History of Art

by Margaret Luongo

  6. Which students give up on music, and how long will it take them (in months) to conclude that they should quit?

  7. Which students become parents who will NOT push their children into music?

  8. How many students will answer questions about their musical training with rueful good humor?

  9. Which students go on to become teachers who are thoroughly bored by their students?

  10. How many students become music directors for their parish?

  11. Do any of the students drop out? Which ones? Why?

  12. Which student develops an intense nonsexual relationship with an older mentor, moving into her Manhattan apartment and spending a lifetime composing on her piano and traveling to Greece with her every summer of their life together?

  13. Which student realizes, in his late forties, that he is gay and weeps for his effaced sexuality?

  14. Which students, if any, go into politics?

  15. Which, if any, become Republicans?

  16. Which, if any, undergo gender reassignment?

  17. In their spare time, two students are part of a string quartet that plays only works by John Cage. One takes particular pleasure in the vocal parts. The other wonders why anyone comes to their performances. He feels that he and the audience are frauds and somehow the fact that they perpetrate this sham together makes life more bearable. Identify the students.

  18. Which students can’t locate the source of their misery?

  19. Which students become university employees?

  III. Answer Key

  1. Six students make a living at making music, twenty years after earning their degree: G and H as full-time orchestra members; I as a college professor; E as an assistant band director; A as a church music director; and C as a composer of popular music and lyrics. The nationally acclaimed institution takes few risks on the students to whom it grants admission.

  2. Four of the ten become nationally acclaimed: I, the very smart asshole, for his organized sound projects in new media; C, the insecure and fiercely competitive perfectionist, for his popular music and lyrics; H, the well-adjusted genius, who has become principal violinist for a major city’s orchestra; and B, the naturally gifted singer for whom music is an uncomplicated joy, for her power in local politics, which has galvanized grassroots movements across the country.

  3. None of the students has an uncomplicated relationship to music, with the possible exception of the vibrant and red-headed F. She most enjoys dressing up as David Bowie (Ziggy Stardust era) and fronting a Bowie cover band. This pleasure allows her to negotiate the unresolved feelings she has about other parts of her life. In other words, her musical activity allows her to keep living, which, owing to momentum and a certain kind of inertia, isn’t as complicated as it sounds.

  4. C has written jingles for television commercials. He enjoyed the nonsense rules imposed by the marketing people about demographics and “vibe.” The work had nothing to do with him—it was simply a puzzle to solve as brilliantly as possible. One summer day during his one-year tenure as a ball-of-fire jingle writer, he woke up in a foam of white sheets, Big Sur blue blazing through the skylight, and he was finished with commercial writing, or this type, anyway.

  5. Students A and F suffer breakdowns. Everybody saw F’s breakdown coming and thought it heroic the way she put it off so long. During this brief “rest,” as she called it on the telephone with her mother—“I’m resting a few bars, Mother. I’ll jump in when it comes round again”—she wraps herself in thrift-store sweaters and experiments with macaroni-­and-cheese recipes, trading one cheese for another, trying different herbs, noodles, and toppings: breadcrumbs, store-bought and homemade; cornflakes; panko; tempura kelp. F nurtures herself with music, too: Carole King, Mahler, Varése, Bowie. Mostly, she stares off into space. Her two friends check on her. What brings her out of her funk? Not the art therapy, not the individual or group counseling, but a playwright friend of her brother’s. He leaves a shy message on her ­answering machine: Would she read a part in his new play, the part of a waif-muse with supreme empathic skills? Intrigued by the idea of being supremely anything, F gets off the couch. She knows something about feeling what others feel, having practiced a perversion of empathy with the alcoholics in her life.

  The naturally gifted A loses it quietly, by himself. Anyone with eyes could have seen it coming. He has the best kind of breakdown: job quit, he drives to San Francisco, meets some nice young men, remembers who he is, and drives back East after a year’s exploration of the flesh and grins of beautiful youngsters who vibrate with music and drugs. As the sun helps the body make and store vitamin D, so does this experience help A to make and store some unidentified substance that sustains him for a while.

  6. Student D gives up on music entirely, toward the end of her junior year—about twenty-eight months after accepting admission to the nationally acclaimed school of music. She does enough to graduate. She marries, has children, and becomes an excellent conductor of household affairs. The children understand to do things her way, that it gives their mother great pleasure to see everything just so. Her husband knows his prescribed area of performance. He dreads the time—coming soon—when the children will prefer to pursue their own pleasures, rather than their mother’s. Already the youngest intentionally loses the scarves D wraps her in before school. After the children, before middle age really sets in, D will have some work done to fix the one area of her life that still does not meet her standards.

  7. H is the only graduate who will push his children into music. They are naturally gifted, he reasons, and he can teach them from an early age. By the time they reach adolescence, he’ll know whether they have the passion and discipline necessary to sustain a lifetime of intense focus. He will allow them to play sports, and in that way—via a foul tip, an elbow to the face, or some other mishap—the decision might be made for them. He imagines himself coaching, but he doesn’t think he can stand occupying the sidelines. Instead, he considers the old-man league, exhausting his body until it aches, appearing in the kitchen, muddy, muscles wrung to quivering. But of course he can do no such thing; he supports his family through his job with the major city’s symphony orchestra, and he cannot risk injury. Most mornings he rises early and runs alone—through the woods near his house, on the trails slick and fragrant with rust-colored pine needles, or in the neighborhood, rustling through fallen leaves. He imagines himself diving to make a play, plowing through a defender, swinging a bat, feeling the force of contact in his bones.

  8. Only C and D will make jokes about their musical training, and they will make exactly the same kind of jokes, along the lines of “Well, they tried their best to teach me, but—” After his enormous success, C stops making these remarks. To continue would be disingenuous. D will remain a lifelong yukster on the subject of her aborted musical aspirations, it being her fault and no one else’s. Every year, she writes a check to the nationally acclaimed music school’s scholarship fund. In lieu of her alumna update, she pens a smiley face on the memo line of the check.

  9. At different points in their lives, eight of the ten students find themselves teachers bored by their students or by teaching. Some work through the feeling and keep teaching; others run from the task, the way healthy animals flee the carcass of a fallen member of its species.

  10. One student—A—becomes Music Director for his parish. He prides himself on providing excellent music for Mass, weddings, and funerals. No other parish has such a good liturgical program; in fact, A has been wooed by monsignors and bishops, all eager to procure his talents for their diocese. At home, he tells his partner, “The Bishop tried to pick me up again. Apparently, I am irresistible.” His partner glances up from the New York Review of Books. “You’re being cruised by Christ. Don’t you think that’s a little weird?” A thinks about it, sits on the arm of the sofa where his lover reads, and says, “I take it where I can get it.”

  11. None of the students drop out, but J flunks out after his first year
. I, who had just started to notice J, feels humbled for a moment, then angry all over again, though he can’t say why. He only knows that he works harder; he doesn’t ask himself any questions other than, “Am I working hard enough?” He attends every class, reads professional journals, practices in the practice rooms, haunts the music library when he finds himself with extra time, and keeps up with everything new while his professors teach him centuries of music history. Many years after graduation, he considers trying to find J, then thinks better of it.

  12. C, though wildly successful, is still an insecure perfectionist. He does not know what he has done to deserve the unconditional devotion of his mentor. He recalls something his mother said while exhaling smoke from her long brown cigarette, somewhere in the neighborhood of her fourth and fifth cocktails: “The rocks in his head fit the holes in hers.” This in response to another situation in another time, but he thinks it apt now, and he doesn’t find it harsh or unkind. Rocks, holes—all that matters is the fit—and the outcome: good music, professional respect, material wealth, contentedness. His success and his enjoyment of it stem, in part, from his ability to create puzzles challenging enough for him to enjoy solving. His mentor delights in these games, and she waits to be amazed by what C produces, which spurs him on.

