My Broken Language

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

  Inside my dorm room, I taped her photo to my desk: in pampers atop my hip, a mess of curls, her eyes pure electric joy. Seeing it, I could almost feel Gabi’s skin against mine, along with all the possibility that her warmth implied. Abuela’s and Toña’s and Nuchi’s heartbreaks predated me and therefore won on chronology: I could offer no balm or protection to my elders. As to the mysteries of our Perez lost, the secrets of our deaths and disappearances? Well, maybe a four-year-old sis was a remedy, if not an explanation. Imagining her on 95 South, mile markers tallying our growing distance, I saw now the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity she presented me: a chance to foster a self-loving, not-disappearing Perez girl. A shot at building a language beyond my own internal purposes: words that would become instructions to the next generation. Gabi would flourish. She must. Now each folded T-shirt placed in a dorm room drawer became a vow. I would earn my physical distance from my sister. And since she had taught me to dive into joy’s deep end, I would make a wild ride of it and come home for Thanksgiving with stories to tell.

  Atonality

  My naïveté surrounding college was a blessing. I saw no reason why Yale shouldn’t be my oyster, and not knowing what to fear, I opted for boldness. First day of shopping period, when students tried out classes before formally registering, I went to Composers’ Seminar, a 400-level course with extensive prerequisites. I had taken none of them.

  “Wait, are you the girl who sent the tapes with her application? ‘Three Piano Preludes’?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have a memorable name. Those were great. But have you taken music theory?”

  “No. But I learn by ear. I’m a quick study.”

  “Play the preludes, will you? Wait till the stragglers find a seat.”

  Yale seminars were capped at twelve but these professors accepted only half that. Judging by the greetings, here lay the inner sanctum. “How was that Boston Pops apprenticeship?” “Any headway on your thesis?” The students were boys, the teachers men. No females in sight, and the room’s whiteness rivaled Malvern’s. But its gleaming wealth added an unfamiliar edge, a new code for me to learn. Racks of digital music gear gleamed, supercomputers stood like installation art, sweaters and slacks looked costly though casual, and at the center stood a six-foot Yamaha digital hybrid.

  I adjusted my stool at the piano, coaxed one deep breath into my trembling fingertips, and began. The dynamic range surprised me. Loud became majestic, soft became tender. It was the best instrument I’d ever played. On it, my preludes sounded magnificent. I had composed the first two a year earlier while avoiding piano homework. My teacher had assigned Scriabin; while practicing, I’d made a note mistake, then gone down a rabbit hole chasing the cool sound. The third prelude had come a month later, as I grappled with some low-register Gershwin stuff. Because of my composition’s fungible meter, I hadn’t figured out how to notate it in manuscript. Some measures were an obvious four-four, while others seemed to lack time altogether. But when played, they flowed like sentences. The chords crunched and resolved, journeying through dissonance to dreamier soundscapes. Ethereal legato traded with witty staccato, and you could hear the Scriabin and Gershwin all over it.

  No applause came at the end. Brows were raised, legs crossed, arms folded. These were not the type to express affirmation, it seemed. And yet, I had a sense of having survived the hazing. To be the only girl around and yet hold center like that, it was ballsy. My hands had hardly trembled after the first few notes. I was twice as bold, I told myself, as any of these boys.

  “Questions for our guest?” the longer-haired professor asked.

  A tall golden boy in cashmere leaned forward. “Most important influences?”

  “Celina y Reutilio.” Until I said it, I hadn’t realized mom’s morning tape was especially meaningful. She had warped it after hundreds of plays, an ebullient Lukumí score by which to trim Pop’s hairline. She would sing-yell above the clippers: “Que viva Changó!” Celina’s voice was twangy as the tres, with the güiro and bongo cutting right through. This was folkloric stuff, campesino to the core, but with chromatic solos that would’ve turned heads at the Blue Note. Their songs were rough joy, dirty praise. And their songs were influence. I had said it aloud for the first time.

