Orfeo

by Richard Powers

  That self-inventing outpost on the edge of the endless cornfields felt like a new Vienna. In his first five days as a graduate student, Els met more composers than he’d met in his previous twenty-two years. Overnight, his ear grew wanton, and he gorged on things that had only recently terrified him. He joined a listening group studying Persian dastgāhs. He attended talks on music and information theory. Music and the social contract. Music and physiology.

  Then, education. In the sixth week of his twentieth century formal analysis class, he arrived breathless over the previous night’s performance of Barber’s Hermit Songs. The class hooted. A stunned Els appealed to the professor.

  It’s a great piece, don’t you think?

  The man stifled his amusement and looked around for the hidden camera. Sure, if you still dig beauty.

  Els sat through the session humiliated. He raged against the man at the grad student Murphy’s happy hour, but no one backed him up. When he checked out a recording of Hermit Songs from the music library the following week, he found them banal and predictable.

  He’d learn the truth from Thomas Mann later that semester: Art was combat, an exhausting struggle. And it was impossible to stay fit for long. Music wasn’t about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war over taste.

  The idea sickened Els. He flirted with dropping out. He lay in bed until noon, planning to head back East to a job sweeping floors or delivering the mail. He could start over in chemistry. But bewilderment forced him back onto campus. Bewilderment and the need to hear whatever that hooting consensus was hearing.

  He was sitting in that same formal analysis in late November, staring at the professor’s winklepickers as the man danced around the Carter Variations for Orchestra, when the door to the classroom flew open. A senior doctoral candidate in musicology burst into the room saying, They’ve killed him. They’ve killed him. The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything. The messenger’s face was as washed out as an unfixed Polaroid, and his right hand traced odd, gnostic signs in the air. The president, he said. They shot him through the head.

  Someone said, Jesus God. Els looked to the professor for an explanation, but the man’s face fisted up in fear. The co-ed at the desk behind Els began to sniffle like an engine that wouldn’t turn over. Someone said, Get a radio. Someone put his arm on Els’s shoulder, a last awkward innocence. And the thought—three parts dread and one part thrill—passed through the mind of the beginning composer as if one of them had spoken it out loud: Make what you want, now. The place is up for grabs.

  You carry around ten times more bacterial cells than you do human ones. Without their genes, you’re dead.

  Els returned to school after that Christmas break with a single-movement octet—cello, violin, viola, clarinet, flute, horn, trumpet, and trombone. Music for uncharted times. The piece had started out studious, even reverent, but something happened as he fleshed it out. The lines insisted on more room, more play, more heat and light. The thing turned demonic, as reckless and motor-driven as those rock and roll anthems that his brother once forced him to admire.

  He assembled a group of grad performers and cajoled them through several rehearsals until he produced a satisfying tape. The piece felt strong enough to win him lessons with any of the faculty’s alphas—those men who locked themselves into the Experimental Music Studio for days at a time, outdoing even the north campus scientists in rigor and formal perfection.

  For his pedagogical parricide, Els settled on Matthew Mattison. A working-class boy from Lakehurst, Mattison went about in bomber jackets, three-day stubble, and loosened ties that looked like sliced-up Pollock canvases. The man was a dervish of dark energy, not yet forty-four, but his music had been performed in a dozen countries; he seemed to Els like a study for a bust in tomorrow’s Museum of Iconoclasm. His most recent twenty-five-minute tour de force was a contrapuntal pitched-speech chorus for virtuoso verbal ensemble built from the phrase, “So what if it’s so?”

  Mattison invited Els to his house to listen to the octet. The home of a real composer: it wasn’t possible. Els stumbled on the loose, weed-covered flagstones twice while coming up the front walk.

  The meeting began at eight p.m. and didn’t break up until one in the morning. And in those five hours of vicious back-and-forth, Els found himself defending a musical philosophy he never imagined anyone having to defend.

