Orfeo (39 page)

Jen, this one: not the first Jen he has worked with in this sunny room, and she won’t be the last. But by every useful metric, surely the most magnificent. Tall, clunky, voluble, half goof, half gazelle, and her dyed-fuchsia curls fly everywhere, however often her fingers rake the mane. Her laughs are percussive, her questions mellifluous. She breathes in instruction and breathes out ingenious freedom. And for one hour every week, he gets to watch her breathe.

He’s written no real music in the eight years since
Fowler.
And yet, she’s here to study composition with him. He’s sixty. She’s twenty-four, eight years younger than his daughter, and starved for anything he can tell her about sound. She wants to squeeze out of him the last thousand years of harmonic discoveries. But he has little to teach that isn’t already within her hungry reach.

Jen’s duet swings upward into a sequence of stunning chords before settling into a cantabile. Then the cantabile broadens. He once put something similar into an ancient octet—the apprentice piece that won him the chance to work with Matthew Mattison. Back then, he still clung to the vestiges of Neo-Romanticism. Now Neo-Romanticism, unkillable vampire, is back with a vengeance. His student outpouring was reactionary, anachronistic; Jen’s is hip and current. Other than that, the gestures are much the same.

He listens to her irrepressible waltz, as familiar as yearning. Then, just when Els has it pegged, the tune explodes into a wild fugato, leaving young Peter’s precious student tinkerings in the dust. He turns toward the girl, amazed. She sneaks a glance his way, mugging a little, impish, a conspirator’s grin. She’s pleased, not with herself but with this marvelous mechanical bird she has stumbled across while out wandering.

They sit shoulder to shoulder, facing the music, nodding to the beat. Now and then he jots something into a pocket notebook. When his pleasure in her devices overflows, he’ll flick her elbow or kneecap with his fingernail.

Four weeks earlier, a quartet of passenger planes turned the dream of the present into a greasy plume. The whole world watched the cycling images in narcotic dread and could not look away. Days passed when even buying a dozen eggs felt like hubris. People kept saying that life had changed forever, but Els couldn’t see how. He’d lived too long for the fallen towers to seem like anything more than history’s next nightmare installment. Terrors as large had struck every decade he’d lived through. Only they’d always happened somewhere else.

On day five, Stockhausen called it the biggest work of art there ever was, compared to which every other composer’s work was nothing.

On day six, Jen came to her tutorial. She sat in her usual chair, her face bloated and red.
Oh, man!
she told him.
Every note I put down seems grotesque. Self-indulgent, after this.

It took all the self-control of a swami at sixty to keep from holding the girl’s jittery hand. Simply wait, he wanted to tell her. Be quiet, still, and solitary. Music will offer itself to you, to be unmasked. It has no choice.

Now, a month on, she’s in full sail again, and the world lies in ecstasy at her feet. She hasn’t forgotten anything; she’s
remembered
. Who will tilt this footrace from Death to Love, if not her? And these full-out, cascading kaleidoscopes, their interlocking syncopations, are her weapons of mass enchantment. Her duet darts like swallows; soon, the voices are joined by ondes Martenot, contrabassoon, and bass clarinet in manic motor rhythms. Then a battalion of spiccato cellos and double basses. Tubular bells, of course. How not? And fanfares served up by a double helping of trombones.

The music works its way to a whirling waterspout, then explodes into strobing suspensions. Jen leans forward into the breakers of her own ocean, grinning like a demon. She’s managed to delight herself again with her God-given right to strike a pose, to play on the fantasies of any willing listener.

The piece plunges off a cliff into blissful silence. In the aftermath, the maker can’t suppress a satisfied giggle.
Huh?
she teases him. Where does such confidence come from?
Whadya think?

I have two words for you,
he intones.
And one of them is
Holy . . .

The praise makes her levitate. He stands and crosses to the piano, where he demonstrates for her a better way to handle a clumsy moment near the piece’s climax. She has reinvented a kind of quasi-fauxbourdon, lush and archaic, like the kind Brahms might have used. But her voice leading is all wrong. She doesn’t know the models, the ones that have solved all her problems already. There’s too much more to hear than the mere past. She listens to music all day long; her tastes are catholic and indiscriminate. She has shown him the tunes on her player, scrolled through the titles in her promiscuous trove. Now and then she leaves gifts in his in-box, music for the end of time: Radiohead, Björk, the Dillinger Escape Plan. The songs startle Els. They’re jewels, rich with dissonance and unstable rhythms. They sound like the experiments of half a century ago—Messiaen or Berio—reborn for a wider public. Maybe that’s how long it takes to go from germ to general acceptance in this world. Maybe the key to acclaim is simply to live long enough.

But then, maybe acclaim is just the foyer to death.

For every solo discovery Jen makes, Els must point her toward dozens more. The world’s bounty has overflowed, and the young are washed away in it. Human ingenuity was doomed from the first, to do itself in with abundance. Of the making of many musics, there is no end.

His fingers step through the keys, spelling out his proposed alternative. He glances up as he plays. His gaze locks onto her chestnut eyes as he talks her through the solution. The girl shakes her head.

God, I wish I could do that.

Do what?
He’s done nothing but trace out a well-mapped progression, one known for centuries.

Stand at the keyboard and knock those things out. While talking!

Oh, stop. You just played me a fifteen-minute piece with a billion notes in it.

That’s not me,
she says.
That’s Sibelius!

Confusion lasts only an instant. Not the Finn: the composition software. The program that turns an average tunesmith into Orpheus. And if a student were to ask Els where to put her energies—into mastering the past or mastering that interface . . .

He recrosses the room and sits next to her again. He waves his finger at her screen.
Time for surgery
. For him, Jen is always ready to repair. She goes to work on her own keyboard, like a kid releasing global thermonuclear war. He marvels again at the sheer power of the tools: cut-and-paste harmonies, point-and-click tone painting, one-button transposition. With a few deft flicks, a handful of raw building blocks becomes a new two-minute stunning tutti. Els wags his head in sad astonishment: five weeks of work for him, back in the day.

Oh, you children are like gods.

Children?
she asks, her eyebrows aerobic.
Is that how you see me?

It’s the most coquettish thing she has ever said. She’s still high on the power of her piece, the sheer trip of playing it for her mentor. Yes, he thinks. A child with breasts. With brains. With the most delicious insouciance he has come across in decades.

When I was your age
, he tells her,
we used to have to find a nice flat stone, polish it up, get a chisel . . .

She listens, brows furled. Then she tsks and shoves his shoulder.
Sure, Gramps.

Again,
he says, pointing at her machine. He feels himself enjoying her, enjoying this, enjoying even music again.
From the top. Once more with feeling.

She does as commanded, and though the reprise of the revised piece sends their lesson into overtime, neither of them gives the minute hand a second thought. Sounds fill their ears and the notes scroll past. The music is everywhere again, lush and naïve and searching out the best in both Apollo and Dionysus.

For a few short measures, the layers turn strange and cold as moonlight.
Oh!
Els says, clapping.
I like that bit!

You should
, she says.
I ripped you off!

He thinks she’s joking. She’s not. The pulse drives on ahead, but his ears turn wary. He waits for the piece to end before confronting her.

You did what?

Her face is shaped for grinning.
I found it in a piece you wrote . . . Your Borges songs?

We are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. He’s forgotten the work was ever published, and if she’s gone and ordered a copy of the score, it will be the first dollar of royalties Els has made in years.

I owe you an ice-cream cone.

What’s that supposed to mean?

Means she has done something good with his old obscure formulas. Putty, sanding, and a paint job, and the thing is all shiny again, better than new.

What were you doing, hunting down my old stuff?

The words scare her, a key he’s never seen.
Gramps?
she asks. She looks at the offending passage.
It’s pretty beautiful.

Oh? So beauty’s back, is it?

How much must have changed in the world of musical taste, since he last took its temperature, for those old provocations to be accused of such a crime. He smiles at sounds from very far away—the antics at the piece’s premiere, Maddy and the players dancing around the little auditorium to Richard’s imperial bidding.

What?
Jen says. She’s ready to laugh along, if she should.
What’d I say?

He shakes his head.
Old friends,
he says.
Crazy people.

She frowns, wondering if she’s supposed to understand. But perplexity rolls off her as easily as recent history. She belongs to the first generation to use the mantra
whatever
without exasperation. It doesn’t matter to her what he’s babbling about. His words are nothing; she wants his tunes.

It’s Monday, 6:20. She’s late for something—dinner at the dorm, a lover’s tryst, a week-starting pub crawl with friends. But her eyes search upward in the air, as if the score of his old songs were printed there.
I learn so much from what you write.

Wrote, he wants to say. Her zeal seems genuine enough. But then, she’s capable of extracting instruction and delight from a ten-second ad jingle.

He wants to tell her: Hold on to what you know right now. Let no one persuade you of a single thing. Study your hunger and how to feed it. Trust in whatever sounds twist your viscera. Write in the cadences of first love, of second chances, of air raids, of outrage, of the hideous and the hilarious, of headlong acceptance or curt refusal. Make the bitter music of bumdom, the sad shanties of landlessness, cool at the equator and fluid at the pole. Set the sounds that angels make after an all-night orgy. Whatever lengthens the day, whatever gets you through the night. Make the music that you need, for need will be over, soon enough. Let your progressions predict time’s end and recollect the dead as if they’re all still here. Because they are.

He folds his hands behind his neck.
We had some strange notions back then.

I know. The sixties!
Even the name excites her. A daughter of a revolution that did not happen as she imagined.

We did some silly things. We thought people could learn to love anything.

She braces.
They can’t
?

They can’t,
Els says.
God. We had energy. We had ideas. We had daring. We had invention for every need. The dreamers outnumbered the charlatans. Then we woke up.

His words slap her, and her face falls. He can’t imagine why his apostasy should bother her. Her music is so lavish and satisfying it’s closer to the 1860s than to the sixties in question. Still she hangs her head, mourning iconoclasm. She’ll never have the pleasure of creative destruction. Nothing to break anymore. Everything already broken and glued back together in a mosaic of pretty bits, too many times to count.

Nobody wanted that stuff. Very little of it will ever be played again.

Through the window, October stretches out, cloudless and amnesic. According to this blue, nothing significant happened last month, with more lovely nothing in the extended forecast. Els stretches. There’s a tune in his ear like the fifties rock and roll his brother force-fed him after tying him to a chair in the family basement.

Turns out that people want a very few things.

He’s a boy again, listening to his father’s hi-fi.
Young Person’s Guide. The Orchestra Song
. The tympani’s two tones are always the same tones: Do Sol, Sol Do. Do Sol Sol Sol Do. And now the long, strange trip of his sixty years, all that wandering through distant keys, doubles back to tonic, that exploded home.

He can’t for the life of him figure out how, but he’s upset her.

Gramps?
Jen’s voice wavers.
It sounds so generous. Fresh.
She pouts with the same force that drives her music on into badass brilliance.
Like you don’t give a shit who comes with. I love that!

He can’t even pat her on the head. There are laws against that, and laws beyond those laws. He waits too long to say anything, and his silence humiliates her.

You tried so many things
, she blurts
. Why’d you stop?

He says,
Not your business
. And at once regrets the words as much as any music he has ever written.

Her eyes blink and her head snaps back. She closes the clamshell of her computer and shoves it in her pack.

Jen
, he says, helpless to say what he should. She stops, waits, vacant, her hand fighting her Amazon hair.