FIVE YEARS IN the Fens apartment pass like the Minute Waltz. His fellow Illinois grads have scattered into university music labs across the U.S. He listens to their gnomic tapes, studies their gnostic scores. Musical resistance still strikes him as worthy. Between Nixon, the endless war, and a radio spectrum filled with bland self-pity and sales jingles, there’s more to resist than ever. But he listens, and can’t get traction.
One night, bent over the low kitchen radio, nursing a bowl of butter pecan while the ladies sleep, he hears the spectral wails of Crumb’s Black Angels, for electric string quartet. Thirteen images from the dark land, barbaric and glorious, a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse. The sounds come from another galaxy. Infinite sonic possibility unfurls in front of Els, and he can’t move. He can’t even think which way he would move, if he could.
The very next night — heaven’s DJ toying with him — it’s George Rochberg’s third string quartet. Rochberg, rigid serialist, now serves up a bouquet reeking of lyric consonance, right down to bald-faced imitations of Beethoven, Mahler, and Brahms. It’s like a heretic giving the benediction: a serious composer surrendering, turning his back on the last hundred years, and sinking into prettiness.
And yet: what courage in this backsliding. Els shakes his head at the loveliness of the florid finale. It makes him remember old pleasures condemned for reasons he can’t now retrieve. The piece sounds naïve at best, at worst banal. But strangely willing to sing.
Afterward, the announcer explains: Rochberg’s young son, dead of a brain tumor. Now the archaic tonality makes perfect sense. The real mystery is how Rochberg could write anything at all. If something happened to Els’s daughter, fast asleep on the other side of the bedroom wall, composing would be done forever.
MUSIC GETS AWAY from him. In this one town alone, fantastic new inventions premiere every week at dozens of venues on both sides of the Charles. From a distance, it’s hard to tell the Brahmins from the bohemians. Els no longer needs to; he and his daughter wander hand in hand through the rose bower in the Fens, chattering to each other in a secret language, collaborators in a whole new genre of spontaneous invention.
Let’s make something, he tells her.
Make what? she asks.
He picks a fallen flower out of the dirt. Let’s make a rose nobody knows.
She pouts, lip like a slug. What do you mean?
Something good.
Good how? she says, but her face has already begun to guess.
Good slow, he suggests.
No, she corrects. Good fast.
Okay. Good fast. Something that’s never been. You start.
She sings a little. He adds some notes. They walk and invent, and the day is the song they’re making. They finish the piece at the keyboard when they get home.
IT BECOMES THEIR rolling litany. Let’s make something. Make what? Something good. Good how? Good and grumpy? No: Good and gentle. Good and treelike. Good like a bird.
Maddy catches them out one evening, giggling at some private nonsense over dinner.
What is it with you two? What’s the big secret these days?
Secret what? Els says, words that send his daughter into hysterics.
Sara holds her finger up, japing. Tips her head. Secret good!
Maddy swats at them. Fine! Be that way.
Jealous? Els asks.
Maddy stands and clears the dishes. Forget I asked.
Sara, anxious: No, Mom! You can know. We’re making things.
What kind of things?
Songs. Songs that nobody knows.
HE FINDS THE girl on the day after Christmas, under the small blue spruce filled with popcorn strings and paper ornaments, laying out her new alphabet blocks in patterns on the floor. She spaces them at varied distances, in gaps that she adjusts and readjusts until each one is perfect.
Els watches awhile, but can’t break the code. Bear? What are you making?
They’re our songs, she tells him. Look.
And she shows him how the system works. The distance between blocks, the height in the line, the colors like the keys of her xylophone: she’s invented notation. Written down secrets for the distant future, for no one, or for anyone who wants to hear. Els can’t stop looking — at the blocks, at the score, at the girl. It’s music from out of something that, a few dozen months before, was nothing but the sequences hidden in a single cell.
I wanted music to be the antidote to the familiar. That’s how I became a terrorist.
We need a bigger place, Maddy says. She’s six. She can’t keep sleeping in a walk-in closet.
Beyond arguing. Yet moving out of their apartment for a larger one, down the Green Line toward Coolidge Corner, feels to Peter like a perp walk out of Eden at angel’s sword point.
Sara starts school at New Morning, where Maddy is now assistant director for the arts. Quilting has fallen by the wayside. Els returns to part-time at the museum. He picks up more copy jobs; he spends weeks at a time transcribing other people’s notes and articulations, bar by bar, into clean, perfect systems of staves. He loves the work, a chameleon trying on alien colors.
But at night, in an office carved out of the Brookline apartment’s guest bedroom, Els starts work on his first real piece in three years. He tinkers after midnight, teetering between splendor and defeat. Over several weeks, a new style takes shape, one he only slowly begins to hear. Except the style isn’t new at all. He remembers describing it to Richard Bonner almost a decade ago, on a dark, frozen campus in the middle of the cornfields.
He talks Maddy through the sketch — a piece for piano, clarinet, theremin, and soprano, to words from Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China.” The piece consists of regions of mutating rhythmic fragments dominated by fixed intervals, constantly cycled and transposed. The intervals build to a peak of dissonance before relaxing into something like denouement. There’s no fixed tonality, but the sequence still propels the listener’s ear through a gauntlet of expectation and surprise. The method feels like a way forward, a middle path between romantic indulgence and sterile algorithms, between the grip of the past and the cult of progress.
“The Great Wall” fits together, stone by stone. He plays sections for Maddy on their little forty-four-key electric piano, trying to get her to sight-sing. It’s not hard, even for a voice that hasn’t sung much in recent years. And it’s interesting enough to go over well at one of the contemporary music venues in Cambridge or Kenmore. They’d only need two other players; Peter could manage the clarinet part himself.
You do not need to leave your room.
Only sit at your table and listen.
Don’t even listen;
simply wait, be quiet,
still and solitary.
The world will offer itself to be unmasked.
It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Maddy nods at the guided tour. She smiles at his crimes and clever reconciliations. Her eyes spark with the memory of old campaigns the two of them waged together, not all that long ago. For a moment, her face is that humming girl’s, the pageboy who was game to run through anything. But when they reach the end of the read-through, she’s the assistant director of New Morning School’s arts program again.