Grantville Gazette, Volume 68

by Bjorn Hasseler

  Johann shook his head. "Does anyone in Grantville do it now?"

  She shrugged again. "There are a few folks doing it. But I've got the one I wanted, so I haven't been thinking about it much." Staci pivoted and put her foot on the floor. "Have a seat…and who's that with you?"

  Johann sat down and slid over. "My brothers, Christoph and Heinrich."

  "Hi, guys," Staci said with a smile. "Sit down…I think there's room."

  The two brothers nodded at Staci and returned her smile. Christoph took the end of the bench by Johann, and Heinrich sat on the other side of the table by Casey.

  "Are you guys into music, too?" Casey asked.

  All three of the brothers laughed. "We are Bachs," Christoph said. "Of course we are , , , how did you say it…'into music.' "

  "There are Bachs scattered all through Thuringia," Johann continued. "And everywhere you find us, we are mostly involved with music. There may be one or two who aren't, but I do not know of them if there are."

  "Wow," Staci said. "So you could make an all-Bach orchestra if you were all in one place."

  "And a choir as well," Heinrich said with a grin.

  "That's cool," Casey said. "My mom would have been thrilled at that kind of thing. So, Johann, did you ever figure out if you are related to Johann Sebastian Bach?"

  At that moment, Marla stood and moved to the piano that stood against one wall of the tavern, followed by Franz and her friends. Johann quickly pointed to himself, "Great-uncle," to Heinrich, "Great-uncle," to Christoph, "Grandfather. Later."

  Casey and Staci both nodded, and everyone turned their eyes to where the musicians were assembling.

  "Good evening, everyone," Marla announced. The room was mostly full by now, and there was a rumbled response of various forms of greetings. "Glad you're here," she continued. "We're going to have some fun tonight, so hang on and let's get started." With that, she sat down on the piano bench and placed her hands on the keys.

  "Play some soul music, sistuh," a voice drawled from the back of the room.

  Marla spun on the bench with a surprised look, which was replaced by perhaps the biggest grin Johann had ever seen. "Nissa? Nissa Pritchard, is that you?"

  "Ain't nobody else, child," came the response in a resonant voice that came from a Moorish woman dressed in up-timer clothing who made her way through the crowd.

  Marla jumped to her feet and met the other woman at the edge of the front table line. They embraced in a strong hug, then stood back. The other woman's grin was as large as Marla's, and her white teeth shown in the midst of her dark face. Johann judged her to be of rather mature years—there were wrinkles on her face—but as with many of the up-timers, he hesitated to judge her by down-timers’ standards. Best he could do was guess that she was over forty. Her face was strong, and that combined with her short curly kinky hair gave her an exotic appearance for the middle of Germany. Everyone knew of Dr. Nichols and his daughter Sharon who had come back with Grantville in the Ring of Fire, but this was the first that Johann had heard that there had been anyone else of their race among the up-timers.

  "It's good to see you, Nissa," Marla said. "I've missed seeing you."

  "That goes both ways, you know," the older woman said with a laugh.

  "What are you doing here, anyway?"

  "Oh, Mayor Gericke brought me and Claude and a couple of the other power plant team guys up here to talk about building a big power plant in Magdeburg."

  "Cool." Marla's eyebrows popped up, and her eyes gave an additional gleam. "Say, did you bring that mouth harp with you?"

  Nissa laughed and slipped a hand into an inside jacket pocket to bring out something that shone in the lamplight with a brassy golden gleam. "Now would I be anywhere without this?"

  "Great!" Marla enthused. She grabbed Nissa by the arm and dragged her over by the piano, where she looked around at Franz and the other musicians. "Sorry, boys, there's been a change in plans." She dropped onto the bench, and looked out at the room with another big grin. "Okay, folks, hold onto your hats. This is going to be like nothing you've heard before. Tonight we're going to be doing some Southern music."

  Johann was confused. Southern music? Swiss? Venetian? Roman? What did she mean?

