by Frank Conroy
"Sorry."
"Now for a good system you could say the evolution of scientific method. Do they talk about that in school? Scientific method?"
"I've heard it," Claude said, wishing Ivan was with him.
"Beautiful stuff. You've got the experiment, it has to have a control. You've got Ockham's razor—if there's two answers, you take the simple one. Other stuff, but in general it's a system and it works. Human knowledge about science is expanding so fast it's exploding, practically. So that looks like a good system. You don't get Hitler or Stalin, you get penicillin."
"But music has a system," Claude said. "You taught it to me. It has a system."
Weisfeld nodded. "Very good. A very good point." He raised a finger in the air and then reclasped his hands behind his back. "Almost always a new system takes the place of an older one. Once they thought earth, air, fire, and water, that's it, that's everything. But it couldn't hold, so eventually it's carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Chemistry. Once they thought God made everything in seven days and there it was, man, the animals, fixed, unchanging, forever. But it couldn't hold, so eventually it's Darwin, evolution, and the survival of the fittest. You see?"
"Newton couldn't hold," Claude said, "so then there's relativity."
Weisfeld stopped walking. "Exactly! This you learned, I presume, from your friend Ivan."
"He's trying to understand it. Space bending. Time changing with speed, all that stuff."
"He mentioned it." Weisfeld began walking again. "A nice young man. A very lively mind."
Claude experienced a guilty twinge of jealousy, but only for a second. Ivan could not, after all, play the piano. Moreover, Claude was proud of Ivan, proud to have him as a friend, and therefore proud that Weisfeld thought highly of him. As they walked along the northern rim of the reservoir Claude felt a sudden wave of love for Weisfeld, a kind of melting sensation in his chest. He moved closer, and Weisfeld, without breaking stride and in the most natural way, took his arm.
"Can tonality hold?" Weisfeld said. "That's something to think about. Is it really a prison, or is there plenty of room left? Is Schönberg jumping the gun? Is the new system really bigger and better, or is it, in the end, smaller and worse. Will it go anywhere? These are things to think about."
"But what do you think? That's what I want to know."
"What I think doesn't matter so much. I'm not the one who has to deal with it. You are. The new generation. You have to find the answers inside yourself. And don't be hasty. Remember, almost all the young composers are writing twelve-tone. Almost everybody."
They walked in silence for a while as Claude thought about it. "Maybe they're just trying it out," he said finally.
"Perhaps. And that might not be such a bad idea."
"You mean—"
"Don't be afraid of it. Learn it. Work hard. Do it seriously and try to get what you can out of it. Keep an open mind, and if in the end you decide to throw it away, you'll be doing it from strength."
"Oh, God," Claude sighed.
"One thing I'm sure of. Play the pieces. Play what you write, on the piano, and listen hard. So it's weird. Who cares? Listen as hard as you can to the new sounds, even if you don't think you're controlling them, which seems to bother you so much. Concentrate. You might begin to hear more"—he searched for the word—"more widely. Maybe, as good as your ear is, who's to say, maybe, under pressure, you'll hear more deeply a little bit? Is that possible?"
Claude looked ahead and realized with surprise that they had gone all the way around the reservoir. Weisfeld stopped at the path from which they had entered. "Okay?" he asked.
"Okay." Claude nodded, slowly kicking a stone. "But it won't be easy."
"So what else is new?" Weisfeld said. "You want easy? Play the ukulele."
In fact, almost immediately it became less difficult. Because of Weisfeld's words Claude was able to stop fighting with himself. Satterthwaite's messianic certitude no longer seemed threatening, only eccentric, and the boy, who had once been worried that twelve-tone was what he had to get to, now understood it as something to get through. It made all the difference. He pushed himself, working late into the night, motivated now by the idea that once he had thoroughly explored the system, he would be free to move beyond it. This was an act of faith, since he did not know what, if anything, lay beyond it. He found himself increasingly interested in structure, caught up in a growing awareness of ever-widening, seemingly limitless structural possibilities. He wrote piece after piece, trying each time for a new architecture, a new form. He became mildly obsessed with metrical and rhythmic effects, overlapping time signatures, jazz beats, Latin syncopations, and the uses of silence. In the absence of harmony, he paid attention to texture in the abstract. He created patterns with dynamics, with hand-plucked strings, pedal technique, and anything else he could think of.