  Then we were diving into the syllabus, the professor introducing our semester’s first two composers: Schoenberg and Ruggles. One was German Jewish, the other anti-Semitic American. One was a sought-out public intellectual, the other a cantankerous hermit. But both were pioneers of the atonality that had come to define Music Today. This was news to me. I jotted down atonal and twelve-tone row, vowing to look them up later. Then it was time to listen. Out of state-of-the-art speakers came the most inharmonious, nihilistic note combinations I’d ever heard. There was no rhythm at all, neither a pulse to steady nor a syncopation to pull. These were sonic inkblots, not songs. If my cousins had heard it, they’d have laughed the Cola Champagne out their noses. But I looked around at a dead-serious room: most brows furrowed in serious consideration.

  I had already begun craving an uglier language, one that expressed the Perez resilience and maelstrom. North Philly’s too-young death and mucky girlhood and gorgeous dance were eager to key their way out my cage. There was a poetics I longed to share with mom at home and the world at large, one messier than dainty Mozart, more syncopated than Chopin, more guttural than elegant Bach. But I hadn’t yet found it. Schoenberg and Ruggles were too bleak. I needed a dissonance that spoke of love, too. A turbulent woman’s tongue. Seated amidst all that spotless machinery, I worried that eight semesters of such exalted noise would sprinkle the wrong breadcrumbs on my path, that this laboratory would not lead me to my language. That, in fact, a four-year detour lay ahead and I would emerge off-course, lost. Having come here to study music, though, I resolved to proceed and learn all I could.

  Then the listening was over and the boys analyzed it with mind-numbing lingo and impressive facility. Taking notes was hopeless; I couldn’t spell the dang vocab words. But dropping the course was off the table. Not after surviving the hazing.

  Girl, I said, you are in over your head.

  * * *

  —

  Scholarships and loans had been generously offered, but I still owed the bursar a couple thou each year. Work-study jobs maxed out at twelve hours; I needed twice that for books, tuition, and Amtraks home. Day one, I huddled with other freshmen before the Career Center corkboard. (My roommates were not among us; I couldn’t fathom how they’d make tuition or buy books with no income.) It was a grid of half-sheets, each the key to a campus job.

  School of Medicine Library. Shelving & front desk. $7.25 @ 5 hrs.

  Morse College Dining Hall. Service & cleanup. $8.50 @ 7 hrs.

  School of Music Recording Studio. $10.50 @ ___.

  That last one caught my eye. The wage was high, the hours left blank. I ripped off the posting and sprinted for my dorm phone.

  The studio recorded every School of Music concert, in the same way that the library housed every PhD thesis. Advanced degree recitals, Yale Symphony Orchestra performances, faculty concerts. Guest artists like Bang on a Can crowded the busy internal schedule. The hours were rigorous, my interviewers intoned. How committed was I, five upperclassmen asked. Extremely, I responded. Sure, sure, but could I work twenty hours a week, they asked. I’m certain my irises transformed into dollar signs, and I’m certain my interviewers saw them, because I was hired on the spot. The hourly wage had a good two bucks on most campus jobs because turnover came with a steep price tag. Each microphone was worth thousands of dollars. Newbies dropped them; trained staff didn’t. I was hired on Monday and started Tuesday.

  You’d never know the place existed had you not been in the Career Center that September morning in ’95. The studio was housed on the third floor of Sprague Hall, atop a small dusty staircase, behind unmarked and always-locked black d
oors. If an audience member wandered to that tiny landing and realized the bathrooms were not there, they’d likely think the doors led to janitorial closets or electrical panels. But open the one to the left and the Fred Plaut Recording Studio’s massive console eclipsed the door frame. A mothership of buttons, faders, sliders, and knobs. It was Star Trek for music geeks. Vintage analog captured the warmth of an oboe’s wail, the breadth of a Steinway’s thunder. Digital’s compression couldn’t compare. Even the buttons seemed of a different era, a time when plastic rivaled concrete for strength. The console was kept in impeccable condition. Gene, the boss, kept a steady stock of air spray. He’d go around pulling off a fader, puffing the dust away, replacing the button. Knob by knob, spritz by spritz, the console’s sound remained flawless. A speck of dust would mean cracks and pops in the feed. Not under Gene’s watch.

  The console consumed over half the studio’s footprint. Chairs, mixing racks, a desk, and a tool cart surrounded it—planets crammed too close to the sun. A cascade of wires streamed between devices, like overgrown weaving, a giant’s macramé.