  Casey turned back to the brothers and murmured, "Southern up-timer music. It's good, but it's probably pretty different from what you're used to."

  Marla played a few dissonant sounding chords, then looked up at Nissa. "What key are you doing Steamroller Blues in this month?"

  Those white teeth flashed again in Nissa's dark face. "Key of G sounds good to me."

  What followed was an astonishing potpourri of some of the most unusual music Johann had ever heard. He was dumbfounded from beginning to end; when he looked at his brothers, they seemed to be even more astonished than he was.

  It was one song after another, frequently with no breaks at all between them as Marla would play two or three transition chords to move from one to another. And they were all music that just gripped him, even as he struggled to assimilate what he was hearing. The rhythms were frequently so syncopated that he had trouble feeling the beat. The harmonies were frequently so dissonant that at times he almost lost the key feeling. Yet there was a power to the music, whether fast or slow, that just reached out and transfixed him.

  Song followed song: Steamroller Blues, Crossroad Blues, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Rockin' Chair Blues, Down By the River, Miss Brown to You, Go Down Moses, Preaching Blues, and on and on. Most of them were sung by Nissa with additional lines on what Marla called a harmonica, but Marla sang a few, and added descants to a couple of others.

  Johann was almost exhausted by the time he felt they might be drawing toward a conclusion. They pulled into a slow-moving song where Marla took the lead. Cry Me a River was saddening in most ways, and the room grew quiet by the end. That was followed by Nissa doing one called God Bless the Child that the CoC members in the room seemed to appreciate, based on the thumps of fists on the table and boots on the floor when it concluded.

  "Yeeoowww!" Marla almost screamed out as she stood up and knocked her bench over backwards, startling Johann and most of the room. She started hammering the piano keyboard in an almost berserk manner, a very heavy syncopation, with both hands moving almost independently, bringing them to a point where she was repeating the same chord rapidly. Then she opened her mouth and began singing a song about some boy who lived in the woods down by New Orleans, wherever that was. Nissa was playing the harmonica along with her, and the other musicians were falling into place as they began to pick up the harmonies.

  They arrived at the chorus, which involved heavy chord repetition and syncopation again, and very simple words, repeating "Go!", and ending with "Johnny B. Goode."

  Nissa took the second verse, they cycled through the chorus again, and Marla took the third and last verse. When they hit the chorus again, Nissa took the lead with Marla singing a descant over the top. The chorus was repeated a number of times, until they reached a place where Marla held the last word out for an extended time while she took the chords through another transition run into a final song. Nissa gave a short laugh when the chords resolved into the final pattern, but turned and faced toward the crowd to belt out the final song.

  Oh, when the saints go marching in

  Oh, when the saints go marching in

  Oh, Lord I want to be in that number

  When the saints go marching in

  They cycled through a number of verses before returning to the original. By now everyone in the room understood the melody, and they started singing along with the words as that verse was repeated over and over again. Fists were beating on tables, boots were stomping on the floor. Even as he sang along with the others, Johann kind of wondered if the tavern building could withstand much of this. He found he didn't care. A glance out of the corner of his eye showed that Christoph and Heinrich were standing alongside him and singing at the top of their lungs as well.

  Oh, when the saints
go marching in

  Oh, when the saints go marching in

  Oh, Lord I want to be in that number

  When the saints go marching in

  Marla brought the song to a crashing conclusion with bravura keyboard work up and down the black and white keys. When she took her hands off the keys and straightened, the room burst into applause, and Nissa grabbed her in a big hug. The two of them embraced, then stood together side by side, arms over each other's shoulders, almost panting as they laughed together.

  Johann found he envied them…at least a little. He greatly enjoyed making music, but he wasn't sure he'd ever had a time like this one, where he commanded such an outpouring of sound and energy and gathered the focused attention of so many people at once. That didn't reduce the pace or strength at which he beat his hands together, though.

