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Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.
By the time Peter first heard Mahler’s songs, his own childhood had long since died. It ended with his father’s heart attack, the raft uprising. For a long time, nothing softened Peter’s guilt about that day more than listening to the best of his father’s records: the Jupiter, the Eroica, the Unfinished. Once or twice, the music reopened that purer world, just alongside his own. Then his mother got rid of all his father’s records, all his clothes, every possession that gave memory any power over the present. Without even asking her children, she donated the music to Goodwill.
Why should bottomless grief feel so bracing? The day is lovely; don’t be afraid. Over the decades, he’d read many theories about why sad music lifted the listener: The antibody theory. The sanctuary theory. Shadowboxing. Mastery by habituation. Mahler himself expressed pity for a world that would one day have to listen to these songs. Yet the cycle has sweetened Els’s life beyond saying.
in otherworldly consolation. He knew beyond a doubt that it did not. Something more was happening in those final measures, and to hear it, all a person had to do was listen. He searched for a long time for someone to confirm the eviscerating lilt of that final, music-box lullaby. Years passed, the articles piled up, and at last Els reached the one possible conclusion: music said only what the ear could bear to hear. Listen, Clara said. These are the deaths that start everything.
rests were the most powerful elements in a composer’s palette. The negative space, that little, ambiguous leap before the Heil. The silences were the thing that the notes were powerless to reach.
But she had turned Els into a pilgrim listener. Before Clara, no piece had any real power to hurt him. After, he heard danger everywhere.
Music, he’ll tell anyone who asks over the next fifty years, doesn’t mean things. It is things.
his music will circle around the same vivid gesture: a forward, stumbling surge that wavers, sometimes in a single measure, between the key of hope and the atonal slash of nothingness.
Shostakovich’s third string quartet from a public tribunal. The tribunal accused
The shining form in front of him pulled away again, laying waste to sloth, anomie, idle thought, and metaphor.
server farm on the far side of the planet was piping down one hundred million tracks of recorded music into her blood pressure cuff, and none suited. 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.
Clara had told him how Mahler sent the young Alma Schindler the manuscript of the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony without any explanation. Alma sent it back, inscribed with the word “Yes.” Weeks later, they married.
Clara never bothered to tell Els the rest of the Mahler courtship fable. Only when Alma entered Gustav’s life did his music descend into real despair. Battles, lies, betrayal, death. All the stoic affirmation of the young songs and symphonies—What the Universe Tells Me, etc.—ran smack into incurable bitterness. Adorno called Mahler ein schlechter Jasager: a poor yes-sayer. Once Alma entered his life and the two of them began flaying each other raw, Mahler could do nothing but continue saying the word, with less and less conviction or cause.
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.
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.
chance was just an order that you hadn’t yet perceived.
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.
And Peter, who’d written the songs for forever and for no one, but also to strike remorse in the heart of the woman who’d cut him loose from across the Atlantic four years earlier, now wanted only to put his ear up to the clavicle of this other, warmer woman and hear what there was inside her so worth humming about.
There’s joy in a minor key, a deep pleasure to be had from hearing the darkest tune and discovering you’re equal to it.
Her eyes went wide, as if adulthood had taught her, too, that chance was an order no one could yet see.
He threw himself into the crushing routine. A few semesters of teaching the rudiments of music made him realize how little of the mystery of organized vibrations he’d ever understood. The whole enigma unfolded in front of him, and he stood back from it as baffled as a beginner. He tried to tell his freshmen the simplest things—why a deceptive cadence makes a listener ache or how a triplet rhythm creates suspense or what makes a modulation to a relative minor broaden the world—and found he didn’t know.
Only the thought of lying down forever kept him moving.
He went to Mozart. He pored over the Jupiter, as a scholar might. But even the cosmic finale was lost in familiarity, or something worse. The notes were all still there, audible enough. But they’d flattened out, somehow, lost their vigor. And the phrases they formed sounded metallic and dun. It took him some weeks to realize: His hearing had changed. He was just sixty-five, but something had broken in the way he heard.
There was nothing more pressing to do all day, every day, except think about the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?
Best line of the book
At sixty-eight, Els could think about the question only a little at a time. He read what he could find—the distilled knowledge of hundreds of experts. He couldn’t follow all the physiology. The body had evolved to feel fear, hope, thrill, and peace in the presence of certain semi-ordered vibrations; no one knew why. It made no sense that a few staggered chords could make the brain love an unmet stranger or grieve for friends who hadn’t died. Nobody could say why Barber moved listeners and Babbitt didn’t, or whether an infant might be raised to weep at Carter. But all the experts agreed that
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No listener would ever need more than a fraction of the music that had already been made, but something inside the cells needed to make a million times more.
He’s beyond frail, hulled out, fighting for that lone resource of any consequence, focus.
There’s a place Els has been to, a few times in this life. A place free from the dream of security, where the soul beats to everything with a rhythm. And every one of his few visits there has reminded him: We’re entitled to nothing, and soon to inherit. We’re free to be lost, free to shine, free to cut loose, free to drown. But part of a harmony beyond the ear, and able, for a moment, to move. I wanted awe.
All my life I thought I knew what music was. But I was like a kid who confuses his grandfather with God.