And he listened. He composed mostly at the worktable, popping over to the Bechstein now and then to see if something was physically playable or to check a motive or a rhythm figure. But when he had a piece written to his satisfaction he would take it to the piano and play it—at first very slowly, often so slowly as to be out of tempo—and listen with all the concentration he could muster. He felt oddly passive, hearing his own work as if from a distance. The strange sounds contained in a progression of unrelated intervals. The eerie, dense chords, like black stones in a Zen garden. Notes skittering in all directions. Everything up in the air without a net.
Sometimes, even with a purely atonal piece, he could hear fragments of some unwritten, hallucinatory, tonal substructure running along underneath, as if played by a string section of ghosts. When this happened—and it was always by chance, beyond his control—he became excited, carried away with an only slightly guilty pleasure. Once he played such a section for Satterthwaite and asked him if he heard anything else behind the stated sounds.
"Like what?"
"Oh, I don't know," the boy said. "Sometimes I hear chords when there aren't any chords. In my head, I mean. Like there, bars twenty-three to twenty-six."
"Play it," Satterthwaite said, bending his head to take his brow in his hand.
Claude played the four bars.
Satterthwaite lifted his shiny face. "I hear only the notes."
"Okay."
"If you are hearing something more," Satterthwaite said tentatively, "it's probably your brain trying to pull it into tonality. Disregard it. You are doing wonderful work, young man. Very pure, very adept. Stay on the high path. Don't be sucked down, even in your head."
"Yes, sir," Claude said, knowing full well that if this was impurity, he wanted more of it.
In the music store late one afternoon, daydreaming while cleaning the glass of the harmonica display case, an odd thought popped into his head. How much could Satterthwaite hear? Claude realized that he had assumed, because Weisfeld and Fredericks could hear everything, that Satterthwaite could also. Fredericks had taught Claude not to be afraid of missed notes or wrong notes, pointing out that they always cropped up at one time or another and that there were more important things to worry about, but at the same time he never failed to hear them. Miss even a single appoggiatura in the middle of a high-velocity bravura passage and Fredericks would hear it. Weisfeld as well. Claude rubbed the glass until it was practically invisible, and a subversive idea formed in his mind. He began to replace the harmonicas when Weisfeld came down the aisle.
"What is it?"
"Nothing," Claude said.
"You look like the cat that swallowed the canary." He continued on to the back of the store.
Claude wasn't sure that what he had in mind was possible, but when Weisfeld closed the store the boy started down to the basement to find out.
"I'm going to the cafeteria with Mr. Bergman," Weisfeld called. "You want to come?"
"No thanks. There's this thing I have to do. I've got an idea."
"Okay. If you go out, don't forget to lock."
Downstairs, he pulled up a stool
and turned the light on over his desk. He dragged out the old blackboard and set it up where he could see it easily. Then he found some charts and tables he had drawn up and copied them on the left side of the board in white chalk. He also transcribed, from memory, a twelve-bar series of chords, once in the first inversion and again in the second. He sat down on the stool, arranged manuscript paper, a soft lead pencil and a block of India rubber in neat order, stared at the board, and began to think.
He wrote nothing for perhaps half an hour. Then he reached for a frank conroy piece of scrap paper and made a few doodles, put them aside, then stared at the board again. Suddenly he leaned forward over the desk and began writing notes on the staves. He worked slowly, raising his head often to consult the tables on the board, sometimes tapping out a figure on the edge of the desk with the pencil, or simply going still and staring at nothing while he worked something out in his head.
He erased often. Sometimes he would cross out two or three bars with angry slashes and move down the paper to start again. Sometimes he had to throw away the whole piece of paper and pull a fresh one. He worked with total concentration, unaware of the little sounds he made—sighs, impatient clicks of the tongue, faint umms of pleasure, soft hisses. At some point he heard Weisfeld return upstairs, but he ignored it and kept on working.