  Els liked arguing as well as the next rebel acolyte. He and Clara had once stayed up all night fighting over which three piano concertos to take down in the fallout shelter for the final stay. But Mattison meant war. He began with a ferocious volley, not merely against the octet itself, but against all the foundations that Els took for granted. He called it cheap of Els to hide behind a melody that the audience would leave the hall humming. That meter so regular you could skip rope to it, those thrilling chord progressions: Why not just send a cozy Christmas card?

  The front room where the two men clashed was almost bare aside from three wood-plank chairs, built by Swedes for mannequins. A stand near the window held a fishbowl filled with cobalt marbles. In the middle of the room a wrought-iron cube supported a thin surfboard of glass, a coffee table that had never seen coffee, let alone magazines. On a ledge jutting from one wall sat a sculpture made of bolts and washers and nuts that looked like an engineer’s upgrade of an elephant. Taped to the wall were unframed newsprint printouts—skeins of radiating black lines, generated by Illinois’s massive mainframe computer. Three years later, every child in America would be making similar webbed designs with their toy Spirographs.

  For hours, Els and Mattison battled over first principles, and all that time, the master never offered his prospective disciple food or drink. For a while, the student held his own. But at last, herded into a corner, Els broke.

  Isn’t the point of music to move listeners?

  Mattison smiled. No. The point of music is to wake listeners up. To break all our ready-made habits.

  And tradition?

  Real composers make their own.

  So Gustav Mahler wasn’t a real composer?

  Mattison regarded the ceiling of the bare room and stroked his stubble with the back of his knuckles. He considered the question for forty-five seconds—half the length of Els’s octet scherzo.

  Yes. I would have to say that Gustav Mahler was not a real composer. A songwriter, perhaps. But caught in the grip of the past.

  It was beyond late. Els rubbed his mouth and said nothing. He was hearing things, faraway things approaching, faint and impenitent and electric.

  If you come study with me, Mattison said, your very first piece will be about the stop sign at the end of my street.

  Els looked around the bare room. The white plaster walls caught the light of the paper lantern and bent it into a cubist bouquet. He listened to the future for a long time. Then he turned back toward his next teacher and squinted. Fine. But I’m going to write it in C.

  Life is nothing but mutual infection. And every infecting message changes the message it infects.

  The war between Peter and Matthew Mattison lasted years, without any hope of peace with honor. They fought not simply over Els’s tenderfoot soul but over the whole project of music. Week after week, Els tried to revive the once-audacious inventions of the past and make them dangerous again. And week after week, his mentor dismissed his études as pretty sentiment.

  The wildest things Els dared to make were too tame for Mattison. And in time, Mattison’s constant harping on freshness began to stale. Still, the rolling clashes taught Els a great deal about theory and harmony, despite Mattison’s contempt for those spent games. Els learned a lot, too, about the human ear, about what it would and wouldn’t hear. But above all, he learned how to weaponize art.

  Els grew; he broadened, under the attack. At last, the jagged terrain that Mattison pushed him toward opened up its cold magnificence. An
d like the businessman who finds one Friday that he might enjoy dressing up as a woman and heading to a dark cellar club on the other side of town, Peter Els embraced his panic and thrilled to realize that he might be free to make anything at all.

  For years, the crisis lay in choosing Schoenberg or Stravinsky. By 1966, both those men sounded old and quaint. European postwar weirdness, American pop ballads, magnetic tape, advertising ditties, and gnarly microtones all collided in one big free-for-all. Yet the wider the choice, the more every conscript in the program wanted Els to declare allegiance. He grasped this one night in a campus bar, while Dylan wailed “Desolation Row” on the jukebox, that reworking of the old United Mine Workers anthem: Everybody’s shouting, “Which Side Are You On?”

  He knew no earthly reason why he should have to choose. Yet he now saw—crazy late—just how the pecking order worked. The high-concept men got all the performances. The twelve-tone formalists got all the cachet. And with new Ph.D. programs in composition sprouting up all across the country, to compete for grants, you needed a system as pure as physics. And so the choice came clear to Els: radiant versus rigorous, methodical versus moving.

