Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (62 page)

“It’s the test of the musicality of your system,” their audiophile friends explain. “You’ve got the flutes and harps in the tweeter, and the bass sounds in the woofer. The test of your system is how well you can get all the tones that lie in between. When you have good midrange response, all the music just seems to be flowing together. It’s mostly a consequence of how good the system is at reproducing ambient sound—room tone that you can’t really hear as music but that’s all
around
the music. It’s a mysterious thing. Some cheap systems can be rich in midrange response, and some people can spend ten thousand dollars and still not have it.” The musical husbands believe passionately that they will find the midrange someday—they will put together the perfect arrangement of cables and find the right place for the speakers, and there it will be—the midrange, rising like an apparition above the stereo cabinet.

Searching for the midrange, the musical husbands pick up their black, undersized speakers and try them in different configurations around the room: on the floor on either side of the stereo cabinet, then up on the windowsill behind the stereo, then one up high, near the window, and one reverberating on the floor—first the left one up and the right one down, then the right one up and the left one down. Their wives watch them from the sofas, where they’re reading, and think that the music sounds just about the same as it always has.

The musical husbands sometimes blame the disappearance of the midrange on the “tyranny of digital sound.” (That’s a phrase from one of the little audio magazines.) Is digital sound really as smooth and as lacquered as they had once been promised? Or is it just cold and rote and clinical? Sometimes the musical husbands slip a CD into the player and are sure that it is giving them a headache. Too cold, too cold. “Doesn’t it sound harsh—sort of
glaring—
to you?” one may call out to his wife, who then appears at the door of the living room with a thumb discreetly placed inside her book.

She cocks her head. “Oh, listen! You can hear the maracas,” she says encouragingly as “Beatles For Sale” plays.

“Yeah! That’s the problem!” the musical husband cries in agitation. “The incidental percussion shouldn’t have that kind of clarity!” She listens for the overinsistent maracas, the too bright tambourines, and then tries to look pained, too.

The musical husbands are convinced that the sound of music has changed since they were children. They can remember hearing the third movement of Beethoven’s Ninth at the end of the old Huntley-Brinkley report—it was their first musical experience: the anonymous orchestra catching fire, alight with indignation at the state of the world that evening. Now, though, when the musical husbands hear Beethoven, even at Carnegie Hall, it sounds too
distinct.
The timpani pound brightly; the strings scratch away; you can pick out the horns—everyone is playing his part. That sense of an orchestra fused into one single, scowling emotion—you don’t hear that anymore. Perhaps the midrange has simply vanished from the world.

WHO are the musical husbands? They are men for whom the love of music supplies more jumpiness than it does serenity. Music creates for them a cycle of appetites and worries, itches and anxieties. They can be seen in Tower Records on Friday nights, travelling between the pop and the jazz and the classical sections, a long CD package in either hand—Ella and Handel—trying to discipline themselves to buy only one. They are seized by sudden enthusiasms
—needs—
for all the music of a particular musician. And yet even as they place today’s CD inside the player, they are already thinking about tomorrow’s. In the space of a week, they buy all the records of Lester Young; then they lie awake, as their wives read, thinking that once again they have deluded themselves—that it was not the swoopiness of Lester Young they really desired but the breathiness of Ben Webster. The musical husbands do love music. They turn on their stereos first thing in the morning and end the day by listening with their headphones at night. But they worry about music, too. When the musical husbands stand on the main floor of Tower, they think that everyone else has a single purpose; everyone else in the store knows just what section to head for. The musical husbands stand in the center of the aisle and look all around: across the floor at the old rock records, and down the aisle at the pop singles, and then they lift their heads toward the classical section upstairs. They have been like this since they were teen-agers, when they would see the ads for the Columbia Record Club in
TV Guide;
just looking at the order forms, where you were expected to check off your “favorite music” (Country and Western, Classical, Broadway, even Teen Hits), made them feel sick. How could you choose?