  The din finally dwindled as Marla and her friends, including Nissa and a large up-timer, settled at the other end of the table. As the rest of the room sat back and the bar servers began scurrying around picking up empty mugs and replacing them with full ones, Johann and those at his end of the table just looked at each other, almost worn out with what they had just witnessed and been a part of.

  "Wow," Staci said. "I'd kind of forgotten just how much energy Marla can pack into a performance."

  "You mean she does that a lot?" Johann asked.

  "It doesn't come through quite as strongly in her classical performances," Staci said.

  "Classical?" That from Christoph.

  "Her serious stuff," Casey said. "What she does with and for Mary Simpson and the Royal Arts League. It's a different style of music, one more directly connected with the court music of this time."

  "And the new stuff that Master Carissimi and Master Schütz write, too," Staci said. "I just wish they'd write a ballet or two."

  "Your mom still wants to stage the old standards," Casey said.

  "I know," Staci replied, "and I get that. I don't want to see them fade away, either. They're too important for dancers. But I think we need some new stuff, too."

  "Ballet? Is that not something in France?" Heinrich asked.

  "Sort of," Staci said, her mouth quirking for a moment. "But what we do is very different. It does involve a lot of dancing, a lot of very structured and choreographed movement by sometimes a lot of people."

  "Dancing?"

  Casey leaned forward. "Staci's mom was a professional dancer for a little while. Then she started teaching dancing to students. Since the Ring fell, she's been teaching a lot of people, including a few daughters of Adel families." She shrugged. "It's really good physical exercise and conditioning, and it requires some real discipline to practice and develop."

  "So do you do this ballet?" Heinrich asked.

  Casey smiled. "Yep. You see before you Mrs. Matowski's two most experienced female dancers."

  "I thought you were teachers," Christoph said.

  "We're teachers to support ourselves, to buy bread and the occasional mug of beer or glass of wine," Staci replied. "But speaking for myself, I live to dance. I want to keep up-time dance alive, and when I can't dance any longer, I want to teach it so it will live on."

  There was a moment of silence after that, then Casey said, "Well, we need to call it a night. School starts pretty early in the morning."

  "Right," Staci agreed.

  The two young women stood up, stepping over the benches and putting on their jackets after they got untangled from the furniture. Johann stood as well.

  "Good night, Johann," Staci said with a smile and a touch to his arm. "Nice to meet you, Christoph and Heinrich. I'm sure we'll see you again some time."

  "G'night," Casey said.

  "Good night," the Bach brothers chorused, and the two young women walked off together.

  Johann sat back down. The three brothers looked at each other, and in unison picked up their mugs and drained the remaining contents. They stood, and Johann waved toward the other end of the table.

  "You calling it a night, Johann?" Marla called out.

  "Work to do tomorrow," he replied with a shrug.

  Farewells were called back and forth, and Johann led his brothers out of the tavern. Once on the street, they flanked him as they moved down the street. It was late enough that there were no heavy wagons out, and only a periodic carriage or cab to contest them for the roadway. Hands in pockets, they walked along.

  "How was your baptism in up-timer music?" Johann asked with a chuckle.

  "That was an immersion, not a simple baptism," Christoph said. "Is it all like that? The up-timer music, I mean?"

  "Surely not," Heinrich said from Johann's other side. "The Bach music we heard certainly wasn't."

  "No, it's not all like that," Johann said. "But you have to remember that Old Bach lived and wrote seventy to one hundred and twenty years from now. But there was another two hundred plus years of musical development and changes after him. And a good many of the changes were apparently due to the influence of aboriginal and tribal music from all over the world, but especially southern Africa. Those influenced richer, darker harmonies and much more complex rhythms. But they take some getting used to." He chuckled again.

  "Be honest, now," Heinrich protested. "You have not listened to that much of it, have you?"

