Middle C

by Gass, William H

  In my home my desk is yet another haven—for my pencils and the seat of my pants—and when my mother calls from her garden her sound will be one I go to as if it were a beacon. Meanwhile, noises on the street I shall ignore. They are not a part of the composition. They revolve about other suns, have other eyes and other axles. Yet you know … that when you arrive home—leave and arrive, yin to yang, come to go—this familiar cycle and its center won’t roll sweetly on forever, because you expect to have a job one day, a car and dog and garage of your own, an office to go to, a kitchen to cook in, main and subsidiary bases like a diamond, to traverse—ball diamond don’t you play on? bases to stand safely at, stages on any journey, on life’s way, don’t you say?—and so you expect the future will be full of places to return to. You expect homes to be here and there all over the place all the time. To spring up like spring does every year, and fresh blooms crack open, birds sing, new leaves hatch. Imagine. Homes to come home to, homes to leave. Everywhere. Imagine.

  Who is imagining as you were instructed? Hands. Hands up.

  Home is not just the last square on the Parcheesi board—oh, I beg your pardon once again—occult reference—shame makes my cheeks redden—I try again—it is not just the tape you break at the end of the race or the plate you run to to put your foot on … score … that’s clearer for you? … But it is a set of things, habits of using them, patterns of behavior, met expectations, repeated experiences. Ho! Ho! Ho! makes it Christmas.

  I know that in your dorms you call me Dr. Digress … do I do so? or am I a comet returning to tell on my tale?

  Now then take notice, pay a quarter, will you? … for my voice and your attention: these homey spaces—so many—familiar voices, scents, satisfactions—comfort food, don’t you say?—will be more important to you than other things, they can even dominate your thinking, monoply your feeling, they will be in the major keys, but there will be minor keys, too, lesser variations, hierarchies will appear like old royalty arriving at a Viennese café where there will be requests from the customers, preferences in tables, order in the kitchen, ranks throughout the staff, competition in the silver, even among the pots and pans, bowls fit for barons shall sit on peasant plates, an ordinance will promulgate itself, a sub ordinance will sound like a summoning to church.

  How many of you knew I was speaking of music all along? its inherent higherarchies? show of hands, please. Hah … You are such good students. Why do I complain?

  Because many of you have not turned in to me your analysis of that little tune I gave you. Such a simpleton task. A simpleton could do.

  Where there is alter there is sub alter. Where there is genus please expect species. Order among the tones. Order among the instruments. There is no note born that doesn’t have a lineage, a rank, a position in the system. The force of past performances. Imitations of the masters. Traditions of teaching. Centers of learning. Habits of listening. Among them who will rule? for someone must rule. The horns? … surely not the winds. Some particular view of quality and composition shall be current. This theory, instead of that, shall be preferred. Therefore the French style will be enforced, the German manner obeyed, the Russian soul—it is always the Russian soul—obliged. They also come and go like cuckoos in and out of clocks.

  Where music is, Vienna is. The maestro is. You think music takes place in isolation, in some hermetic solitude? Cakes, coffee, gossip, and the gypsy violin—loopy swoons and much mealy schmaltz surround the violinist’s form and dismal dress. Huge, too, the opera haus. High the hats. Gaiety. Flirtations. The hunt. The waltz. Vienna tuned out the terrifying world to listen to Strauss. To Fledermaus. A social round of balls. Yet there must be a leader or there will be chaos, all those instruments braying at once. There must be a home to come home to, didn’t the Austrians at one time suppose, while longing for the Reich to envelop them like a mother’s warm milk-white arms? There is a home for you.

  The bosom of the family. The leader raises his baton, Stukas scream from the skies.

