Orfeo

by Richard Powers

an eight-year-old who heard Schumann’s Scenes of Childhood in the year it was published could, at seventy-five, have attended the premiere of Mahler’s Songs on the Death of Children. From the spring of Romanticism to Modernist winter in one life. That was the curse of literacy: Once you started writing music down, the game was half over. Notation touched off a rush to uncover every trick hiding out in the rules of harmony. Ten short centuries had burned through all available innovations, each more fleeting than the last.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste. How many tunes did anyone need? One more. The next new one.

He was disappointed to learn that it was Gould.