And they are a unity in a way that becomes clear to me only as I discover an even higher order of order imbedded in the set. The aria, itself just another organism synthesized from the Base, is repeated — completely overhauled, although note for note the same — da capo at the end. So there are not thirty but thirty-two variations in the set, one for each measure in each variation, for each note in the generating Base. Any reductionist attempt to capture the work in its understandable particulars, dropping from the set down to the variation down to one measure, produces a germ that is not a part of anything but a microcosm of the infolded whole.
The theme is all thirty-two notes, the Goldbergs, all thirty-two variations. Each moment is a miniature globe, an encoding of everything above it., The Goldbergs are layered all the way from bottom to top and back down again, with every layer of ordering — from canonically entering canons to contrasting triplet groups, from note to measure to line to variation to entire work and back to note — contributing to, particularizing, and lost in the next rung of the hierarchy it generates.
But the severe mathematics of recursive architecture are lost in the first ornament of aria. By the time the potential of the original sequence emerges, no ear can trace any but the faintest line of that all-embracing ground plan. No; Ressler was not listening to inversions and midpoint symmetries and numerologies and the closing of the diatonic circle. He was following the death of his friends, listening to how love fled, anticipating the dissonance of Jimmy's crippling, detecting and replaying his own departure from science: hearing, in the descent of four notes from Do, the script of life's particulars, brute specifics that too often became too much, too full, too awful to bear, too unendurably, transiently beautiful.
The canons proceed beyond the octave, start all over again at the ninth, as if to suggest, "We could do this for eons." The Goldbergs threaten to expand the modest four-note germ of the thirty-two note Base to the scale of infinite invention, a perpetual calendar. I hear Ressler talking to his love every night for thirty-two years, using no words other than those built on the alloted four letters, and never exhausting all he had to say to her. Once a grammar passes the complexity threshold, no algorithm can list all possible well-formed sentences. The diversity of language defies physical law, or rather, endless sentence-generation displays law in a new, unprecedented predication.
Sufficiently complex, the Goldbergs no longer know their own sarabande. They are no longer about permutation, manipulation, pattern. They are about the bliss of the sixth, the cut of the seventh, this drooping cadence, the suspension selecting for sorrow or serenity, a snowed-in weekend, late nights of conversation, anger, abandonment, disaster, the decision to act, to rejoin for a last moment the condition of human politics, a brute insistence modulating worlds from G before coming home. The Goldbergs reach the threshold where each variation denies that it is a variation. And at that point, they no longer are.
Like proliferating species, the variants do not improve or advance. There is no question of progress here. Under the pressure of evolutionary restlessness, they simply spread out across the map of available biomes, unearth more of the embedded germ material, bring some as yet unrealized alternative — similar to all others, only different — into existence. The sarabande is never escaped, however much migration takes place. Its shape squarely inhabits mid-measure. It may wander freely across voices and beats, be for a few bars almost unbearable. But it is always there. The distance between any two incarnations is immense, as wide as the immigrant's awe at native idiom. It is improvisation in here tonight. We listeners can do nothing but stand back and wing it as it wings. Where will the next dance step come from, the next flying arabesque, the wilder, more cunningly contrived canon?
More than enough room in this world for him to move around in, respond to, to laugh at, to feel the quick, sure flash of recognition. He could hear in it not just the faithful transcript of lost love, his early work on the coding problem, the years of obscurity, and the premonition of a few affectionate months with us, the first. hint of what today in history would call him to. The sound was also an invitation to run this experiment of independent parts— crossing, racing, colliding, mimicking, moving in contrary motion, teasing each other into brighter, freer passages, informed by what has passed and what is still to come. The variations are the working out of that instruction, buried deep in the Base string, that commands itself to translate, to strain against the limits of its own synthesis, to test the living trick of Perhaps, to love.
It is, as the young pianist on Ressler's thirty-year-old recording proclaims in the liner notes, music with no beginning and no end. Music of no particular style or period: its eighteenth-century decorum constantly upset by backward glances and embryonic predictions — by turns monkish cloister, Renaissance brass, skittish romantic soaring, and the jarring atonality of my own evening. Darwin might have found his elusive pangene, if he'd only looked in the right place: higher up, deeper down, outside the cell, in the codes the cell creates and sends out to probe and describe its inexhaustible world.
The variations take on the language of the time and place they require, obeying no formal principle except the continuance of their parent. Conflicting musical ideas tear across the page, from the page to the keys, and the keys to the ear — rising into free-fall, daring chromatics, turning triolet shorthand, leaning, crashing in exhilaration, creeping meekly across the keyboard, descending to earthy folk song, daring the dead stop of anguish. The Base on which the entire piece is built, while everywhere manifest, loses its original, independent identity. It is subsumed in the general fanfare, swallowed up in invention, changed in the accumulation of minute mutations. Its sequence becomes a sustained pedal point, a repeated, ultimately stationary strain that changes as all else changes around it.
And the immense set as a whole becomes a scalar expansion of the sarabande, each of the thirty-two notes enlarged into thirty-two variations that are themselves, apart and together, a macrocosm of a single idea. Nowhere in the patterned sequence is there the remotest suggestion of what might arise out of it. To try to locate, in the thematic germ, what Ressler spent a life listening to would be to search in those schematics — line drawings showing every subassembly of every carburetor part — for a semblance of the functioning car. The germ shares nothing with its inheriting variations except the investing metaphor at the heart of life.
Yet the only way over the threshold, down into the full sound he heard, lies along this line, parallel to the one connecting organism to circulatory system to heart to chamber to valve to pumping muscle cell to nucleus to copy of the master theme. The line sought by the systematic researcher. The thing he hoped one day to uncover on the ancient, battered disk he toted around his entire adult life, the thing every beat of the piece encoded, the thing he was living, the set inside him: the infinitely pliable four-note theme.
Ultimately, the Goldbergs are about the paradox of variation, preserved divergence, the transition effect inherent in terraced unfolding, the change in nature attendant upon a change in degree. How necessity might arise out of chance. How difference might arise out of more of the same. By the time the delinquent parent aria returns to close out the set, the music is about how variation might ultimately free itself from the instruction that underwrites it, sets it in motion, but nowhere anticipates what might come from experience's trial run.