  Did not Odysseus strive to reach his wife kid dog and palace—you remember him? ah many of your hands need washing, I can see—too few pink palms … through countless trials and tribulations, too, remember the delays, the teases—Sirens, enchanters, giants lurking—one two three ten twelve thirty troubles, trials, tribulations, did I say?—lures of ladies, comforts of creatures—in wait like rocks—to bring the wayfarer down, to sink his soul to his sandals. So, too, we depart from the tonic, we journey farther and farther afield—yes, we digress—until it seems we’ve broken all ties with the known world, we are farther away than anyone has ever been, we are at the edge of the earth, we can forehear … forehear the Wagnerian downfall, we stand at the brink … the brink that splashes into silence … when … lo, behold … magically … the captain, the composer, sees a way, steers us through the storm, and we modulate, do we not? sail ride walk to the warm and welcoming hearth again, the hiking path winds but takes us to our hotel in safety just as the signs said they would: what relief at what a climax … the sight of a spire, familiar stones at one’s feet, the smell of a pot on the stove. Nice walk, good hike, healthy return.

  Poor Miss Rudolph. Glad you’re back. Nice of you to cough in the hall. No music there.

  Or shall we let a cough be music? music made of cough and sniffle? chance and error? the music of the blown nose, the phone call, the unwrapper’s annoying rattle? With our new instruments of bedevilment might we not record all sorts of sounds out there in the world that calls itself—that call themselves—real; where squeaks and squeals and screams are on the menu, where dins assail us by the dozens—the crinkle of cellophane, whishiss of small talk, the fanning of five hundred programs—where we fill our ears with one noise in order not to hear another … yes, record, preserve not only the roil of the sea but the oink of pigs and moos of cattle, the wind rattling the cornstalks like the hand of an enemy on the knob, and put them in … in the realm of majesty, of beauty, of purity, in … in music, let them in—poor Miss Rudolph’s cough included—why?—why would we come to such a detrimental thought? or why should we learn to sigh at silence as if it were a sweet in the mouth, as if it were a pillow soft as a sofa, why should we order our instruments off! as if silence were an end? Only to invite the ruckus—of which we are the ruck—to rumpus us, to ruin our holy space?

  […………………………………………….…]

  Just then we had a silence, did you hear? a rest. Broken like a pane of glass by … explanations.

  Because music has its holies, has its saints; because music has sounds all its own that no one else, no else like thing, no motion that the muck of matter makes: nowhere is one tinkle like them, these tones that musicians know. Pure tones, resolute tones, resonant tones, redolent, refulgent, confident tones. We have artisans whose ancient art is to fashion instruments so different from the heartless machines that now can capture a starling’s idle clacks and chop the resultant cacaphones into eekie-screechie parts in order to blast them—these ultra audibles—earclapped, earboxed earrings—save us, save us, save us from such ruffians, yes … give us smooth-wooded polished fine-tuned bodies instead, that glow in anticipation of being played, shining trumpets proud of their purpose, soothing tubes from which much love emerges, and virtuosos who have devoted their lives to learning how, from these wily and noble objects, to elicit the speech of the spirit. Consider: a quartet of them: four men or women. Centuries of preparation will go into their simplest tuning—into a single scrape of the bow—nor will they be togged like Topsy or some ugly ragamuffin, but garbed and gowned for these rites, these magical motions that make truly unearthly sensations. Our costumes, our manner of bowing or blowing, shall not be upstaged by clown costumes or gyrations. Shut up, world, while we hear the sounds the soul makes. This is where we should worship if we had the wit. Today Köchel Five Fifteen will pray for us. Play on our behalf. Be our best belief. Besides, this C-major quintet is assigned. You will note how the apparently harmless theme sink
s into C minor only to startle us with a chromatic passage meant to be stunning and achieving a vibrant numbness. That’s the way to talk to God.

  Now, children of our century, inheritors of what is left of the earth: calculate the consequences. Of a cough.

  The musicians begin. After sufficient silence is imposed on the audience—for the slate is being wiped, a space cleared of all competition (note that, but return all the notes you’ve made before you leave, we dare not lose any)—then, and only then, they play. There are vibrating hides, vibrating tubes, vibrating strings. Vibrating air in vibrating spaces. Vibrating ears. Vibrating brains. Do the notes fall out of them like spilled beans? out of these instruments as if they were funnels?