Gradually, enough bits and pieces emerged, and held, for him to sense the general shape of the first four bars, which would contain all twelve tones, without a unison or a repetition. He worked it out so as to include a certain four-note motive he was familiar with. When he had the complete tone row, he double-checked the math and began to explore the upside-down and retrograde forms.
At one point he almost lost heart. He'd written himself into a corner. There seemed no way to use the retrograde row against the original without a number of fairly strong tonal effects creeping in. He fooled with it a dozen different ways, but as soon as he excised one tonal effect another would crop up somewhere else. It was like trying to pick up liquid mercury with your fingertips. Then he saw something. If he broke the original row into halves—a modest impurity even by Satterthwaite's standards—and used the second half upside down, the tonal intervals were avoided.
He pulled a fresh sheet of paper and began writing out the piece, polishing as he went along. His excitement grew as he saw that the first part of the experiment—that is, this particular twelve-tone piece—was going to work. He forced himself to get up, stretch, and breathe deeply a few times. He knew that when he got excited he could make mistakes, and for his idea to prove anything at all the piece had to be perfect, or very close to it. He bent his head, put pencil to paper, and continued.
When he was finished he put the piece to the test—the second part of the experiment—and jumped up with a shout of exhilaration. He walked around the room a couple of times and ran upstairs into the shop. He went to the door leading up to Weisfeld's quarters and knocked loudly. No response. He knocked more loudly and then heard a thump, followed by the sound of breaking glass as something fell to the floor. Then more thumps in quick succession. Suddenly the door was pulled open.
Claude jumped back involuntarily. Weisfeld, clad in a sleeping gown, his hands trembling, his eyes wide but unfocused, sweat on his face, chest heaving, lurched forward. "They're coming," he cried, and with astonishing strength swept Claude off his feet and ran toward the back of the store.
"Mr. Weisfeld! Mr. Weisfeld!"
At the rear wall Weisfeld let go and began pushing aside some cardboard boxes. "The door! Where's the door? They won't see us." He seemed possessed, deep in some nightmare, and Claude was terrified.
"Mr. Weisfeld!" the boy yelled.
Finally, his hands flat on the empty white plaster, Weisfeld straightened up.
"It's me ... It's just me, Claude."
The man's entire body shuddered. He turned around, pale as wax, and seemed to see the boy for the first time.
Claude felt tears spilling down his cheeks. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I was just working on, I wanted you to hear, I forgot where, I'm sorry I forgot I'm sorry."
Weisfeld looked around as if orienting himself, then lowered his head. After a moment he kicked a cardboard box. Claude recoiled. Weisfeld rubbed his head with both hands and gave a great sigh. "It's okay," he said. "Everything is perfectly okay now. I'm sorry if I alarmed you."
"I just forgot. I never should have—"
"Shhhh," Weisfeld said softly, making damping motions with his hands. "Calm down. Relax. What time is it?"
"I don't know," Claude said, pointing at Weisfeld's wristwatch.
"Oh, yes. It's four o'clock in the morning. What are you doing here? Is something wrong?"
"No, no. I was working downstairs. I lost track of time. I'm sorry. I'll go now." Claude turned away.
"Wait a second, wait a second." Weisfeld moved forward and touched the boy's cheek and then his shoulder. "Something important, yes? What is it?"
Claude felt nothing but remorse. "I wrote a thing," he mumbled. "I got all..." He paused and shook his head. "It doesn't matter."
"Sure it matters. It's music. Let's go down." He took a step and stopped. "Look at me here, in my nightshirt." He smoothed out his sleeves. He looked back at the door he'd come out of and then turned to look at the wall. He remained motionless for several minutes.
"Mr. Weisfeld?"
Weisfeld gave a little shake of his head. "Amazing," he said, and pointed at the wall. "In the farmhouse, that's where the door was. The secret door." He lowered his arm. "Amazing."