  C still takes a dim view of eating, so she prepares meals so suited to his palate that he can’t resist them, and these in very small portions that simultaneously satisfy and create appetite. C knows his mentor has bested him in this arena. How clever of her to create something so desirable, in such limited quantities. He thinks once, watching her in the kitchen—slim, blonde, in her vintage pedal-pushers—that someone should have sex with her. Later, at dinner, he clears his throat between sips of chardonnay and suggests as much. A tiny forkful of risotto enters her mouth; she chews, swallows, sips from her wine glass. “It’s not that I’m short-circuited,” she says, and he notices how tiny she is, how little of her there actually is. “This,” she says, waving her fork in a tiny circle at herself, “is a conservation project.” The sun blazes in, hot on C’s cheek, and he has never felt so warm and content.

  13. For many years, A feigned indifference to sex so that he could avoid sleeping with men. Through the kindness and patience of an extremely attractive man, who also happens to possess a lovely tenor, A has finally found himself in a steady intimate relationship. “We’ll make up for lost time,” his partner tells him when A bemoans all the youthful sex he missed. “You probably wouldn’t have liked it anyway,” his friend tells him, stroking his forearm.

  14. B realizes that though she is gifted, she is unwilling to work as hard as she would need to in order to become exceptional, if that is even possible, and she suspects it is not. She is willing to work hard enough to teach at the primary or secondary level, but a brief stint as a junior counselor at a music camp leads her to the conclusion that this, to her, would be torture. Meanwhile, back home, her neighbors lose their jobs, their homes. At her parents’ kitchen table, she hears about the teenagers’ wages her neighbors earn at factory jobs in the new economy—people raising families, making less than she did scooping ice cream during summer vacations. Loading up on history and political science, she finishes her degree and canvasses for local politicians, working into the early-morning hours at campaign headquarters, knocking on doors all weekend, rallying support. In the night, she wakes to find her fingers moving across the phantom neck of her guitar. Years later, while working late at the statehouse or drafting policy on a commuter flight, she’ll regard the slimness of her fingers and remember their pressure on the strings; the smell of sandalwood comes back to her. She pushes herself harder, hallucinating from fatigue on boring stretches of road between campaign stops; bars of music and teleprompter text float amid the telephone wires and billboards. She hums what she thinks she sees before her and digs in her purse for something to keep her awake.

  15. D marries a Republican and votes Republican, though she maintains her registration as a Democrat. Her husband does not know she votes Republican; he assumes she is a bleeding-heart liberal, and that is one of the things he loves about her.

  16. None of the students undergoes gender reassignment, though F considers herself a cross-dresser. She lives in a college town on the side of a mountain in Tennessee, where people are gracious and appreciative of her gifts. They don’t mind her turbulent bouts of inflamed fashion. They know to be extra kind, gentle, and appreciative as her hair color changes, heels rise and fall, sequins come and go. The extra kindness manifests itself in no outward change in their behavior toward her.

  17. G, the modestly gifted student who is even-tempered and hardworking, neither lazy nor spiteful, weird nor crazy, plays cello in a quartet specializing in the works of John Cage. H, the well-adjusted genius, plays violin. Both are also members of a major city’s orchestra. H is, as principal violinist, the boss of G. G approves; so does H. G feels perfectly secure, which is why H is attracted to her. She is not intimidated by his talent, so he pursues her. H enjoys the look of impish delight on G’s face during their performances of the experimental work. H has no idea what the other musicians will do, and that keeps him coming back. It’s fun for him, but he can’t see how it could be much fun for the audience. Sometimes he ventures a sideways glance at the patrons and he sees looks of delight and surprise—and blank expressions, too.

  18. J is utterly blind to the source of his misery. As a result he lashes out, not even having the sense or good grace to channel his anger into wry self-deprecation, which would make him much easier to take. He fails to grasp the utility of sublimation. Every year, he petitions the nationally acclaimed school of music to award him a degree, based on his “real-world” experience, most of which has nothing to do with music.