  By the way, did you know that “spill the beans” means to throw up? Hands please. You others may sit upon yours and be uncomfortable.

  No, the notes do not have anything to confess. They emerge like children into an ordered universe; they immediately know their place; they immediately find it, for the order you hear was born with them. Did I not just say so? Hands? Every one of them, as they arrive in their reality, immediately flings out a sea of stars, glowing constellating places. As a dot does upon a map or grid. As a developer on an empty field sees himself standing on a corner in a city that’s yet to be. For these notes are not born orphans, not maroons surrounded by worse than ocean, but they have relatives, they have an assignment in a system. Did I not just say so? do you suppose that this will be on an exam?

  Relations … As you have in your family. Aunts, uncles, haven’t you? oh, I dare say, and addresses, underclothes, honor codes, cribs. The whole equipment of the gang. Yes, for even gangs have their organization, their nasty-nosed bullyboy boss and the boss’s chamberlain—First Violin.

  But now … now remember the honest reality of that home—so sweet—a home … there’s no place like it, just as the song says. Let us have a second thought about that collection of clichés … Those relatives—remember them?—arrived like ruinous news: they broke the peace; they ate the candy; they spoiled naps; they brought their own rules. Their kids cried. And you were punished for it. Sweet home? Dad is seeing his secretary on the sly, Mom is drinking long lunches with her female friends or shopping as if a new slip or a knickknack would make her happy. Sweet home is where heartfelts go to die. Sweet home is where the shards of broken promises lie, where the furniture sits around on a pumpkin-colored rug like dead flies on a pie. Home is haunted by all the old arguments, disappointments, miseries, injustices, and misunderstandings that one has suffered there: the spankings, the groundings, the arguments, the fights, the bullying, the dressings-down, the shames. Yes, it is a harbor for humiliations. A storehouse for grudges. A slaughterhouse for self-esteem.

  Families are founts of ignorance, the source of feuds, fuel for fanatical ideas. Families take over your soul and sell it to their dreams.

  […………………………………………….…]

  That was not a silence but a hush, and a hush is filled with awe and expectation. It is a pause, an intake of breath, release of steam.

  Somewhere during the slow course of the nineteenth century, the children of the middle class woke up to the fact that they were children of the middle class—well, some of them did. They woke one morning from an uneasy sleep and found they were bourgeois from toe to nose; that is to say, they cherished the attitudes that were the chief symptoms of that spiritually deadly disease: the comforts of home and hearth, of careers in the colonies, of money in the bank where God’s name was on the cash, of parlor tea and cake, of servants of so many sorts the servants needed servants, of heavy drapes and heavy furniture and dark-wood-walled rooms, of majestic paintings of historic moments, costly amusements, private clubs, a prized share in imperialist Europe’s determined perfection of the steam engine and the sanitary drain. Daughters who could demand dowries were in finishing school where they were taught to tat, paint, play, and oversee kitchens; sons were sent to military academies or colleges that mimicked them, where they would learn to love floggings, reach something called manhood, stand steady in the buff, and be no further bother to their parents. And in these blessed ancient institutions both sexes would learn to worship God and sovereign, obey their husbands or follow their leaders, serve and love their noble nation, and dream of being rich.

  It was inevitable. It was foregone—the drift of the young to Paris. Where the precocious began to paint prostitutes; they began to write about coal miners; and they began to push the diatonic scale, and all its pleasant promises, like the vacuum cleaner salesman, out the door. They took liberties as if they had been offered second helpings; they painted pears or dead fish instead of crowned heads; they invented the saxophone. They shook Reality in its boots. Fictional characters could no longer be trusted but grew equivocal. First there was Julien Sorel, then Madame Bovary. Novels that undermined the story and poems that had no rhymes appeared. Soon there would be no meter. Though you would still have to pay for parking. Painters tested the acceptability of previously taboo subjects, the range of the palette, the limits of the frame. With respect to the proscenium, dramatists did the same, invading, shocking, insulting their audiences. Musicians started to pay attention to the color of tones. They pitched pitch, if you can believe it, from its first-base position on the mound. They fashioned long Berliozian spews of notes, composed for marching bands as well as cabarets, rejected traditional instrumentation, the very composition of the orchestra, and finally the grammar of music itself. Notes had traditional relations? they untied them. Words had ordinary uses? they abused them. Colors had customary companions? they denied them. Arts that had been about this or that became this and that. The more penetrating thinkers were convinced that to change society you had to do more than oust its bureaucrats, you had to alter its basic structure, since every bureaucrat’s replacement would soon resemble the former boss in everything including name. Such is the power of position when the position is called the podium.

  Who shall build from these ruins a new obedience?

  They … who are they, you ask? they are the chosen few, chosen by God, by Geist, by the muse of music: they are Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern. They chose, in their turn, the twelve tones of the chromatic scale and thought of them as Christ’s disciples. Then they sat them in a row the way da Vinci painted the loyals. I don’t want to convey the impression that this disposition was easy, no more than for da Vinci. Suppose out of all the rows available, the following was the order of the group—ding dong bang bong cling clang ring rang chit chat toot hoot—and that we found the finest instruments to produce each one, the finest musicians to bring them forth, and sent them—the musicians, I mean, but why not the notes?—to Oxford to Harvard to Yale to Whittlebauer, to Augsburg even—thank you for the titters—to receive the spit of polish.

  Yes, it is true, this music will be keyless, but there will be no lock that might miss it. Atonal music (as it got named despite Arnold Schoenberg’s objection) is not made of chaos like John Cage pretended his was; no art is more opposed to the laws of chance; that is why some seek to introduce accidents or happenstance into its rituals like schoolboys playing pranks. Such as hiccups. Miss Rudolph’s cough. No, this music is more orderly than anybody’s. It is more military than a militia. It is music that must pass through the mind before it reaches the ear. But you cannot be a true-blue American and value the mind that much. Americans have no traditions to steep themselves in like tea. They are born in the Los Angeles of Southern California, or in Cody, Wyoming, not Berlin or Vienna. They learn piano from burned-out old men or women who compose bird songs. Americans love drums. The drum is an intentionally stupid instrument. Americans play everything percussively on intentionally stupid instruments and strum their guitars like they are shooting guns. But I have allowed myself to be carried away into digression. Digressions are as pleasant as vacations, but one must return from them before tan turns to burn.

  Imagine, then, that we have our row: di
ng dong bang bong cling clang ring rang chit chat toot hoot. Now we turn it round: hoot toot chat chit rang ring clang cling bong bang dong ding. Next we invert it so that the line looks like the other side of the spoon. Hills sag to form valleys, rills become as bumpy as bad roads: hat tat chot chut rong rung clong clyng bang bing dang dyng. We are in position, now, to turn this row around as we did our original. Or we can commence the whole business, as Schoenberg himself does at the beginning of Die Jakobsleiter, by dividing the twelve tones into a pair of sixes. Thus the twelve tones are freed from one regimen to enter another. What has been disrupted is an entire tradition of sonic suitability, century-old habits of the ear.

  Then come the refinements, for all new things need refinements, raw into the world as they are, wrinkled and wet and cranky. The rule, for instance, that no member of the twelve gets a second helping until all are fed. They have a union, these sounds, and may not work overtime. Compositions, too, will tend to be short. Audiences will admire that. For instance, Webern begins his Goethe song, “Gleich und Gleich,” with a G-sharp. Then follows it (please hear it with your heads): A, D-sharp, G, in a nice line before slipping in a chord, E, C, B-flat, D, and concluding F-sharp, B, F, C-sharp. You see, or rather, you intuit: four in a line, four in a chord, four in a line. Twelve in a row. Neat as whiskey.

  What a change of life, though, is implied by the new music.

  I hear a distant bell. It tolls the end of our unanalytic hour. The sound might have come from any bracelet in this room, from a bellflower that my mother’s grown, a garden row, or from some prankster in the classroom. Shall we include it in our composition, ignore it, or tell it to shush?