down into his nervous system, hitched to the traces of every emotion Jonah had ever felt. Both coaches believed that a given muscle set was the emotion that produced it. The symbol produced the thing, and the ability to reverse create, by muscle movement, the full spectrum of human feeling represented the ultimate artistic power.

  His mentors differed violently over how to produce this power. Agnese ran about the studio, flapping his massive wings, shouting, “Move your sound. Above the upper lip. Out in front of the teeth. Put the brain away. Let the pitch correct the vowel. Ah, eh, ee, oh, oo. We must hear joy! Love! Desolation! Ma-je-sty!” Grau stood still, a pillar of transcendence, musing. “Draw in your breath with your thighs. Drop as you rise. Sing on the air, not with it. Conceive the sound before you make it. Start your sound before your throat, in your mind!”

  Roberto Agnese gave Jonah his first crack at reading a famous role. He toyed with the experiment, settling on Donizetti’s Elixir of Love—the poor, swarthy Nemorino, in particular the devastating cavatina, that one fat, famous, secret tear stealing down the lead’s cheek in the dark. Jonah took a stab at the part, penciling up his expensive foreign edition with articulations.

  Then Peter Grau hit upon assigning him the same role. Jonah came to me in a panic. “There is a Supreme Being, Joey. And He’s after my mulatto ass!”

  He didn’t have the cash to spare for a second copy of the music. So each week before each lesson, he’d erase every pencil mark given him by the one teacher and replace them with the carefully archived marks of the other, down to the slightest scribble. He was like a plagiarist, constantly tripping up, begging to be caught. The labor was herculean. Every recopying took him the better part of a night.

  Each teacher’s “Furtive Tear” was the other’s opposite. Agnese wanted it wet, wide, and scooping. Grau wanted it dry as the winter Sahara. Agnese told Jonah to wallop the first note of each phrase and swoop down a fifth to nab the rest of the line in his talons. Grau had him clamp on the attack, then swell from nothing. The Italian wanted the sorrow of all mankind. The German wanted a stoic rejection of human absurdity. Jonah just wanted to escape alive.

  They had him going like Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve, the previous year’s multiple-personality Oscar winner. Jonah couldn’t remember who’d ordered what. He got so he could switch interpretations in midnote, given the tiniest tremor in his current teacher’s eyebrow. Then one week, Mr. Grau leaned down to examine my brother’s penciled articulations. “What’s this? Sostenuto, here? Surely I told you no such thing.”

  Jonah mumbled something about a friend’s joke, and fell to furious erasing.

  “Who would dream of sostenuto at such a moment?”

  Jonah shook his head, appalled at such an outrage.

  “You surely don’t think that’s the way to do these lines?”

  Jonah looked scandalized.

  “Well, why not. Go ahead and try it that way.”

  Nothing if not limber, my brother did, trying to make it sound as if he hadn’t rehearsed it that way, every other session, for the last three weeks.

  “Hmm.” Grau scowled. “Not uninteresting.”

  When Agnese stopped him at the same passage and told him—just a crazy whim—to try it staccato, Jonah knew the gigue was up. For a week, both of his teachers raked him with antiphonal silence. My brother apologized to each.

  Grau wagged his head. “Whom did you imagine you were fooling?”

  Agnese chuckled. “You think this stereophonic ‘Furtive Tear’ was what you Americans call a coincidence?”

  My brother didn’t inquire how long they’d seen through his sham. But, as abjectly as possible, he did ask, “Why?”

  “Consider it your education in the politics of performance,” Grau said. “Believe us: From here on out, such things will cause you far more tears than any passage in Donizetti.”

  So ended my brother’s attempt to two-time the school’s finest. Jonah’s escapade briefly made him the conservatory’s Brando. Outside the school, the cranked-up youth uprising geared up to break open the world. But inside our soundproof practice rooms, tempo violations were still the worst imaginable crime. We simply had no idea where we lived. The Sammy’s crowd traded murky tales of reefer and horse, potent substances that by all accounts made Village jazz musicians schizophrenic and turned the Harlem underclass into killers. They worried the question for hours. “Say it made you play better for a while, and then it killed you. Would you take it, for your art?”

  Sex was the much closer transgression. Rumors of hand jobs, even mouth jobs performed in darkened practice rooms for standing-room-only recipients abounded. One slim blond ingenue flutist—everyone’s fetish—had to leave school under circumstances ripe with inventive explanation. The hint of vice filled the halls, a broken scent bottle no amount of ammonia could scrub out. My brother’s friends argued forever about which female vocal students, with their various techniques, would best serve their needs—the fast
, high passage-workers, the deep embouchures … We were such children as this country will never produce again. Long past the age when our old Hamilton Heights torturers were being sent off to their first prison terms, Jonah and I held on to a naivete we mistook for sin. But when the time for real sinning finally came, we had all the advantage of the late starter.

  With the settling of his voice, Jonah landed most of the plum parts he set himself after. Two years into the bachelor’s, he was singing with graduate productions. If the part called for weightless precision, all pretense of democratic auditions broke down. He had a flair for the comic—the eighteenth-century page boy whose ditsiness is surpassed only by his heartbreaking zeal. He sang a Bach Evangelist that had half the agnostics in the house ready to convert, at least for an evening. He learned how to act. By nineteen, he’d mastered that devastating sucker punch, the one that lulled audiences into thinking they were watching some other poor bastard’s life, only to zap them at the flick of an invisible switch into realizing just whose story this was.

  He performed hungrily. He’d sing anything written since the war. He had his pick of premieres, as few other students wanted to kill themselves learning new, extended techniques for a one-shot deal. But he’d also sing little bits of French fluff he could have ripped through at age six. Up on Claremont, he sang everything from Celtic folk songs to Russian liturgical monody, with Sturm und Drang, buffa, and High Renaissance hankie flirtations littered along the way. He couldn’t distinguish between a funeral mass and a flippant encore. He sang every tune as if it were his swan song. He could make stones weep and guiltless animals die of shame: the Orpheus that Peri, Monteverdi, Glück, Offenbach, Krenek, and Auric had in mind.