On the way to the basement Weisfeld said, "So what is it? You wouldn't knock on my door for nothing. Something wonderful?"
"I don't know," Claude said. "It was hard. It's probably crazy."
"I'm all ears."
Weisfeld sat at the workable, facing the piano, and Claude played the piece. It was tightly structured music, the sound limpid, the colors pale pastels with only brief flashes of dissonance.
"Play it again," Weisfeld said, and came over to stand behind the boy and read the manuscript. "Very interesting," he said after the last bar. "I see it's twelve-tone, but somehow it has a flavor—" He paused, stroking his mustache. "There's a quality. I don't know. It sort of feels like it's in the middle. I don't know what it is. I'll have to listen to it some more. I can't quite put my finger on it. It's beautifully worked out structurally. Very clear." He reached down to play a couple of bars with his right hand. "That in there. Very good. Intricate but clear." He straightened up, still thoughtful.
"Okay, just one more thing." Claude got up and Weisfeld followed him over to the phonograph, which was on, a record spinning on the turntable. Claude adjusted the volume knob and said, "When I go back to the piano, drop the needle at the beginning. I'll come in at the twenty-fifth bar."
"What is this record?"
"Charlie Parker. The bebop player I told you about."
Weisfeld reached forward for the tone arm. "I've got it."
Claude went back to the Bechstein and Weisfeld lowered the needle. The sharp sound of Parker's alto saxophone cut the air with a twisting, syncopated blues line, repeated after twelve bars. At the twenty-fifth bar two things happened: first, the pianist on the record began to play the cycle of fifths based on Parker's bebop changes Claude had been given in the Automat, and second, Claude began to play the twelve-tone composition he'd been working on all night.
In a very few seconds Weisfeld understood what was going on and jumped up from his chair. The two fit together harmonically, as if the bebop were accompaniment for the twelve-tone, or vice versa. His mouth opened in astonishment.
Claude played the piece twice, then came over and turned off the phonograph. "The thing is," he said, "it follows the twelve-tone rules. But I made it out of the overtone series from the roots of the chords on the record. Fifths, sevenths, and ninths, mostly. Sometimes I had to go farther out. I mixed them up, of course, but it's all based on harmony, really. Do you think he'll hear that?"
Weisfeld laug
hed out loud. He bent over and slapped his kneecaps, letting out a couple of whoops before regaining control of himself.
Claude smiled nervously. "So is it tonal or atonal?"
"It's wonderful, that's what it is," Weisfeld said, rubbing his hands. "I wish the maestro was here for this. He would have—" He broke off and took a more serious tone. "Listen, Claude. This is brilliant. I'm not kidding you. Brilliant. What led you to do this?"
Claude blushed. "I was curious. I didn't know if it could be done. And if it could be, I wondered if Mr. Satterthwaite would hear it. You know, if he'd suspect something, the way you did."
"Ha! Well, show it to him. Play it for him. Let him play it."
"You think that's okay? Just show him and not say anything about the..." He gestured toward the phonograph.
"Sure it's okay?" Weisfeld laughed again. "It's a great idea. Tell me what he says."
"Excellent," Satterthwaite said, lifting his hands from the keys. "Mr. Platt? Anything strike you about this?"
Platt, who had started off strong at the beginning of the semester, no longer seemed particularly interested in music. Chess had become his passion, and he had the preoccupied air of someone continually working out games in his head. "Uh ... no, sir. It sounds fine."
Claude squirmed nervously in his seat.
"He doesn't hear it," Satterthwaite said.
Claude waited.
"Mr. Platt. He has broken the tone row into two halves for the development. Only a mild heresy, and not without precedent. Berg, for instance. You should have noticed that."
"Sorry, sir."
"Mr. Rawlings? Experimenting?"
"Yes, sir." Claude relaxed.
"Very good. A certain amount of play is certainly allowed."
"Thank you, sir." Now that he'd brought it off, Claude felt uncomfortable and almost wished that he hadn't done it.
After class, Satterthwaite asked him into his office.
