“But I thought … I was under the impression you were … Jews?”
“Germans,” Hans said. He leaned against the rusticated walls, studying a thread in his shirtsleeve. I couldn’t tell how many categories were on the table.
Jonah nodded. “Think Gesualdo. Ives. It’s a progressive idiom. Totally archaic. C’est la mode de l’avenir.”
Celeste grabbed him under the arm. She clucked her tongue, bored. “C’est pratiquement banal.”
“C’est la même chose,” I offered. I’d die doing my own brand of Tomming. My very own.
The six of us stood under the Ducal Palace arcade. Peter Chance already looked at us differently. Jonah wanted to say something to break this group apart and lay waste to everything he’d made. But he’d already set alight every other place he might live. I figured the others would slink off in embarrassment, each to their own gens. But they hung tight. Jonah stood in the Piazza, a duke about to bid his courtiers good night. “I say we blame this whole early music boom on the English and their damn choirboys.”
“Why not?” Hans Lauscher grabbed the chance. “They’ve had the ownership papers for everything else, at one time or another.”
“A British plot,” Marjoleine agreed. “They never could sing with any vibrato.”
The evening’s exchange changed nothing, nothing visible anyway. Voces Antiquae went on singing together, more eerily synchronized than ever. From Ireland to Austria, we fell into what passed for fame, in early music circles. We were doomed to it. What Jonah really needed from that ringing, translucent sound was to be cut loose, unbranded, anonymous, as far away from notice as notice could get. But one last time, music let him down.
Since moving to Europe, I hadn’t kept up with the United States. I no longer followed current events, much less current music. I didn’t have time, given how hard I had to work to keep from dragging the others down. What little I did hear confirmed me; the place had gone stranger than I could imagine. Its appetite for law and order grew as insatiable as its taste for drugs and crime. I read in a Walloon magazine that an adult American man was more likely to go to prison than attend a chamber music concert.
In a hotel in Oslo, I chanced across an English newspaper headline: FOURTEEN DEAD IN MIAMI RACE RIOTS AFTER POLICE ACQUITTED. I knew what the officers had been acquitted of, even before I read the lead. The paper was a month old, which only added to the horror of knowing. Worse could have happened since, and I’d never hear until too late. Jonah found me in the lobby. I handed the page to him. Giving him a newspaper was like giving Gandhi a stack of soft-core porn. He read the story, nodding and moving his lips. I’d forgotten that: My brother moved his lips when he read.
“We haven’t been away as long as it feels.” He folded the paper into neat vertical thirds and handed it back to me. “Home’s waiting for us anyway, anytime we need it.”
Two nights later, in Copenhagen, I realized why he’d dragged me across the world to be with him. We were in the middle of the Agnus Dei from Byrd’s five-part Mass, scattered across the stage, singing as hot as stars spun out somewhere in the gas clouds of the Crab Nebula. He was sending a message out to other creatures who’d never understand the expanse between us. For this, he needed me. I was supposed to give his monastic ensemble some street cred. Jonah had enlisted us all in a war to outshame shame, to see which noise—this shining past or the present’s shrill siren—would outlast the other.
We made some money, but Jonah wouldn’t move out of the Brandstraat. Instead, he sank a fortune into renovating the dive, filling it with woodcuts and period instruments that none of us played. Those panic spells and shortness of breath that had bothered him for years more or less disappeared. Whatever youthful terror they were recalling had been put to bed, outlived.
Voces Antiquae used two publicity photos, both black-and-white. In the first, some trick of the light made us all fall into a narrow tonal register. The second spread us over the latitudes, from equatorial Celeste Marin to sun-starved Peter Chance at the polar circle. Most magazines ran the second, playing up the group’s United Nations nature. A Bavarian feature called our sound “Holy Un-Roman Imperial.” Some overworked British journalist came up with “polychromal polytonality.” Flacks and hacks waxed on about how our multiethnic makeup proved the universal, transcendent appeal of Western classical music. They never mentioned how the earliest of our music was as much Near Eastern and North African as it was European. Jonah didn’t care. He had his sound, one that, with each passing month, grew clearer, finer, and less categorizable.