  Sprague was one of two main concert halls at Yale, the austere sibling to the gold-leaf ostentation of Woolsey. Its brick facade, white walls, and wooden seats echoed the Quaker meeting I’d attended. Seen from the ground-floor audience bank, a white bandshell enveloped the stage. Seen from the second-floor balcony, the cherrywood stage was a warm glossy pool. No matter where you sat, the eight-foot Steinway was a regal gorilla. Years of trial and error had allowed Gene to perfect mic placement. He was uninterested in the compression that was industry standard. He wanted to capture a live acoustic experience, in crystalline pianissimo and rafter-shaking fortissimo. A musical journey was not about its average.

  Yale’s wealth was of a magnitude I was only beginning to fathom. Most kids had no jobs at all. Others quit when the work got tedious or the fraternity tapped them. People cashed checks written by parents, dropped daddy’s Visa like corner store pennies. Over a late-night call, my long-distance boyfriend spelled it out to my confused ass. “They’re rich,” he said. “Sure, some of them are,” I responded. “Not some,” he corrected, “most.” I remembered the pie chart in Yale’s recruitment brochure. I had focused on the forty percent slice: students receiving need-based financial aid. That portion had informed me Yale was fiscally possible and worth applying to. But I hadn’t considered the flip side of the coin, the sixty percent with a small fortune on hand—enough to write four years’ worth of full tuition, room, and board checks. Now that I lived amongst them, that just about blew me away.

  Stepping into the studio was welcome escape. Instant relaxation, my muscles unclenched. And not just mine. All the studio crew left their armor at the door. We were in the same boat—paying our way. You wouldn’t hear any of us fronting about poverty, though outside the studio, classmates with Tahoe ski habits insisted on the modesty of their estates. Not us. This was our third or fifth in a string of jobs since our first paper route or babysitting gig—we knew we’d struck gold. Having steady work marked many of us as the fortunate amongst our extended clans. We got paid to hear Bach’s C-major cello suite, how it peaked on that crunchy modal tone. Once, we ordered midnight pizzas thanks to Willie Ruff, double-bass faculty, who called and said, “Gene, set up your mics now.” An arrangement of “Amazing Grace” had come to him in a dream, he had to get it down before it slipped away. It was a short session. Three live takes. He plucked his double bass and sang the melody atop it. His voice had the rasp of reveries. I got paid to catch the serenade.

  Each microphone had a dedicated attaché. Inside, foam cutouts gave the impression of a manger. Wrapping the cables was done with precise methodology. Coil them loose, draped over the shoulder, so as not to kink up the cable. Never drop them on the ground, place them down. Never yank them out by the cord—use the plug as a handle. Blue cables, fifteen feet. Red ones, twenty-five. Green, fifty.

  Then we’d go upstairs, adjust levels at soundcheck, and hit record before the concert began. If we had set up correctly, there should be nothing left to do but enjoy the show. Maybe the slightest downward adjustment if an agitato hit the red. Beethoven required a close watch. Wagner, for sure. Bach’s Italian Suites meant a laid-back evening. Some evenings I studied. Others I listened to the concert. Still others, I swapped jokes with coworkers, or taught them Spanish curse words in exchange for the German, Italian, and Trini patois ones they had been raised with.

