Yurik’s first days on Long Island coincided with the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Martha had planned to take Yurik to see the sights in the city, but she fell ill and had to cancel it. When Yurik tried to pick up his guitar and play, he couldn’t concentrate—something stopped him. Vitya spent these Christmas holidays in the university lab. At the end of December, the university purchased a NeXT computer, the recent brainchild of Steve Jobs; he had been fired by that time from Apple and had started a new company that produced these new NeXTs with a new operating system, which laid the foundation for the future Mac OS X. Vitya couldn’t tear himself away from this new toy. He invited Yurik to have a look. It was the first computer that Yurik had ever seen “in person.” Vitya stroked the case and praised the black cube the way a dog lover praises the points of his favorite canine. He admired its power, its memory capacity, and the high-resolution graphics.
Yurik asked questions, and Vitya answered. When Vitya answered, Yurik asked him to repeat what he had said. And he grasped it. Four hours passed like a single minute. As they sat talking in the empty laboratory, Yurik began to understand that music wasn’t the only interesting thing in life. They would have sat there all night, but Martha called to say that she was expecting them home for dinner. They went home under a fine rain when it was already dark, silent, each of them lost in his own thoughts. Vitya was thinking about the wonderful possibilities for modeling cell processes that the new computer offered, Yurik about how great it would be to unite music with this remarkable machine. He wasn’t the first one this idea had occurred to, but he didn’t realize it yet. Yurik had no idea that in a few years the computer would become an indispensable part of any musical process, from studying to recording to performing.
Vitya was a lousy communicator. He offered his thoughts, but there were gaps and lacunae, and he left out the important details that he considered self-evident. Yurik understood him, though, and knew how to negotiate his way through the holes in the conversation. He immediately grasped that Vitya’s expertise lay in his ability to make the intelligent machine solve a problem that an ordinary person could also solve but would require far more time to do.
This was the beginning of the nineties, and the first experiments in the fascinating interdependence of the human and the machine, formerly a subject of science fiction, were now becoming a part of daily life. Programmers foresaw that the artificial brains created by humans could surpass the intellects of their creators, that the speed of calculation could engender a new kind and quality of intelligence.
Vitya had acquired a new audience for his ideas in Yurik; but Vitya did not become a new listener to Yurik’s music. Their relationship did evolve, however. From the age of five, Yurik had been connected to his father through chess. Now, some ten years later, chess had been replaced by the computer.
On January 4, Martha took Yurik to enroll in the music department of a high school that specialized in the arts. Yurik had an interview about his knowledge of music. Since his English left something to be desired, they assigned him to an ESL class with a group of other foreign students. There were only four required courses: ESL (which, after two months, Yurik was calling “English for Slow-Wits,” and he was transferred to the regular class), mathematics, the U.S. Constitution, and a vague catchall subject they called “science.”
Of the many music courses on offer, Yurik chose four: music theory, classical and jazz guitar, and the foundation course in piano. There was also a course called Choir, which was mandatory for everyone who studied music.
The first day of school made a deep impression on Yurik. The four morning hours were devoted to analyzing a recent Christmas performance. The general choir of the school had sung a part of Händel’s Messiah, and now the choir director, dissatisfied with the performance that the audience had raved about, was voicing his criticisms.
“Open to No. 22: ‘Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world,’” the teacher’s voice boomed out.
Yurik opened a homemade book of music and text. He found No. 22. All of them had these books. The teacher, waving his hand, looked more like a basketball player than a musician. His hands were like enormous shovels, and his arms flailed as if he were battling with enemy air.
To Yurik’s ear, the choir sounded marvelous. There was no accompaniment, and groups of voices worked like different instruments. Yurik listened to them almost in a trance. He knew that the instrument could sound like a human voice, but that the voice could sound like an instrument—Yurik had never heard anything like it! The singing awoke a storm of feelings in him, an astonishing chaos he couldn’t make sense of, but he felt on the verge of tears. Every now and then, the teacher stopped the singing with a gesture and explained to them where and how they had bungled it. It was remarkable, but Yurik understood him. The focus of his interests helped him in understanding a foreign language.
Fortune smiled on Yurik. He would finally have teachers who interested him in the subject, and he was able to escape from the dead end he had been stuck in at home. He understood that he was in the right place at the right time.
The best teacher of all was the one who taught music theory. He played strange Japanese music on the koto, an ancient Japanese instrument that had no definite number of notes per octave—not seven, not twelve, but as many as one wished. Instead of a scale, there was infinity … It simply boggled the mind.
His first jazz-guitar teacher, on the other hand, turned out to be a dry old curmudgeon, cut from a completely different cloth. A fat black man, a Southerner, with a bald pate and a rich ring of hair circling it, he didn’t even listen when Yurik played. He just pointed his finger at Yurik and said, “Practice scales!” This is what he told everyone, but the lessons in technique were individual, and Yurik didn’t know that Mr. Kingsley taught everyone by the same method: he demanded that a student play 120 scales over two octaves in the course of ten minutes, and if the student made the slightest mistake he had to do it all over. The stress was such that Yurik even had a nosebleed during the second lesson. Kingsley wouldn’t allow the students to play anything else. And he didn’t let anyone talk, either. Much later, Yurik summed up this maniacal method by saying that there was not the slightest drop of joy in Kingsley’s approach to music, only finger gymnastics. But Yurik already understood that if music brought no joy to the musician it wouldn’t bring joy to anyone else, either.
The piano teacher was a charming elderly Frenchwoman. Watching her small wrinkled hands fluttering over the keys, Yurik experienced professional envy. Whereas the pianist uses the same mechanism of movement for both hands, a more complex coordination is required of the guitarist: the left and the right hands must live different lives, but stay in perfect sync. And, of course, the main advantage of the piano is that it allows one to introduce several voices simultaneously, and opens a whole universe of sounds that the guitar can’t reproduce. In addition, there is an enormous amount of music literature for the piano—more than for any other instrument.
The classes in classical guitar, which he didn’t like, expanded his abilities. The teacher, Emilio Gallardo, who happened to have the same name as, or was a relative of, the famous Spanish classical guitarist, showed his plucking technique on an excellent Antonio Sanchez instrument. Yurik began playing without a pick, and resorted to it only in special circumstances or when he broke a fingernail. Plucking the strings with his nails produced a completely different quality of sound. At the same time, Emilio Gallardo taught him how to treat his nails properly—how to grow them out and file them in a straight line, with the file held at a forty-five-degree angle to the nail. This was how the childhood trauma of nail cutting, the occasion of constant struggles with his mama, was resolved.