He and Celeste came home one day in the winter of 1981, giggling like schoolchildren who’d stumbled onto a dictionary of taboo words. She wore a garland around her temples, prim white daisies that her hair turned into tropical hothouse blooms. “Joseph Strom the First.” Jonah saluted me. “We’ve got a secret.”
“That you’re just dying to broadcast over the World Service.”
“Perhaps. But can you guess, or do we have to cue you?”
I looked, yet couldn’t believe. “This secret of yours. Does it sound like Mendelssohn?”
“In some countries.”
Celeste stepped forward flirtatiously and kissed me. “My brother!” I’d sung with her for four years, in ten nations, and she still seemed farther away than Martinique.
They went to Senegal for a honeymoon: vacationing in an imagined common origin. “It’s amazing,” his postcard from Dakar said. “Better than Harlem. Everywhere you look, faces darker than yours. I’ve never been so comfortable in my life.” But they came back shaken. Something happened on that trip they never spoke about. They’d toured some mosscovered coastal prison where the deeds had been transacted, the commodities stored. Whatever Jonah was looking for in Africa, he found it. He wouldn’t be going-back anytime soon.
We made two more recordings. We won prizes, grants, and competitions. We gave master classes, did live radio, and even made occasional television appearances on the BRT, NOS, and RAI. Nothing was real. I lived in the sound alone, making sure only to catch all the trains and planes. My bass got better, simpler, more effortless, with month after month of work.
I reached that age where every six weeks, I had another birthday. I turned forty, and didn’t even feel it. It hit me that I’d given most of my thirties to my brother, as I’d once given him my twenties. Jonah had gambled on returning me to singing, and we made the gamble pay. I’d never be a transcendent bass; I’d started lifetimes too late. But I had become the foundation for Voces Antiquae, and our sound came from all six of us. Yet even as I reached my singing peak, I heard my tone wearing away, concert by concert, chord by chord. As doomed lives go, singers are not quite basketball players. But the eternity we make for fifty minutes every night lasts, if the wind is with us, for only a score of years.
It stunned me to discover I’d been in Europe for over half a decade. In the first year, I’d learned what it meant to be forever American. In the next two, I learned how to hide that fact. Then somewhere, I crossed an invisible line where I couldn’t tell how far I’d drifted from my inalienable birthright. All that time, we didn’t step foot on our home continent. There weren’t enough bookings to make a tour worthwhile, and we had no other reason to return. The country had named an actor to the helm, one who proclaimed it morning again in America and who napped most afternoons. We couldn’t go back there, ever.
I could follow conversation now in five languages and acquit myself in three, not counting English and Latin. I went sight-seeing when we toured, now that I no longer had to spend every waking hour vocalizing. Visiting dead landmarks became my hobby. Sometimes I saw women. In moments of unbearable loneliness, I thought of the years I’d lived with Teresa. Then being alone seemed more than complex enough. I was a forty-year-old man living in an adopted country that took me for a guest laborer, with my forty-one-year-old brother and his thirty-two-year-old wife, who treated me as if I were their adopted child.
Everything I had belonged to him.
My pleasures, my anxieties, my accomplishments and failings: These were all my brother’s piece. So it had always been. Years would go by, and I’d still be working for him. There came a month when I needed a secret project or I would disappear forever into his accompaniment. The nature of the work made no difference. All that mattered was that it remain unsponsored, unaccountable, and invisible to my brother.
This time, my supplies were more modest. I carried around Europe a single A4 notebook, clothbound at the side, with eight blank staffs per page. On long train rides to distant concerts, in hotels and dressing rooms, in the dull, wasted stretches of fifteen minutes and half hours that ravage a performer’s life, I fished for tunes in me that were worth writing down. I did not compose. I was more of a psychic, a medium taking dictation from the other side. I’d hover with my pencil over the blank ledger lines and just wait, not so much for the prediction of an idea as for the revision of a memory.