  For as long as he could, Els crept between camps like a Swiss diplomatic courier. But the fray said declare, or be despised by all. And soon enough, the fray began to excite Els.

  It was his pure dumb luck to be alive in the morning of that revolution. For one more time, music had causes to champion, utopias to foster, and idols worth demolishing. Not since ars nova in the fourteenth century or the development of sonata-allegro form at the end of the eighteenth had there been a better time to be a beginner.

  And beginnings were everywhere for the taking. One Saturday, out scavenging his week’s stock of TV dinners in the freezer aisle of the Jewel, Peter heard a girl, no more than ten, in pink shorts, flowered peasant blouse, and flip-flops, humming to herself while bathing in the cold clouds that poured from the open door of a Popsicle case. The tune hit Els like a distilled Magnificat. Over the span of two manic months, he took the girl’s ditty and turned it into the twenty-minute Rapture, for chamber orchestra, soprano, and four reel-to-reel tape machines. The six pitches of that singsong fragment, combined and recombined, slowed, sped up, inverted, reversed, stacked into evolving rhythms and incanted in banks of antiphony, blossomed into a fantasia.

  Mattison condemned the finished piece as decorative. Johnston liked the virtuoso reach, but wanted something more purged of familiar harmonic gestures. Hiller found it intriguing but inchoate. And Brün wanted to know how such music helped bring about a more just society.

  Els squirreled away his teachers’ cavils and crafted his revenge. He spent nights in the electronic studio, coaxing the theremin, splicing tape loops, and learning how to program. The computer made it possible to shape any pitch, amplitude, timbre, and duration, and combine these into the voiceprint of the early space age. But omnipotence made Els sad. He yearned for the clumsy, freighted flights of earthly instruments.

  In secret, he returned to the exhausted vocabularies of the old masters, looking for lost clues, trying to work out how they’d managed, once, to twist the viscera and swell whatever it was in humans that imagined it was a soul. Some part of him could not help believing that the key to re-enchantment still lay in walking backward into the future.

  Picasso: “Art is dangerous. Art is not chaste.” Ellington: “When art ceases to be dangerous, you don’t want it.”

  There were women in those years, one brittle and misgiven, the other glad and loud. Each had a music, though neither was Clara, whom Peter now hated with such force it left little room in him for other need. There were entertaining men, too, friends whose crackpot ideologies seemed just the thing for a month or two. Above all there was his growing technique, the greatest chemistry set a boy could want.

  By demented but rigorous Cold War logic, composing kept him out of the jungles of Southeast Asia. People in marble buildings out East vowed to beat the Communists at every available proxy war: athletics, chess, showpiece architecture, even high culture. And that meant deferments for student composers. The State Department and the CIA even sent the best of Els’s colleagues on concert tours to Thailand, Argentina, Turkey, and other contested world hot spots.

  Back in his first year in graduate school, Els had sat in a TV room at the Illini Union, surrounded by giddy students, watching a bulky, grainy, rabbit-eared black-and-white set bolted to the wall as the Beatles played Ed Sullivan, their infectious seventh chords electrifying the room. By the time he started his doctoral portfolio, a great feedback loop of influence had swept him up. Everyone was picking everyone else’s pockets: the Fab Four stealing from Stockhausen for Sgt. Pepper; Andriessen and Berio rearranging Lennon and McCartney. For a few bright months, high and low, timid and adventuresome, coarse and intricate, all braided around each other in complex counterpoint. But by the year Els left school for good, the gods were fumbling around up on a London rooftop, trying and failing to get back home.