  D, on the other hand, knows the precise nature of her problem: It’s her cowardice. She does not want anyone to see her trying and failing—and she is sure she would fail. Even if she could get past her fear of shame, if she cannot have things as she pictures them, she does not want them.

  19. E, F, and I become university employees.

  E becomes assistant director of the marching band at a mid-sized midwestern university. She loves her work, loves how hard the kids work. They arrive during summer break, weeks before the other students, and they practice hours every day during the school year, fitting in homework during the times when the other kids play video games, get drunk, or fix their hair and makeup before going out to get drunk. Sometimes, when E is poised on the grandstand at practice, her arms raised, a vision appears before her: a mound of used reeds, discarded mouthpieces, dented mutes, bent stem-cleaners—decades of band garbage, spit-slick and breath-moistened, that she herself has plucked from the practice field year after year, touched with her bare hands. Other times the phantom odor of well-worn band uniforms fills her nose—B.O. so deeply hormonal that the stink clings to the inside of E’s van weeks after she’s delivered the uniforms to the dry cleaner, giving E the experience of piloting a crotch or an armpit down the road, day after day. But on the grandstand, E does not hesitate. She cannot keep the students waiting in the blazing sun with their heavy instruments. Later, she does not wonder about the meaning of these phantasms.

  F becomes a counselor at a university in the South where students still refer to northerners as “Yankees”—with irony, of course. The students could not be more polite and well-mannered. In her spare time, she plays music with some of the faculty and students. Because the students graduate in an orderly manner, they are always coming and going from F’s life. She becomes attached to them, which she knows is sad. Her best friend is a gay playwright-in-residence who weeps for the lack of gay men on the mountainside where they work. They host rip-roaring costume parties, to which students and their parents are invited. F thinks how phony is the divide between teacher and student, adult and—what? Quasi-adult? The students are simply people with less experience and knowledge, though in many cases that is arguable. She knows that some of them know
things she doesn’t, and though they are younger, they have skills and experience beyond her. She tries to get to know them as individuals with their own peculiar interests and desires. After many years, she has yet to meet a truly boring student. They seem vanilla on the outside, with their brand-correct clothing and sunglasses and their fit physiques, but she knows that on the inside she will find what makes each of them unique. These excavation projects excite her, and she hoards the strange details of their lives, for no particular use but her own wonderment. In fact, she finds that the duller the student’s exterior, the more faceted and sparkling the interior. Sometimes the blander ones are buried so far inside themselves their very appearance in her office exhausts her. They have no idea what’s inside them. They move through their days like scared animals responding to stimuli.

  She takes them on adventures. Unusual activities in unfamiliar settings disarm them; they talk, and they reveal themselves to themselves—and to her—without realizing it. Rock climbing for the timid; nursing orphaned wildlife for jocks; whitewater rafting for the repressed; thrift-store shopping for the fastidious; headstone rubbing for the overly ambitious. She remembers one student in particular, always impeccably groomed: peach picking with this one, over summer break; the student refused to meet her parents on the island of their habitual summering, so F and the young woman plucked just-ripe peaches and made pies with intricate cutouts and latticework. While rolling dough in F’s elegantly unremodeled and un-air-conditioned kitchen, the young woman recalled sitting by her baby sister’s crib each night, watching the child breathe. She’d fall asleep on the floor, night after night, until her parents sent her to boarding school. Now her sister attends school in Paris. The two meet in Europe for holidays, spurning their parents; their parents pay for the trips, including a suite in a five-star hotel, though the sisters sleep in the same bed. F glanced from time to time at the girl’s face as she told her story, noting the color creeping into her cheeks, her hair going lank around her face from the heat and steaming pots of peaches. “What should we do with all this pie?” F asked. “Give it away,” the girl said, “to whoever wants some.”