  "No," Johann admitted. "And I cannot say that I like a lot of what I have heard. But I have been told that familiarity will breed at least tolerance, if not a certain taste." He shrugged and held out his hands to each side, palms up. "The same miracle that brought us Old Bach also brought us the blues. We will have to learn from both, I believe. But our call is to preserve and spread abroad our Bach heritage."

  "Agreed," Christoph said, and Heinrich threw in an affirmative grunt.

  They were another half a block down the street toward the rooming house when Christoph said, "You are thirty years old, Johann."

  "As of last November 26th, yes, I am. What of it?"

  "She looks like a child. They both do. Is she really a teacher, or does she just tend children not much younger than herself?"

  "Part of that is because Fräulein Staci is small—short, that is, and slender. The French word petite applies. And part of it is because she was raised in the up-time, with their abundance of good food and excellent medical care. Like most up-time women, she looks younger than she really is. No plague scars, either. But she's probably older than the two of you."

  "What?" Heinrich exclaimed. "She cannot be that. Can she?" He sounded almost insulted from his august age of nineteen. Christoph was frowning a little, obviously thinking there was no way that Staci was older than he was.

  Johann chuckled, taking a bit of pleasure from being able to puncture their pomposity. "I believe she is twenty-two. Frau Marla is a few months younger. I do not know about Fräulein Casey, but she is probably about the same age."

  "I'm twenty-two," Christoph protested.

  "Staci's birthday is in February," Johann said with a grin.

  Christoph muttered as it was proven she was indeed older. The two younger brothers mulled that over as they walked.

  "That is hard to believe," Christoph said at last, "but I must take your word for it. And it would explain their control and manners. But even so, even if we give her those years, that's a bit young to marry, is it not?"

  "Not that much," Johann said. "Not by our standards, even, and definitely not by theirs. It was not uncommon in the up-time for up-timers to marry as young as eighteen, and sometimes even earlier. And it still is today."

  "So at twenty-two Fräulein Staci is perhaps a bit ripe by their standards?"

  Johann chuckled again. "Perhaps. But they tend to not think that way."

  More steps in silence as his brothers mulled things over.

  "She is pretty," Heinrich offered, "certainly much more so than Herr Hoffmann's daughter Barbara. But…"

  "But what?"

  "A dancer? One who performs in front of people? What would Mother have said?"

  And that, Johan
n knew, was a question that he had to deal with.

  The rest of the walk was made in silence.

  ****

  Over the next several weeks, the two major concerns in Johann's life progressed in parallel. Christoph and Heinrich rapidly became as familiar with the building plans as he was, and before long were on a first name basis with the construction crew, especially the carpenters and electrical workers, and most especially the cabinet makers who were doing the fine and detail work for the organ works. Christoph had begun to take over the monitoring of that work, which freed up some of Johann's time to begin working with the carpenters on the exact placement of the pipe ranks and the routing of the air pipes from the primary wind chest to the smaller reservoirs behind the keyboard console and from the keyboard console to the ranks of pipes.

  Heinrich, meanwhile, had become an unofficial almost-apprentice to Master Luder. He was spending much of his time at the whitesmith's operation, watching the preparing and pouring of the sheet tin and the work to shape the sheets into the pipes. After a few false starts, the whitesmith had recalled the knack of shaping the voicing openings of the pipes, and true to their agreement, the night of the day that Johann had passed the first pipe had been a night of celebration at The Green Horse. Johann still remembered the head he had had the next morning.

  So the organ was progressing well. His courting of Staci Matowski was progressing…or at least, he thought it was. Staci would meet with him once or twice a week, always in the company of others. She appeared to be enjoying his company…at least, she laughed a lot when they were together. But there were no signs that she was encouraging his courtship.

  Of course, she was an up-timer. Her understanding of courtship was probably different than his. He wasn't sure he knew what signs she would give.

  The conversation he'd had with Franz Sylwester floated through Johann's mind for perhaps the umpteenth time, to use one of Staci's phrases. Give her equality, equitability, and trust. Listen to her. Well, perhaps he needed to give her that opportunity.