Now they try to be surer about music, but they are still mercurial from day to day. “I just can’t stand to listen to classical quartets when they aren’t played on original instruments,” they will declare. Then the next day someone will give them a reissue of a Hungarian quartet playing Schumann, recorded in 1956, and that will become their new favorite. They try to console themselves by producing their own tapes, alternating selections from the record collections that they have been assembling since they were twelve with tracks from the new compact-disk reissues. These juxtapositions, they feel, illustrate important musical points. They place gut-string performances of the Haydn string quartets alongside the Quartetto Italiano’s performance of the same material, movement by movement. Or they produce scholarly tapes of popular music for their friends. “The Birth of Heavy Metal,” for instance—a compilation that pairs American Delta and Chicago Blues material with its English-working-class interpretations. The selections are written out in thin felt pen on the white, ruled cardboard insert of the tape boxes: Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads Blues” (1936), and then Cream’s “Crossroads” (live, 1968); Howlin’ Wolf’s “The Red Rooster” (1961), and then the Stones’ “Little Red Rooster” (1965).

THE musical husbands are nothing like their best friends, the married musicians. The married musicians once really were musicians. They played in bluegrass bands around Cape Cod one summer, or had two years at Juilliard, or wrote satirical songs for the college revue. They are casual about recorded music; often they still use the record-player they had back then or else they actually own a boom box—a ghetto blaster like the kids in the park have—and take it with them to the office, on vacation, or out to the country. They keep beautiful instruments in their apartments—handmade f-hole guitars, or Bechstein baby grands.

The musical husbands are also different from the High End Enthusiasts, with their “reference” records of the twenty-four hours of Le Mans and their speakers shaped like airplane wings; from the Serious Listeners, with their bookshelves full of early-twentieth-century recordings from La Scala; from the Focussed Collectors, with their six versions of “Show Boat”; from the Music Lovers, who are lusty rather than furtive in their musicality, and are full of musical gusto and musical wisecracks (“You call that bel canto? I call it can-belt-o!”); from the Musical Bachelors, who have Sony components and actually buy Harry Connick records; and from their own, moderately musical children, who sit in the middle of the living room, listening to Billy Joel on the Walkman, the music passing right through them, like juice.

Above all, the musical husbands are different from their musical fathers. The musical fathers never thought much about sound, for they still had musical worlds to conquer. There was so much unheard music left for them to discover. The musical fathers subscribed to the Musical Heritage Society, and every month received a single white album with blue lettering, no pictures or liner notes; each presented a new Baroque composer, a “discovery”—Telemann and C. P. E. Bach and Vivaldi, back when Vivaldi was still something. They were in revolt against Romantic music and planted their flag on two fronts at once, moving into sixteenth-century Italy and early-twentieth-century Vienna simultaneously: they heard the first “authentic” recordings of Palestrina with the same pleasure they had taken in hearing the dissonances of Webern. They took their music seriously, were prepared to banish Tchaikovsky or canonize Gesualdo. The musical fathers loved boxed sets of records—the heft of them, their impressive taped bindings—and when their sons reached their early teens, they would give them boxed sets at Christmas. To have something in a boxed set (the symphonies of Beethoven; the motets of Schütz; Bach’s St. Matthew Passion) was to
possess
it—to have turned the waves of musical history into an object as solid as a doorstop.

Not that the musical fathers were musical snobs. They loved Jimmy Durante singing “Inka Dinka Doo,” for instance, or the lyrics to the Peggy Lee hit “Mañana”: “Oh, the window she is broken, and the rain is coming in,” they would sing to their sons, with comic bravura. The musical fathers took positions and held them. They had the same seats at the symphony every Saturday night for twenty years, and then went to chamber-music concerts the next afternoon. Old soldiers in the musical wars, they recounted musical adventures to their sons. “When I saw how Toscanini had the Philadelphia horns laid out, I knew that we were in for trouble,” they said. Yet many of their musical adventures seemed filled with gaiety. Sometimes, they would recall, they could get silly at concerts, listening to the Chopin “Funeral March” played too slow, for example, and then laughing so much that the ushers threw them out of the hall.

