I’ve already told you I studied with Morton Feldman, yes? Don’t bother to check—you won’t find me on Wikipedia’s list of his “notable” students, though I see they’ve got Kyle Gann, as well they should, and even Elliott Sharp. Back in the eighties, I wrote the music for a Canadian horror movie you wouldn’t have heard of—not that you’ve heard of Morton Feldman—which gave us the down payment for this house. I used to call it my big score; was that not witty? And ten years ago, or I guess more like fifteen, the Kronos was supposedly going to record a piece of mine, but of course by then they had Tan Dun—there’s a son of a bitch who knows how to work it—as well as the Africans and whoever else.
Oh well. Even back when I was studying with Mort, I knew that whatever sang to him was never going to sing to me. He knew it, too. But once, when I was broke, he bought me dinner and when he died, a couple of years before we moved up here, I helped put together a tribute in Boston; wasn’t I the shit back then? We recruited players from the BSO to do For Samuel Beckett, the last thing he ever wrote, and for a curtain raiser I’d worked up Palais de mari, his final piano piece. The chamber orchestra for the Beckett outnumbered the audience. You play Feldman with the sustain pedal mostly down, to make the notes after the notes, the echoes and harmonics, ring and shimmer and beat against one another inside the piano. A couple of minutes into it, I got lost in listening, fucked up a note, fucked up another—I doubt now that anybody noticed—and just got up and walked off. They must have thought I was too devastated to continue. So of course you’re asking yourself, Did he secretly have it in for this man?
Mort once assigned us to write a piece for soprano and string quartet based on an item out of The Buffalo News, and ever since I’ve mostly stuck to setting other people’s words—a sufficiently dinky arena for my dinky gift. This is going to sound like I’m bullshitting, but back in Buffalo I started writing a Watergate opera—this was long before Nixon in China. Then, around the time the Kronos deal was happening, or not happening, I thought I’d better take notice of hip-hop, as old hacks like Milhaud had felt they’d better take notice of jazz. Ah, that was the answer: sample a smidgen of Boulez or Golden P. Harris, whatever struck your fancy—this was where intuition came in—and sequence them to a dance beat, so people might actually listen to it, then put your text on top. In Sprechstimme: no more screwing around waiting for some melody to sing itself to you. I even bought a Roland 808, which I’ve still got up in the attic. And after I got over that, the answer was what? One’s oh-so-personal vision?
At any rate, I’m now working toward working on a piece—a little Gesamtkunstwerk, you might say, since it’ll involve some visuals in performance—that I’m calling Alcorian A-1949. This is how they’ve registered Ted Williams’s frozen corpse at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. Did I tell you I saw Ted Williams once? My father took me to Fenway when I was six, just so I could say I saw him. And now I’ve said it. How I got the idea, there’s a man at the nursing home, Jimmy Condon, who used to be a great friend of the Gartners. Jimmy doesn’t let them wheel him out much—he says it gets him down to see old people—but I bring him what he calls “reading matter.” He likes fat paperbacks, mostly histories, and since he follows the Sox, I naturally thought of him when that biography of Ted Williams came out. The next time I went in, he handed it back. “Maybe you want to pass this along to somebody else,” he said. “You know his son put him in the deep freeze? Ted Williams. Yes sir. And then they cut off his head and froze that.” He drew a finger across his throat. “But I’ll tell you who was a hell of an athalete—Gene Conley. He’d pitch for the Sox and then turn right around and play for the Celtics. Two sports. Nobody can do that anymore.”
That made me curious enough to read the book myself—if I’d known how depressing it got toward the end, I would never have inflicted it on Jimmy. Not just the head business, but fat old Ted Williams, stroked out, hooked to machines, disinheriting his daughter and still signing autographs on his deathbed for his son to sell. But how the man could blaspheme!
Virgin Mary All-Clapped-Up Mother of God!
Cocksucking fucken syphilitic Jesus!
I could hear him singing to me—and how often did that happen anymore? So my idea was, you have the singer up there—a soprano, since you don’t want maleness to be an issue—and you see only this head, with white makeup like the Commendatore, and it’s singing from this place beyond this life but not in the next life either. I’d prefer that the singer shave her head, but I suppose that would have to be negotiable. As I say, I’ve been working toward working on it.
I don’t imagine you know the name Roberto Loomis, but they gave him an NEA a couple of years ago. He’s got CDs out on Lovely Music, which he always has them send me, and I’ll say this for him—his stuff is less unlistenable than mine. The reason I mention him, he was one of my students, back when he was Bob Loomis from somewhere in Idaho. At the time he came into my composition class, he was a death-metalhead who’d belatedly begun studying classical guitar; I got him listening to Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. He emailed me the other day, to say he was organizing a festival in February, in Cozumel, and did I have anything he might consider. Well now: to have one’s work considered, and by Roberto Loomis no less. Was he looking to enhance his credibility by passing me off as a neglected master? Anything, please, but an act of kindness. At any rate, it’s given me some incentive to get on with this Ted Williams piece. For which one is obliged to feel grateful. Which in turn must account for the nasty tone one hears oneself taking.
—
I had washed the dishes and mowed the lawn, and the sun hung low over the hill, an hour from touching the treetops, which would be sweet Nature’s signal that the first drink might now be poured. I was sitting on the porch, going through Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero with a yellow highlighter, when a Mini Cooper with Rhode Island plates pulled into the dooryard. I got up to greet Jessamyn, and as she walked toward me I saw that she’d changed from her black dress into tight jeans, the tops of her thighs just touching, and a loose denim shirt. She turned around, as if to show me those womanly charms, and looked back at the graveyard. “Gran always used to say how she’d like to be buried up there,” she said. “So now she gets to be shipped out to fucking Harrisburg.”
“Is that where her family was from? Come on up and sit.”
“His family. She hated those people. That was Gramp’s sister—with the walker? I always thought she was a witch. Can I look in the barn first? We used to make hay forts in there.”
“My daughter did the same thing,” I said. “Great place to grow up. I always thought.”
“If you can deal with a little weirdness,” she said. “I mean, you know about our ghost.”
“Your grandmother did say something about it.”
“Oh, old what’s-his-face? That was bullshit. No, there was this little girl who used to play with me. Gran wanted to think she was like my imaginary friend.”
“I never heard of a little girl.”
“Seriously? Well, maybe she—I don’t know, what does anybody know about this stuff? You don’t mind if I look in the house after? And then I’ll get right out of your hair.”
I went back to work, but Ted Williams wasn’t singing to me today—hadn’t been for weeks, really—and until he did there was no point in going inside to the piano. A breeze had come up, and every now and again I’d hear an apple hit the ground.