  For three years, Peter lived in a graduate flophouse in West Urbana—a majestic old turn-of-the-century American Gothic carved up into separate units, each serviced by its own fire escape, with a dozen mailboxes in a police lineup on the front porch. There, in the fall of ’66, his roommates clamped him in a wing chair, fed him hash brownies, and launched him on a marathon listening session that seemed to spread out across days. They started him on The Well-Tempered Clavier. Kaleidoscopic lines burst in Peter’s head like tangled stairways in a Piranesi labyrinth. Indescribable arcs separated themselves from the flood of music and struck off on lives of their own. Those independent lines in turn formed—in the surprise intervals they struck when gliding over each other—further unheard melodies, airs folded perpendicularly inside other airs, or buried like cryptic crossword hints that hid the keys to their decoding inside another would-be clue. The weave staggered him—a two-minute proof of time’s divine design.

  Who’s playing? he shouted, with an urgency that sent the group into hysterics.

  He was disappointed to learn that it was Gould. I always hear all the counterpoint, with Gould. Try me with Richter.

  The secret weaving was still there, even in Richter’s pedaled blur.

  Six more hash excursions with much careful note-taking ended in disillusionment. Pot was a private aha. All the glories were sealed in the locked room of the smoker’s brain, and turned to a joke when he sobered. Els was after something more solid, a priori, shared—durable wonder raining down on whole roomfuls of listeners at once.

  Then a summer night, a gram and a half of P. cubensis, and Els found himself swimming upright, propelled by thought through a field filled with what announced itself as filaments of pure life stretching out much farther and deeper than the mere world. The stars spoke in patterns of brilliance so obvious he’d forever overlooked them. The field was pure music, Jupiter unbound, one of an endless, renovating series of theres that the brain might live in, were it not shaped so mercilessly for here.

  Music has killed more people than Serratia ever did.

  Babbitt asked the question to the country’s face: Who Cares if You Listen? His manifesto made the rounds, drawing more readers than his music had listeners. Music knew things. It had its expanding toolkit, no less than chemistry. If you wanted to go deep, to make the full journey, you had to study the language.

  The great mystery of those days was how many people still thought the journey worth the effort. Audiences sat for hours in somber black-box theaters to listen to a rash of abstruse blips and bleeps. Even downstate Illinois crawled with people—bright, energetic, hip, inventive explorers in loud stripes and madras and sideburns the shape of Idaho—people on the verge of a newfound America of sound.

  In the middle of this efflorescence, the Imp Saint came to town. He walked into that wasteland of corn like the Apostle Paul wandering into the boonies of Lystra. A chance toss of the I Ching led Els to John Cage. Yet chance was just an order that you hadn’t yet perceived.
The Imp Saint himself had written as much: every item in existence was linked to every other.

  But then, the man had also written, many times in many ways, I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.

  Music is awareness flowing in through the ear. And nothing is more terrifying than being aware.

  He wanted to go home, shed his walking clothes, take a shower, and eat lunch. But camera crews encircled his house and lab techs were autopsying his dog for biotoxins. His face would be all over the local news by afternoon. Renown had evaded Peter Els his whole life. Now he had only to drive home and wave his arms, and he’d become America’s most famous living composer.

  His brain was pure noise. Els drove at random, turning often, his eyes on the rearview mirror. The strip mall where he bought his groceries swung into view. He turned in. The familiar gauntlet of shops felt like the set for a comic operetta: tanning salon, weight loss clinic, dentist-in-a-box, Pretty Nails, Eyemart.

  Els sat in the parked car, hands under his armpits. At last, he fished his phone out of the glove compartment. Sara had made him swear to keep one there, for road emergencies. She failed, however, to make him promise to keep it charged. The green phone button did nothing; the screen reflected his face in a postage stamp of black. He rummaged around for the car adapter among the piles of books and CDs in the backseat, without luck.

  Something like the space shuttle pulled into the slot next to him. Its running board came up to the middle of the Fiat’s window. Waves of pounding bass passed through the hulls of both vehicles and shook Els’s torso like a Vitamaster belt massager. Whole windshield-shattering subcultures had grown up around that sonic violence: dB shoot-outs, video sites featuring women whose hair whipped about in the winds of sound. Deafness as the price of ecstasy: any composer had to admire the bargain.