When the musical husbands think about their musical fathers, what they hear is not music but a rustle, as a father slips his record out of the paper-and-plastic inner wrapper; his decisive little pant as he blows the dust from the needle; the click of the record being placed on the record changer; the dull plop as it falls (a thrilling but oddly sinister sound, like a trapdoor being dropped open on a scaffold), and then the pause as the needle works its way across the first smooth, uninscribed eighth inch of vinyl; and finally—in the almost indescribably brief and exciting fraction of a second before the music actually begins—the hiss and pop of surface noise that precedes the orchestra, the sound of musical dust.

The musical husbands have come to believe that it was these sounds, more than any others—the sequential plop of the heavy records, and then the microsecond of fuzz—that gave their fathers ease and security in the presence of music. Sound didn’t assault their fathers, didn’t jump them from behind. They began to hum before the music began, and they would sometimes break their musical routines by putting on a “comedy album”—Bob Newhart, or Nichols and May, or Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner—and they would start laughing before the first high-pitched, nervous, night-club sounds broke through the static. The musical husbands don’t know anybody who listens to comedy CDs, and they think this means something. Digital sound can never be funny: imagine an antic comedian’s voice suddenly breaking through, without preparation, deep and amusing and surrounded by perfect silence, as though by a black border.

ARE the musical husbands really musical at all? The possibility that they are not worries them. Sometimes they think, The midrange has been there all along, but I cannot hear it. They know in their hearts that they don’t really like concerts. They drag their wives to concerts, but the wives sense that the husbands are not really happy there. They sit on their coats, fighting off the sleepiness from the big Indian or Chinese meal; they’re always overheated, and there’s nothing to look at except the grandiose, unconvincing biographies in
Stagebill
(“Over the last ten years, Eleanor Hemidemisemiquaver has become one of the harpsichordists most widely in demand for concerts and recordings.”) And in jazz clubs the sound is no good. The drums drown out the piano, the bass player has a pickup. The musical husbands would rather be at home.

They can hardly believe it now, but there was a time, back when the musical husbands were in high school, when they went to rock concerts all the time. Jethro Tull, Procol Harum, Yes. Though they still love their Beatles records, the musical husbands realize now that as a sonic arrangement, rock is without body. “It’s all high notes, like a siren, and low, like a thump, with nothing in between,” they announce to their wives. What they don’t say is that they worry that the midrange may have atrophied in their heads from neglect. Maybe the fault is not in their speakers, or their cables, or their amplifiers; it is within themselves. All those neurons and nerve endings, shrivelled up—all their midrange software wiped out—from underuse in adolescence.

This current of self-reproach and hopelessness makes it dangerous to bring the musical husbands together. Sometimes they can be kind and helpful to one another. They visit one another on Saturday afternoons, to examine new recordings and old speakers. They tweak one another’s CDs, placing rubber rings, like prophylactics, around the edges of the silver disks. (They have convinced themselves that this deepens and widens the sound.) They spray Armor All on the disks, to diminish their metallic harshness, and listen to each other’s favorite passages. You see them sometimes in Tower, rummaging through the sale bins and sharing their enthusiasms, the whole universe of music stretching out around them.

But on other occasions it’s dangerous to seat two musical husbands beside each other. They can get into an argument in the middle of dinner about nothing at all—about Monster cable, for instance.

“Are you one of those guys who believe in Monster cable?” one will taunt the other, who has just finished explaining about the new disposition of his speakers.

“It makes a difference. I can hear the difference,” the other says, stubbornly.

“Sometime I’ll have to show you how electrons work. I guess you think the electrons need to be warm or something. You believe in Monster cable. I believe in physics,” the friend says. “The electrons don’t need to be warm or anything.”

The other musical husband is so angry that he addresses his next remarks to his wife. “This guy is too ignorant to talk to. There is a difference, and everyone who listens seriously, anyone who has an ear, can tell.”