Just as when I’d tried to compose in the States, everything I wrote down was some tune from my earlier days, changed just enough to be unrecognizable. If I studied what I wrote long enough, I could always find a source hiding in it, evading and yet craving detection. Only now, instead of the misery that this discovery caused me in Atlantic City, I felt an excruciating release in watching these hostages escape. Over the course of three slack afternoons, I labored over an extended passage that took me until I was free of it to recognize as a reworking of Wilson Hart’s chamber fantasy, the one that years ago had struck me as a reworking of “Motherless Child.” I’d sworn to him to write what was in me, and managed only to rewrite what had once been in him.
But the scribbling was mine, and had to be enough. My notebook filled up with floating, disconnected fragments, each of them pointing toward some urgent revision they couldn’t get to. The tunes spelled out the story of my life, half as it had happened to me, and half as I’d failed to make it happen. I knew that none would ever become the mystery it was after. All I could hope to do was stumble about, belatedly throwing open their cages.
Jonah often saw me struggling away. He even asked me once. “So what’s with the hush-hush hobby, Joseph? Business or pleasure?”
“Business,” I told him. “Unfinished.”
“You writing a good thousand-year-old Mass for us to do?”
“We’re not good enough,” I said. That was enough to guarantee he’d never ask again.
In the world we occupied, our future was fixed and we could do nothing about it. But the past was infinitely pliable. We were in the thick of a movement that made sure history would never be what it used to be. Every month brought a new musical revolution, constantly updating where music had come from. Supporting evidence for half the revolutions was scant, and the experts lashed into one another with the fury of the antiballistic missile treaty debate. Voces Antiquae was ahead of the curve on the newest developments in oldest performance practice. We sang one voice per line three hundred years after and five years before it was the hot thing. Jonah applied the ethereal sound to anything that stood still long enough for the treatment. He fully subscribed to Rifkin’s bombshell theory that Bach intended his sacred music to be sung one singer to a part. Jonah was convinced on sonority alone; no amount of documentary proof either way could alter his conviction.
He wanted to perform Bach’s six motets—just us and a couple of ringers to pad out the eight-part extravaganza, Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied. The others—Hans in particular—opposed the idea. The music was a full century younger than the latest piece we’d ever sung. It lay way outside the idiom we’d perfected. Our caution maddened Jonah. “Come on, you bastards. A world masterpiece that hasn’t been sung properly in all its two hundred and fifty years. I want to hear these things once before I die, when they’re not a Sherman tank with one tread falling off.”
“It’s Bach,” Hans objected. “Other people already own this. People know these pieces, forward and retrograde.”
“They only think they know them. Like they thought they knew Rembrandt, until the grime came off. Come on. ‘Sing unto the Lord a new song.’ Johnny Bach, heard for the first time.”
That became the project’s slogan, the one EMI promoted our recording with. Whatever the legitimacy of the performances, our agility justified them. The thing about Bach is, he never wrote for the human voice.
He had some less plodding medium in mind to carry his memo into space. His lines are completely independent. His part-writing combs out some extra dimension between its harmonies. Most performances go for majesty and end up mud. Voces Antiquae went for lightness and wound up in orbit. The group’s turning radius, even at highway speeds, was uncanny. We brought out counterpoint in the works that even Hans had never heard. Every note was audible, even the ones buried alive in that thicket of invention. We goosed the giddiness and laid into the passing dissonances. We brought those motets back to their medieval roots and pushed them forward to their radical Romantic children. By the time we finished, no one could say what century they came from.
Our disc was notorious from its day of release. It started a pitched battle, venomous in proportion to how little was at stake and how few people cared. I don’t mean Le sacre du printemps or anything. But there was flack. The new had lost its capacity to shock; only the old could still rattle people. We were derided for emasculating Bach and praised for sandblasting a monument that hadn’t been hosed down in a long time. Jonah never read a single review. He felt we’d acquitted ourselves well, maybe even superlatively. Yet he wasn’t satisfied. He’d wanted to make that music give up its secrets. But that was something it wasn’t going to do until long after we were all dead.
