Ressler's face drops before he sees that the woman's calm is affected, her euphoria about to blow out every pore. "The rest of the catalog is just sweat." It is not, in fact. He begins to see how there's always call for one more insight, one more piece of improvised ingenuity. But labeling, controlled mutagen-tailoring of the submitted message, poly-dinucleotides, combinatorics, short chains — time-consuming, meticulous, brute lexical mop-up will get them through.
"Simple," she concurs. "Dr. Johnson's dictionary." But beneath the sardonic restraint, they both know he has done the hard part. He has listed the set of imperatives for lifting the curtain. Her excitement is unconcealable, and it spills out of her in cautionary checks. "Anyone wishing to make a little conversation with the angels has to remember that jeder Engel ist schrecklich." At his blank, startled look, she laughs and glosses, "Every angel is terrible. You've told Dr. Koss?"
Something, a slight rise in the woman's cheerful tone, warns Ressler that she knows the half of what she is asking. He feels the last step in an untraceable hierarchy of chemical events flush his face, conveying the source by suppressing it. Enzyme spray laces his central nervous system. He will not go on this way, pretending. He cannot bear it. And now, he need not. Heart, lungs, viscera do a Coney Island. He is diminished, augmented all at once, hung out on the first intervals of a melody that pronounce him infinitely powerful and shatteringly afraid, a pairing he needs no code wheel to read. Promise first. You must never die.
Now he can promise. He can go to her, say, "See what a flower I have found you." No more cause, no possible loss, no need for this denial, the refusal they have fallen into, the separation standing in for life. She must get free. The two of them must marry, must make, of the time still in front of them, the everyday miracle time already hints at. He will go to her, tell her he has sprung through to the far side. He holds the answer in his hands; hers if she wants it. He will ask her help and offer her his, daily and for good. What will it be like then, how impossible, necessary, and real, to be able to look up from anything he is thinking, working on, just look up — nothing so simple as that — and speak to her, hear her, be with her?
"I haven't told her yet," he says. "But she's next."
Theory and Composition
Sometimes we played a game, essentially Name that Tune. Our friend would challenge us: "A sequence please, some clues, But make it something from the repertoire I've had some chance in this amateur's life of having heard."
The point was not mastery of the catalog, but the pleasure in quotation: Were we familiar with those few measures, a certain interval, a favorite leap; that abiding high G in the 'cello, surprise rising fifths, agitation in the reeds?
He thought themes between us might make an intimacy, could be almost like singing. We didn't get it: "How long should the phrase be?" "How long do I need? Give it to me a tone at a time. One after the other; I'll stop you when I'm home."
We tried him on our most obscure: Stamitz, Machaut, Cui. Then graduated to guilty loves. At last, it grew fun to see if Gilbert and Sullivan, slowed to a stop and in minor, might slip him. Or "Satisfaction." "Watchman, Tell Us of the Night."
I thought: so this is melody.
Leased office, dull mechanical hum, irritating flicker of fluorescence, and a few friends, stretching their vocal cords. A little patter, a little mix of the dozen available intervals. And out of this weight on the chest, our desolation, came a sudden sweep, a quick-closing glimpse of that place beyond the incurable, where hope might Still germinate.
We resorted to the concert war-horses. The point was to see how far they might be sliced down, pared back to their essentials, and still be recognizable. Ressler was uncanny. Even with my feeble approximations, he could get most of what I knew by heart in a few pitches. Half by reading my mind, half by the shape of the phrase, he got Brahms's Fourth, first movement, in four.
The suggestion of predictability in the masters outraged Todd. "Now how in hell, out of all possible choices—"
"That's just the point. Each note reduces the choices that are left. What pitch could possibly come after such a setup? And if you already know the next pitch, then you know the piece."
Todd persisted, confused. "Tell me: could you conceivably Name That Tune in three?"
"Not if the notes formed an ascending triad. The whole question is, within acceptable tonal syntax, how likely the sequence of intervals becomes. Where do they point? Is the next pitch already telegraphed? Some sequences are so free, so without redundancy, that they might lead anywhere. Others are more constrained. Every melody heaps up improbability until, by the cadence, it can only be the one thing it is. If your three pitches were improbable enough, they might suffice to prove the private domain of, say, Shostakovich. Or Dragnet"
"And two notes, then? Still possible?"
"Don't push your luck."
"One?"
"Pure potential! No edge; no message. One note could be the start of any tune at all."
It took a trained reductionist, someone who arrived at effusion relatively late in life, to see the shape of songs governed by information theory. Perhaps he did so simply to lead Frank on, force him to toughen his own indulgence toward washes of sound. Whatever the case, Ressler tested the first, tentative equation relating music to constituent melody and melody to strings of frequencies, simple sequence.
Q: I'm just your middle-distance listener. Forgive me asking: if it's really language, a matter of tending toward tonic, being driven back, how can fragments of phrase, motives, voices stacked into chords, moments that strain toward greater departure or return, how can these explain, begin to account for, the terrace of light, mottled rays guttering back to dark, joy, loss, the scent of my own ending in this syllable-free tune? Layman's answer please.
J. O'D.
Sound, he pronounced, always means more than it says. The parts only start to explain the thing waiting to spring out of them. So it is in every organized hive. Because we live on the seam between formula and mystery, because I can recognize in the harmonic vicissitudes the hummable tune is put through some similar, metaphorical bend, music marks out the way all messages go. Its contours deliver themselves, bent from the chance of experience. They live for a minute in ephemeral pattern, then collapse back to a uniform void that says nothing, carries no knowledge, far less information. The silence they fall back into, the nothing that they contrast with, is what notes make, for a measure, audible.
What else is there in a melodic phrase? However much it wrenches me on the promise of sound, signals from a place lost beyond recovering, a musical line has nothing in it but notes. A choice of twelve possible pitch-equivalents, durations scored out by a simple-minded system of ten or so lengths based on powers of two. What else is there in an allegro but phrase, phrase, and development of phrase? What is there in the Jupiter but allegro, andante, minuet, plus allegro? At bottom, only notes.
But notes passed through a transforming key: nothing is what it is except in where, when, and how it goes about unfolding. Push that pencil box of notes, pitch it faster, prolong it, pinch it, prod it upwards, follow its fall, attach it to a line, stack voices on top of it, slacken, shift it off into unlikely relation, let it breathe, grow, summon, augment, enhance, startle everything around it, and suddenly, out of those ridiculously constrained initial building blocks, those neutral frequencies meaningless in themselves, with only the most elementary grammar or enzymes to shape them: