Orfeo

by Richard Powers

Els held a tone, and the dog answered in a mournful interval. But if the clarinet jumped an octave, the dog held steady, as if the pitch hadn’t changed at all.

Something magnificent and enduring hid under music’s exhausted surface.

A “mistake” is beside the point. Once anything happens, it authentically is.

Step by step the singers stumble forward into a thicket of tangled harmonies. Something reaches out and trips the tune.

He toys with square roots and looks for secret messages in the digits of pi. He calculates the area of countless right triangles and maps the ebb and flow of French and German armies across five hundred years of Europe. Teachers rotate like the circle of fifths, each of them insisting that childhood give way to accumulating fact.

At six minutes into the amazement, the five galloping melodies align in a quintuple fugue. Lines echo and overlap, revealing where the music has been heading from the opening Do. They plait together too tightly for Peter’s ear to make out everything that happens inside the five-way weave.

He does his best to sound enthused, but the posse sees through him. They drill another tune into him: “The Great Pretender.” It’s a catchy sing-along that turns into Chinese water torture after the first chorus.

Tonic. Subdominant. Dominant. Those guys need to learn some new chords.

It doesn’t go anywhere, Pauly. It just sits there, circling the drain.

His brother gets that faraway look: the sledge, the sex, the drill of infant rock. You can’t hear that? Freedom, you dried-up little turd! Peter hears only harmonic jail.

Thirty yards out, kids swarm a plywood float lashed to empty oil drums, like ants massing a melting sugar cube. Shore-hugging uncles fish beer bottles from an ice-filled zinc trough and open them on the trough’s handle. Aunts and worse stretch out on beach blankets in a suntan assembly line.

Peter can’t name the secret of the suite’s power. But somehow its first few notes, like the rays of sunrise over eastern mountains, lay down a foundation for all the developments to come. They return at the end, layered against an old Shaker hymn tune, to make a sound bigger than any country. He can’t say how that simple return produces a release so spacious and shattering.

They squabble over the buses down South, the black and white chess game for the nation’s soul.

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 accelerating vehicle would one day have to hit the wall, and it was Els’s luck to be alive at the moment of smash-up.

She wasn’t married; she wasn’t even single. Men who weren’t scared of her were usually sociopaths.

A pause came across the line. For decades in the classroom, Els had told his composition students that rests were the most powerful elements in a composer’s palette.

The silences were the thing that the notes were powerless to reach.

To Els, music and chemistry were each other’s long-lost twins: mixtures and modulations, spectral harmonies and harmonic spectroscopy.

The formulas of physical chemistry struck him as intricate and divine compositions.

Dealing with bureaucracies required no more than the patience of an animal and the simplicity of a saint. He could fake both, for a while.

The morning air smelled silly with possibility.

The country’s collective concentration was simply shot. People couldn’t hold a thought or pursue a short-term goal for anywhere near as long as they could a few years before, back in the waning days of analog existence.

the study gave Els the same shudder he’d felt the day he first saw a list of the top one hundred terms that passed through the world’s largest search engine. Soon afterward, he began choosing silence over any kind of background listening.

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

Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn’t yet destroyed.

All my music ever wanted was to tunnel into forever through the wall of Now.

She showed him her latest art: a quilt bigger than both of them, pinwheels of azure and ochre. She wrinkled up her nose. Learned how to do this from my maiden aunt when I was twelve. Kind of an old lady hobby, isn’t it? Something magical to it: rags into riches, scraps into art.

noise is music by its maiden name.

People can’t stand too much anarchy. They need pattern. Repetition. Meaningful design.

He looked up, toward the garden plots. The air droned like the tinnitus that had plagued him in his sixties and made him want to mercy-kill himself. One low trill split into two, a minor second. The interval turned metallic. A moment more, and the pitches collapsed back into unison.

The ringing resumed, a Lilliputian air raid. The new chord bent into more grating intervals—a flat third, widening to almost a tritone—a glacial creation like Xenakis or Lucier, one of those cracked Jeremiahs howling in the wilderness, looking for a way beyond. The sky-wide trill filled the air with sonic pollen, like the engines of a fleet of interstellar spaceships each the size of a vanilla wafer. It filled the air at every distance, too sweet for locusts or cicadas. Bats didn’t shriek in broad daylight, and birds didn’t sing in chorus. Something abundant and invisible was playing with harmony, and Els turned student again.

A quartet of Shade residents came through the sliding glass, William Bock among them. Seeing his teacher, the ceramic engineer stopped to listen. Holy crap! What’s that? The guessing began, but no theory held up. In the distance, children with pennywhistles, wind clacking the branches, the hiss of pole-mounted power transformers, a murmuration of starlings, rooftop ventilation units, a muffled marching band drilling on a school football field miles away. That’s how Lisa Keane, dressed for gardening, found them, ...

You gonna sit there with a broom up your sphincter, afraid to tap your feet? You’ve all forgotten where music comes from. Why do you think they’re called movements?

Maddy pours the champagne into paper cones. Bonner insists they clink. Bubbly spills from the mushy flutes onto the frozen earth. To putting the past to bed, Richard toasts. To waking the future, Els says. To staying in the Beautiful Now, Maddy adds, although they’re already leaving.

Pushing Sara’s stroller through the Victory Gardens, Els sees with terrible clarity the hubris of his twenties. He can’t for his life imagine why he ever signed on for the full Faust ride. For years, he’s struggled to write something thorny and formidable, as if difficulty alone ensured lasting admiration. Now he sees that what the world really needs is a lullaby simple enough to coax a two-year-old to lay down her frantic adventure each night for another eight hours.

IT BECOMES THEIR rolling litany. Let’s make something. Make what? Something good. Good how? Good and grumpy? No: Good and gentle. Good and treelike. Good like a bird.

I wanted music to be the antidote to the familiar. That’s how I became a terrorist.

Music isn’t about things, he says. It is things.

Sara couldn’t get enough of the trivial tune. Even Maddy was caught humming the hook around the apartment. The earworm was as brutal as a bad case of flu. Maddy shook her head at the song’s total delight.

He fell back on a diversity that bordered on plagiarism. He’d lived all his life under the tyranny of originality. Now he was free to be as derivative as he needed.

Insecurity will always be a growth industry. The economy now depends on fear.

He found the news channel, cowering between fourth-generation reality shows.

She ordered an expensive Bordeaux and offered a toast: To unearned forgiveness. I was a monster, Peter. One confused little shit of a girl. Forgive me? Nothing to forgive, he said, but clinked her glass anyway.

He was safest now in crowds. And crowds of the young, who tended to look away, embarrassed, from anyone careless enough to have let himself get old.

The nation has been panicked for ten years. And if spreading panic is the measure, every news anchor is a terrorist.

More fires followed, which Bonner had the time of his life running around putting out. He turned an angry cast uprising into a cathartic breakthrough. In three days of shuttle diplomacy, he resolved an ego war between the conductor and the choral director. He threw the crew’s continuous litany of insults and injuries into Münster’s cauldron and let the flavors simmer.

To call any music subversive, to say that a set of pitches and rhythms could pose a threat to real power . . . ludicrous. And yet, from Plato to Pyongyang, that endless need to legislate sounds.

Please. No nostalgia. It’s unbecoming in a bioterrorist.

They sat across from each other at a red molded table that would still be around long after the race had cooked itself to death.

The middle-aged lovers at the next table—married, but so obviously not to each other—stood and walked away, giggling and licking ice cream off each other’s fingers.