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the key to re-enchantment still lay in walking backward into the future.
Cage: “Nothing is accomplished by writing, playing, or listening to music.” Hear that or miss everything—even what’s within earshot.
Doesn’t it bother you? she’d asked. Eight-tenths of every piece performed in a major venue, written by one of twenty-five composers? I’d be fine with it, if it were the right twenty-five.
Or (more Cage) “the mind may give up its desire to improve on creation and function as a faithful receiver of experience.”
Mr. Composer, she said, crawling on top of him. You got something to sing about? He does. And the somethings are all her. She can blow away a year’s worth of his fear with a single amused pout.
Maddy’s eyes crossed a little when he went on too long about harmonic structure. She had no need to talk about music, only to make it.
And yet, when Powers writes about music it’s as if n one has done so before
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?
Crazy’s up to you. I’m not sure what that means. Those hundred thousand peace protesters, trying to levitate the Pentagon? Okay, Els said. I get it. Crazy. No! She crushed his fingers in hers until he winced. They could have done it, if they’d really wanted to. Science is built on stranger things.
Cage again: “What is the purpose of writing music? . . . A purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play.”
Inside, it’s something out of Dante. The cavernous oval swarms with people gone feral under the waterfalls of light. Bands, dancers, and actors perform on platforms throughout the space. Down on the show floor, milling past the livestock judging stands, spectators jostle, jockey, flinch, and wince, grinning, wigging, gaping, shrieking, and freaking at the happy havoc. They drift in a giant clockwise whirlpool, like Mecca hajjis circling the Kaaba, around a tower of rubber tubes and lead pipes in the center of the show floor, on which they take turns banging.
Here, music is holy or mind blowing or nothing
Nothing changes, except for the Imp Saint’s litany, playing through Els’s head: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
Musicircus: Cage’s latest way of saying how noise is music by its maiden name. But in this insane din, Els can’t for the life of him remember why that idea held such promise once.
Maddy bolted from her seat and jerked her unwilling body up the stairs and out to center stage, where, shocked by a sudden rush of will, she sang: The truth is, truth is, truth is . . . The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off . .
Borges Songs
What are you afraid of? I’m assuming you’ve already seen her naked. Oh, Jesus. Richard. What if I’m wrong for her? What if this isn’t meant to be? Es muß sein, Maestro. What if I ruin this woman’s life? Oh, that would be awful! Especially after swearing to use your powers only for good. Richard, what am I doing? You’re leaping, Peter. For the first time in your life. And it’s a thing of beauty.
He found a disc by a group called Anthrax, as if some real bioterrorist had planted it there to frame him. He looked around the cottage for something to play it on. In the kitchen he found a nineties-style boom box. He slipped the disc into the slot and with a single rim shot was surrounded by an air raid announcing the end of the world. A driving motor rhythm in the drums propelled virtuosic parallel passages in the guitars and bass. The song came on like a felon released from multiple life sentences.
It’s like nobody before Powers has ever heard music, like nobody ever wrote about music before. He defies Barthes’ claim that all writing about music is just adjectives
The band had been around for half of Els’s life, servicing the need for anarchy written into people’s cells. He wondered which of this middle-class, outdoorsy family was responsible for the disc. Probably not Mom, although the thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.
Paul swam in a sea of theories. Everything from the morning’s headlines to the license plates of buses had hidden significance. But Paul’s torrent of interpretations had something joyous to it. Buried patterns everywhere. It sounded, sometimes, almost like musicology.
the ten million Facebook frenemies they will meet in heaven.
She turns at the door, surprised by the song’s sudden brightening. She catches Els’s eye and frowns. He holds up two fingers in a covert wave. She waves back, baffled, and disappears into the night. She, too, will die wanting things she won’t even be able to name. Her shed boyfriend will look forever for a music that will revive this night. A few steps into the embracing air outside this café and they’ll both be bewildered, old.
You want something, Els said. Bonner looked at him, startled by the insight. Dying for it. And you don’t know what. Oh, but I do. I want to wake people from their dream of safety. And you think I can help you do that. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who wants more than I do. Look at you! Not afraid to torch your entire life. Writing for no one.
Life fills the world with copies of itself. Music and viruses both trick their hosts into copying them.
The watchdog is talking. He has panicked the whole nation. The nation has been panicked for ten years. And if spreading panic is the measure, every news anchor is a terrorist.
Shostakovich’s Fifth—a condemned man writing the accompaniment to his own execution.
The fireplug preacher Rothmann, in his dark robes, mounts the stone bank rimming the plaza’s fountain. Whoever says “This is mine, that is yours”—that man steals from you!
From the first leaping figure in the strings, Els heard again the problem with music. Even the slightest tune sounded like a story. Melody played on the brain like a weather report, an avowal of faith, gossip, a manifesto. The tale came across, clearer than words. But there was no tale.
the firestorm of 1936. An adventurous composer, at the top of his Orphic game, brilliant, unpredictable, admired by everyone. For two years, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District played to near-total acclaim. Then the Pravda article—“Muddle Instead of Music”—a rabid, all-out attack on Shostakovich and everything his music stood for. Problem was, the anonymous author turned out to be that culture fan and amateur music critic, Stalin.
Then the shadow falls on Shostakovich. The composer asks his powerful admirer Marshal Tukhachevsky for help. Tukhachevsky appeals to Stalin to spare Shostakovich. Soon the marshal himself is arrested and executed. Brittle, tense, and close to suicide, Shostakovich works on. But the piece that comes out of him is worse than the first offense. The Fourth Symphony: filled with audible treason. Days before the premiere, Shostakovich suppresses the piece and chooses to go on living. To call any music subversive, to say that a set of pitches and rhythms could pose a threat to real power . . .
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You will hardly know who I am or what I mean.
Plurals
They slaughter infected poultry all across Asia. A holocaust of birds. Birds die by the millions, infected or not. Safety is a concept piece, at best.
The guardians carry on flying their nightly sorties. Drones gather data from all the planet’s hotbeds. Recon units comb those last few holdout places that elude the grid. Virtuoso interpreters of chatter listen in on all frequencies. Everywhere, agents break up attacks before they’re even planned. In another few weeks, an airborne squad will drop into the compound of the supreme artist of panic—fugitive these last ten years—and slaughter him. That death will change nothing. Panic, like any art, can never be unmade.
Powers wields a silken whip
After two years of listening, Els woke one morning and realized that he was done, even with Bach’s bottomless buffet. The surprises were over. The brilliance had gone routine. He could anticipate every outlandish dissonance hidden in those independent lines. And where do you go, once you’ve memorized the sublime?
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.
Dr. L’Heureux ordered a scan. The scanner was a large tube much like one of those Tokyo businessmen’s hotels.
It seemed to Els, as another slice of his brain filled the screen, that classical music’s real crime was not its cozy relations with fascism but its ancient dream of control, of hot-wiring the soul.
Yet the tiny gray islands in his silver brain reassured Peter. Whatever musical facility he’d lost was not his fault. He wasn’t being punished. The scattered dead spots on the screen joined together into a pattern. The islands of silence shaped the still-surging ocean of noise around them. He’d always told his students that rests were the most expressive paints in a composer’s palette. The silences were there to make the notes more urgent.
Everything he heard was new and strange. Two-tone, four-by-four garage, rare groove, riot grrrl, red dirt, country rap, cybergrind, cowpunk, neo-prog, neo-soul, new jack swing . . . He’d never dreamed that people could need so many kinds of music.
As more and more people made more and more songs, almost every piece would go unheard. But that, too, was beautiful. For then, almost every piece could be someone’s buried treasure.
He returned to the life of a sole proprietorship, but now without a way to pass the days. Still, the days passed, many in a major key. He had his phone calls with his daughter, whose every word delighted him. He had her gift, Fidelio, his elated companion on long walks nowhere. 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? 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
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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.
Powers distills
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 waves of compressed air falling on the eardrum touched off chain reactions that flooded the body in signals and even changed the expression of genes.
it made perfect sense that an entire school, with its own society, journal, and annual conferences, had sprung up around biocomposing.
String quartets were performing the sequences of amino acids in horse hemoglobin. 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.
His own music had no corner on obscurity. Almost every tune that the world had to offer would forever be heard by almost no one.
lying in bed before falling asleep, he’d heard soundtracks extracted from DNA—strange murmurings transposed from the notorious four-letter alphabet of nucleotides into the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale. But the real art would be to reverse the process, to inscribe a piece for safekeeping into the genetic material of a bacterium. The precise sounds that he inscribed into the living cell were almost immaterial: birdsong, a threnody, the raw noise of this arboretum, music spun from the brain that those self-replicating patterns had led to, four billion years on. Here was the one durable
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Sorry Carl Sagan but fuck ur gold record
The year has had no real spring. Much of the country jumps straight from December to June. In Barstow, it’s August already. The freak weather may be nothing to worry about. Not for extremophiles, anyway. Bacteria need worry about almost nothing.
The highway is narrow, and the backdrafts of passing cars rock him. Els edges along the shoulder, probing another stretch of rail. On such a spot, eight forsaken Depression hitchhikers scribbled bottle-messages to no one. Eight anonymous pleas, turned into an ethereal, banal, subversive, conservative set of microtonal mini–folk songs, Harry Partch’s signature piece: Barstow. Easy place to land in, hard place to get out of. It’s January twenty-six. I’m freezing. Ed Fitzgerald, Age 19. 5 feet 10 inches, black hair, brown eyes. Going home to Boston Massachusetts, It’s 4 p.m., and I’m hungry and
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Tramp Quixote, visionary bum, indigent in a collapsing country. Prophet in the wilderness, sure that only an outsider could find the way through. A man of no compromises. A mean drunk. Gay, for what that was worth, like so many of the century’s best composers. In any case: Did not work and play well with others. And convinced that the salvation of music required cutting an octave into forty-three pitches.
To hell with it—I’m going to walk!
Harry Partch
Partch was right about so much. Twelve chromatic pitches are nowhere near enough. They doom a composer to a series of already explored phrases, progressions, and cadences. They slip a straitjacket over the continuous richness of speech. “The composer yearns for the streaking shades of sunset. He gets red. He longs for geranium, and gets red. He dreams of tomato, but he gets red. He doesn’t want red at all, but he gets red, and is presumed to like it.”
the spot that once made Partch scribble down in ecstasy: In the willowed sands of the American River, within the city, I gaze up at the enthillion stars and bless the giver. And she shall be multiply blessed, for at every approaching dusk I shall thumb my nose at tomorrow . . .
! Where I traded acid for shake weed, a hitcher myself
