The piano blasted through the stuttering material and broke it loose. All five instruments fell into a flowing stream. Maddy bolted from her seat and jerked her unwilling body up the stairs and out to center stage, where, shocked by a sudden rush of will, she sang:
The truth is,
truth is,
truth is. .
The truth is that we live out our lives
putting off all that can be put off. .
On a downbeat, the pitch group changed to Hypophrygian, an old church mode. The instruments circled in tight stretti of dense materials. Then the projectors fired up — twin beams from opposite sides of the hall, coating the singer in colors. Near the bottom of her register, Maddy sang a legato line that twisted like a tunnel in an ancient tomb:
Perhaps we all know deep down. . that we are immortal.
At the word immortal, the lines sailed up into a series of ringing forte chords in the piano and a frenzy of handbells.
The three melodic instruments reached a blistering peak of arpeggios, then froze. The projectors blacked out. The sound decayed in the dampening hall. Awkward Maddy beckoned out over the audience’s heads. Her grasping hands and desperate glances made half the room turn and look. Then, over the pianissimo horn and oboe, she wove through the four pitches of a diminished seventh:
And that sooner. .
Sooner or later. .
Sooner, or sooner or later. .
Later. . or later. . later. .
The projectors blazed again, along with a choir of antiphonal taped voices. Images pelted the hall’s walls in a time-lapse cavalcade that ran from Edison’s electrocuted elephant to Edward White tethered to his Gemini capsule by a twenty-five-foot umbilical above the blue Earth. The pianist placed his forearms across the keyboard and undulated. Horn, oboe, and cello built a corona of minor seconds while the percussionist rolled sponge mallets on a suspended china cymbal. On a fixed pitch in the middle of her range, rising three steps at the end of the line, Maddy, motionless, intoned:
Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.
Who was in the audience that night? Students of cultural anthropology in tie-dyed kurtas and beards like shoe brushes. A doctor of philology about to embark on a career selling discount furniture off of flatbed trucks. A long-haired, sloe-eyed woman with the “Desiderata” on her bathroom wall, who woke up nightly, convinced she’d burn for what she’d done. Retired social scientists certain that consumer democracy had ten more years, tops. An agitator with a mind like lighter fluid who ended up owning a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade. A scholar of German idealism who believed that the universe was coming to know itself. An atmospheric scientist wondering if the planet might be about to slow-cook to death. An ethnomusicologist who’d spend the next forty years proving that music evaded every definition. In all, a hundred people whose offspring would someday know all things and become immortal.
The first song ended; the audience coughed and shifted. Giggles rippled through the seats near Els. The woman to his left leaned toward her companion and pantomimed the winding of a crank. Els turned to Richard. Bonner’s face shone. He cackled like a melodrama villain and rubbed his hands, keen for the feast of abuse that only art can bring. Three songs left, and hot, tourniquet pains were shooting down Els’s left arm at ten-second intervals.
The second song consisted of just two ideas: a dotted trochee pulse, like a lopsided metronome, overlaying itself at different intervals, and a cycle of suspensions forever falling into other suspensions and failing to resolve. Maddy flexed and squared her shoulders, leaning forward and reaching out while being drawn back, swaying in place, trapped in what struck her as someone else’s body.
Time is a river which carries me along,
she sang, on a tone row that flowed by like chant. Then the long phrase’s lyric answer:
But I am the river.
Each time the players rested, they passed various colored globes in slow arcs over their heads. Images painted them — stretched and compressed clocks, the throbbing sine wave of an oscilloscope, atomic nuclei, spinning galaxies. The tone row returned, transposed and inverted.
Time is a tiger that devours me.
Then the answering cantilena:
But I am the tiger.
At the third couplet, the images spilled over the musicians and onto the back walclass="underline" rebels in Biafra, riots in Detroit, bombers in Da Nang, and the young Che, who’d died only a few months before. Maddy, stilling her trembling limbs, sang like no one would ever hear.
Time is a fire that consumes me. But I am that fire.
The cycle of suspensions faded. The ghostly films, too, froze on a frame of a sinking supertanker, before going dark. The audience coughed and shifted again and checked their watches. Els wanted to slink off and be dead somewhere for a very long time.
Then came the scherzo romp. Maddy sang the words about working for neither posterity nor God, whose tastes in art were largely unknown. The players passed around an eight-note figure, tricked up with every species of counterpoint Els could manage. The antics climaxed with singer and players all threatening to leave the stage in a combined hissy fit, but coming back together for the cadence.
Listening, Els heard the total lie. He wrote for the future’s love, and for the love of an ideal listener he could almost see. He saw how he might expand the music, make it stranger, stronger, colder, more huge and indifferent, just as soon as this concert was over.
But a breeze blew through the final song, and the skies cleared onto pure potential. Maddy gathered herself, as if laid out for her own funeral, at peace at last with the previous three outbursts. All dancing stopped, and the back wall hung on a single black-and-white photograph of a few diatoms a handful of microns wide, their silica casings carved like the finials of Gothic cathedrals. Above the piano’s pulse, the cello and horn overlaid a tune of outmoded yearning, like the start of Schumann’s Mondnacht, in disguise. Maddy sang a slow, stepwise rising figure, a blue balloon coming up over the horizon:
We are made for art. .
The moment Maddy took up the tendril phrase, Els knew she was as dear to him as his own life. Talons gripped his ribs, and he felt a joy bordering on panic. He needed to know how this woman would unfold. He needed to write music that would settle into her range like frost on fields. They’d spend their years together, grow old, get sick, die in shared bewilderment.
She nudged the phrase up another perfect fourth:
We are made for memory. .
Something seized his arm. Richard. Els turned, but the man’s face was fixed on the stage, as if he hadn’t already heard the melodic prediction two dozen times in the last two days.
The pianist broke off in the middle of an ostinato, stood up, and left the stage. Maddy reached out, palm up, but couldn’t stop him. The reduced ensemble kept turning over notes that now lined up to reveal themselves as a permutation of the delaying fragment that had opened the first song. The horn, too, grew forgetful; he stood and wandered, climbed down the front of the stage and into the audience. Maddy looked on, touching her cheek, unable to call him back. Puzzled, she carried on: