There is only one way for day to pass into dark; today has done so along a predictable sliding scale since the Precambrian. There are only a few barometric pressures, a narrow band of allowable temperatures. But however reducible to parts — degree, pound per square inch, lumen, hour by the clock, latitude, inclination and season — however simple and limited the rules for varying these, something in the particular combination of elements is, like twelve notes and ten durations compounded into a complex cortex-storm, unique, unrepeatable, infinitely unlikely. Today in History: Bach knocks out another cantata.
I hear him listening with a code-breaker's urge, taking noise and turning it to pattern, thinking to find with ear and voice a surrogate, an emblem for the melody of the self-composing gene. The absurd conclusion I cannot help but reach — that singing means something — is rooted in Ressler's choice: either be a physician, cropping the delinquent tissue, or a researcher, a musician, mapping anatomy, the way the tissue lies. Two choices that amount to one thing. To feel the pattern flash, summoning an account for the gut-twist in a deceptive cadence. In either case, conspire to produce and deliver that new song the obsolete Lord requires.
Listen and sing. That's all he wrote. And I can name that tune in one note.
Breaking and Entering
"So you see, Jimmy, we'll need access."
I listened as the professor sat on the hospital bed and explained. It became clear to me what he had in mind. It even became clear to Annie, who leaned over during Dr. Ressler's explanation and whispered, "So it's time to get our feet dirty."
How he could imagine that stroked and broken Jimmy, who had wanted pitifully to tell us of his father's death twenty years ago, was in any shape to assist was beyond me. Yet Ressler spoke to him without condescension, apologizing for spelling out the obvious. His words had a confidence in the ability of signals to survive the shattered receiver. I watched Ressler reach into his jacket pocket and momentarily thought he was about to pull out a handheld terminal and plug it into the wall jack in that hospital room.
Instead, he retrieved a lower-tech spiral notepad and flipped to a blank page. The pad was packed with illegible scrapings, although I had never once seen Ressler make a single mark into anything resembling it.
He printed methodically, in large block letters down six columns of six, the letters of the alphabet and the ten digits. "I'm sorry we have to resort to this, Jimmy. But I have to be sure we get it right." Jimmy made no sound. I thought: He might as well be talking to himself. "Let's start with the operating system lockout. You lie still. When I get to the first letter, let me know." He smiled reassuringly, betraying none of the hopelessness of this attempt, the only shot we had for getting Jimmy reinstated under the umbrella of an institution that, understandably, had no stake in private welfare. Dr. Ressler began at the top of the first column, pointing to each letter and pronouncing the corresponding name.
I stood and walked to the door. I could not stand to watch them get to the bottom of the last column, Ressler pointing and naming while Jimmy lay in confusion. Then, an agonizing twenty letters into the list, Jimmy made a noise. Not a howl or sigh. An indicative yes. Ressler's shoulders dropped in relief. He noted the letter and brought his pen back to the top.
It was a grueling process, and Jimmy had to rest twice. But after the first letter, we were home. Jimmy gave us dozens of crucial bits of information — passwords, memory locations, patch names— that until then had been the secret domain of the Operations Manager. Whatever else the flood of blood had wiped out — muscular control, speech, emotional perspective — it left Jimmy still able to remember the system words Ressler was asking him to spell. Nowhere in the dialogue was the message passed, "Betray your professional confidences, look the other way while we break the law, and we will do what we can to keep you from being killed." Ressler said only the letters of the alphabet; Jimmy made only grunts. But the transmission was there, intact, awful in its implied risk. Uncle Jimmy was the classic Picardian third: minor his whole life, promoted to major at the last chord.
XXVII
The Goldberg Variations
Its published name is wildly unassuming: "Keyboard Practice, Part IV. Composed for music lovers to refresh their spirits." One of only a handful of his thousand compositions to be published in his lifetime, in a form he never cared for, although perfected here.
Bach's first biographer tells the story, already thirdhand, of how Count Kaiserling, former Russian ambassador to Saxony, employed a young harpsichordist named Goldberg, one of Bach's star pupils. Goldberg's duties included making soft music in an adjoining room on those frequent nights when the Count had trouble sleeping. The Count commissioned Bach to compose for Goldberg something "of a soft and somewhat lively character," to assist against this periodic insomnia. A musical calmative, a treatment that now consists of two tablets and the low drone of talk radio.
Theme and variations, a form limited to "the sameness of the fundamental harmony" throughout, was just the ticket: sedative, soporific permutations jumping like counted sheep over a stile. From beginning to end, the Goldbergs were conceived, if not as an attempt to sing the listener to sleep, as a catalog that would at least keep the sleepless sufferer company, to hold at theme's length the nightmare of wakefulness. The best one can be is either doctor or musician. Both, if possible.
For this work, legend has it, Bach was rewarded with a goblet of one hundred gold louis, more than he was paid for scores of other works combined. The ambassador got off cheaply, taking possession of one of the supreme works in music history. Throughout the rest of his life, he referred to the piece as if it were his own composition. "Dear Goldberg, do play me one of my variations."
So much for the reading tale. The stuff any librarian can turn up. As for the architecture: the Goldbergs are twice as long as any previous variation collection. They form the most virtuosic and demanding piece for solo keyboard in any form until middle Beethoven. The set is built around a scheme of infinitely supple, proliferating relations. Each of the thirty is a complete ontogeny, unfolding until it denies that it differs at conception from all siblings by only the smallest mutation. Together they achieve a technical inventiveness and profundity unsurpassed in the rest of music, a catalog hinting at every aspect of tonal experience.
And the whole archive is hatched from an insipidly simple theme. One musicologist tried to convince a fellow scholar that the germ aria, a heavily ornamented period piece, was not even Bach's own. The eminent colleague disappeared into his study, emerging some time later (like Von Neumann affirming the obvious) shaking his head. "You're right. It's a piece of French fluff."
Bach's first act out of the block is to strip down this aria bacterium to its even simpler bass. For the longest time, until Ressler pointed it out, I couldn't hear how the wayward offspring had anything to do with parent. That's because the variations aren't descended from the aria per se. Rather, the aria itself is just another variation, built upon the all-generating, sarabande Base:
The Goldbergs are not even variations in the modern sense, but an imperceptibly vast chaconne, an evolutionary passacaglia built on the repetition and recycling of this Base. Music that goes nowhere, that simply is, hovering around the fixed center of diatonic time.
A line of pitches can be heard as a melodic sequence or as a series of harmonies. Bach's Base is both, at times even hybridizing horizontal and vertical. As with 90 percent of standard tonality, it is no more than an exploration of the possibilities hidden in the scale. The sequence is symmetrical to an extreme: two paired, complementary halves of sixteen notes each. Each half comprises four similar-shaped paired phrases — tension, release, tension, release — four notes long. Each pair of four-note phrases creates an eight-note harmonic section, four in all, tracing the fundamental journey from tonic to dominant to relative and back to tonic. Sixteen twos, eight fours, four eights, and two sixteens: with repeats, the trip from home and back takes sixty-four notes.