  There was a late-night session with only one piece scheduled: Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A Major, D. 959. Elizabeth Parisot from the piano faculty was on deck. Because it was a studio session rather than a concert, we started late, after Sprague Hall shut down. The closet-size room adjacent to the main studio had a smaller analog console and just a few rack components. Its focused sound was best for solo projects. I placed the mic at the bell of the piano. Gene checked it with approval, then watched me set levels. He pressed the talkback button and spoke into the console. Whenever you’re ready. Then came an inhale and two opening chords that swung heaven’s left and right gates open. Simple A majors but when they dropped, those fuckers left mushroom clouds. In their ringing wake, a legato minor-key arpeggio ran the length of the ivories, top to bottom. Professor Parisot destroyed the Steinway that night. WWE on eighty-eight keys, seismic as warfare, elegant as ballet. I didn’t know any Schubert so beyond sonata form, I couldn’t anticipate the piece’s direction. Its unexpected turns and dynamic contrasts had me exclaiming aloud in spots. Mm-ing and ugh-ing like the AME back on 48th and Kingsessing. Gene gave me the good headphones—my ears cupped in their plush nest. The first movement, the allegro, is twelve minutes long. In sonata years, that’s a quarter century. Mozart’s first movements clock in at five. Beethoven’s range from six minutes to ten. Twelve is tantric. Plus, Schubert uses false recapitulations so you think the piece is rounding the last bend, then you’re in a different key with the melody in the top octave. The final A chord was gentle as the small of a back. A pianissimo that dribbled down your chin. I pulled off my headphones and looked at Gene, flushed. Needing a cloth to pat away the sweat, craving a postcoital ciggy. “I know, it’s magnificent.” He chuckled. “That happens sometimes.” Then he pressed the talkback mic. “I think we got it.” We heard Professor Parisot’s footsteps on the Sprague stage. Gentle and echoing, she paced atop the hardwood, no doubt preparing herself for the next movement.

  Fania Everything and Salsa Out-of-Prints

  Midway through sophomore year, I grew cold to the major. I hopped to Yale music thinking horizons would expand, curiosities would deepen. That’s how the best piano lessons made me feel back home, and the best dance parties, too. En el barrio, music was air. There was no funeral, no graveside visit, no praise ceremony, no after-work hang, no morning shower or roll-by without it. Music meant Nigeria and Senegal, Cuba and Brazil, PR and DR, and Harlem, U.S.A. Music is why driver’s-side glass could descend, why kitchen windows got jimmied. It was the front door and the linoleum floor. Volume knobs lived well above medium. Every Philly Rican I knew had an instrument in the cabinet—a güiro, maracas, bongos—so that a stop-n-chat might become an all-night descarga. On occasional weekends I fled for Aunt Linda’s, from dad’s side, and we’d hit up SOB’s or the Lone Star Cafe, or climb to the bandstand where her rambunctious rock was on tap and she’d let me be keyboard-side page-turner. I expected that from Yale and more, four years of awakenings, but that late-night Schubert was a rare gem. Many dictionaries live in this world, and at Yale, “music” came from a different Webster, with a different definition. The word meant a particular type—Western classical—without even having to specify. “Music” was a synonym for “white.”

  The ethnomusicology corner of the listening library was a half shelf of grainy field recordings. As if most of the globe had not yet encountered recording studios. There was a smattering of unattributed Kenyan tapes; some of Alan Lomax’s southern recordings. Unlike the strict rule
s governing most of the collection, non-Western musicians didn’t merit attribution. Certainly, no music major would be caught dead at Toad’s Place, the local rock joint. That was a lower rung than the field recordings.

  Music was for dissecting, a forensic pursuit in which the human body was checked at the door. The only true audience sat in a concert hall. The stuff of dancing? Maybe, if Merce Cunningham or the Joffrey was involved. But the stuff of dance halls? Nope. Atonal theory and twelve-tone rows got prime bandwidth. Bleak stuff, but profs and classmates laughed—out loud—when I once dared to mention Stevie. I would imagine my cousins as flies on the seminar walls. They’d have a field day. Yo, they call that music? Fuck outta here, I got farts with more melody. How much Yale costs again?

  * * *

  —

  English 129 offered imaginative escape. After the densely packed Greek and British readings, Ntozake Shange rocketed straight to my core, the syllabus’s final offering. Like e. e. cummings, whom I’d read in high school, Shange broke all the rules of capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. But the rule she broke most beautifully was who merited a page and a stage. In her choreopoem (woman was a genre unto herself) Black and Brown women’s heartbreak set the table for a distinct form of communal healing. Here, celebration and suffering cohabitated within the feminine divine, and the piece’s ritual structure felt to me like an awakening. It was a baño, a limpieza, in literary form.

  The cycling team offered physical escape. We’d pedal thirty miles along New England roads, past orchards and quarries, far from campus. I didn’t feel fraudulent or freakish pedaling past the autumn foliage. The cyclists were mostly European grad students with accents disparate as the Perez family’s skin tones.