We toured with the motets but returned, after a while, to our roots. We revived the Renaissance in every burg in Germany. We sang in Cologne, Essen, Göttingen, Vienna—every city Da had ever mentioned to us. But no relatives ever came out of the audience after any of our concerts to claim us. We sang in King’s College Chapel, a homecoming for Peter Chance and a stunned first for the Strom brothers. Jonah craned up at the fan vault, which no photo can even be wrong about. His eyes dampened and his lips curled bitterly. “Birthplace of the Anglican hoot.” He was coming home to a place that would never be his.
We spent five days in Israel. I imagined that our Counter-Reformation Masses and courtier chansons would have to sound absurd in this permanently embattled world. But the halls wouldn’t release us without several encores. Memory was resourceful. It could reclaim any windblown trinket and weave it into the nest. In Jerusalem, on the tour’s last concert, we sang in a futuristic wood-lined auditorium that might have been in Rome, Tokyo, or New York. The audience was unreadable: two sexes, three faiths, four races, a dozen nationalities, and as many motives for listening to the chant of death as there were seats in the house.
From my spot on the stage lip, I keyed on a woman in the second row, her body stenciled with sixty-year-old state messages, her face an inventory of collective efficiencies. Four chords into our opening Machaut Kyrie, it hit me: my aunt. My father’s sister, Hannah, the only one of his family whose wartime death had never been certain. She and Vihar, her Bulgarian husband, had gone underground before my birth, and there the trail ended. My father, the empiricist, could never bring himself to declare her dead. Hannah was, compared to the size of history, a particle so small, her path could not be measured. The Holocaust had annihilated all addresses. Yet here Aunt Hannah was, returned by our performance. She must have seen the posters announcing our tour. She’d seen the name, her name, two men the right age and origin … She’d come to the concert, purchased a seat up close so she could study our faces for any trace of bloodline. Her resemblance to Da was uncanny. Time, place, even the nightmare gap between their paths: Nothing could erase the kinship. She looked so much like Da, I knew Jonah had to see it, as well. But his face throughout our concert’s first half showed no sign of any audience at all. Between this familiar stranger scrutinizing me and my brother refusing to catch my eye, it took a
lifetime’s practice to go on singing.
I cornered Jonah at intermission. “You didn’t notice anything?”
“I noticed your focus flying around like some high-wire—”
“You didn’t see her? The gray-haired, heavy woman in the second row?”
“Joseph. They’re all gray-haired, heavy women in the second row.”
“Your aunt.” If I’d lost my mind, I wanted my brother to know.
“My aunt?” He put his fingers to his chest, running the calculations. “Impossible. You are aware, aren’t you?”
“Jonah. Everything’s impossible. Look at us.”
He laughed. “There is that.”
We went back on. At our first shared tacet measure, I caught him looking. He flashed me a quick peripheral glance. If anyone in the world is our aunt, it’s her. She, for her part, gazed into us like surgery. She took her eyes off me only to look at Jonah. During the curtain call, she fixed me with a look that scorned all forgetting: Strom, boychik. Did you think I would never find you?
The reception lines that night were endless. Scores of people, still savoring the frozen hour they’d just inhabited, tried, by standing next to us and shaking our hands, to postpone, a little longer, their relapse into motion. I couldn’t focus on the compliments. I darted through the crowd, about to find a family, however small and distant. Excitement was just terror that hadn’t yet imagined its own end.
The crowd thinned out, and I saw her. She was holding back, waiting for a lull. I grabbed Jonah and pulled him with me toward our flesh and blood, using him like a shield. She smiled as we closed on her, a thrill that looked around for a place to bolt.
“Tante Hannah? Ist es möglich?”
She answered in Russian. In a broken pidgin of languages, we three worked it out. She knew the name Strom only from our recordings. She closed her eyes when we told our half of the story, said who we thought she was. Hers were my father’s closed eyes.
The Time of Our Singing Page 71