The echoing lines slow to half speed, reprising the song’s first measures. Augmentation, it was called once, worlds ago, before MIDI. The two-part canon turns into a trio. Choirboy clarity thickens, then smears out as thin as gold leaf. The posters on the walls, the painted tables, the bodies huddled in booths and stretched out on sofas — everything around Els dissolves into wet crepe. The couple at the next table freeze, alerted. The woman’s soul is all up in her ears. The boy leans forward in a frightened crouch; someone is doing a thing better than he ever will.
Voices align and interfere. Bliss starts to jar. The lines weave a standing wave, a sonic moiré. Then those pulsing chords cadence again at another perfect fourth.
An organ emerges from nowhere. It blends into the held pedal point while two tenors bob in parallel above. Els’s lips twist in unwilling joy. The ancient harmonies spread through his bloodstream like an opiate. He grows light-headed on the parody, the imitation Pérotin, these sounds from the Notre Dame School, from the dawn of harmony. The bar lengths keep altering; Els can’t hear how to count them. Soon counting doesn’t matter. Time is nothing; only these changeless changes are real. The soprano lines echo and multiply:
How small a thought
It takes to fill
a whole life.
The twin tenors lift free above the organ’s drone. There was a time — as recent as the year this music was written — when such an exercise in smoky nostalgia would have appalled Els. For years these canons would have sounded like pure kitsch, needing only a drum machine, a scratch track, and a little overdubbed rap to become the latest caustic mashup.
Tonight, he finds it rebellious, even radical. Sopranos again, in unison: tandem seraphim floating through each other’s lines, even slower now, at wider intervals, without a single breath. They sail up and above a vibraphone whose dotted rhythms turn the long sustains into a pocket infinity.
The raucous café—industrial frother jet on the espresso machine, clink of mugs and cups from the kitchen, laughter and shouted politics from the back room’s upper loft — has no need of forever. Half the clientele have their own earbuds, the other half use this music, if at all, only as protection from the terrors of silence.
But these canons at unison glide on. Voices unfold above the driving vibes. Their intervals cycle through clashing dissonance. The collisions start to sound like a requiem for the millennium-long search for novel harmonies, a search now done. The sounds could be an elegy for those scant ten centuries when chant became melody, melody blossomed into harmony, and harmony pushed outward in ever more daring border raids on the forbidden. This innovative phasing piece, collapsing back into ars antiqua. Organum again: the sound of possibility, after the map of the possible is all filled in.
A girl at a nearby table bows over a textbook filled with symbols. She curls her hands around her mug campfire-style, warming them in the steam. She frees one hand to drag a highlighter over a crucial formula. She grabs the mug and sips, deaf to the record of that reckless rush of Western music that ran too fast from Dorian mode to Danger Mouse. But her head nods to the changing bar lines, under the spell of something she doesn’t even know she hears.
Above the room’s two dozen contrapuntal conversations, over the relentless vibraphones, the singers harp over and over on their lone idea:
How small
a thought
it takes
to fill
a whole
life.
The words rock and breathe. Els has seen the idea leaping through texts across two and a half millennia, from Antiphon and the Dhammapadas on through Maddy’s beloved Merton. He himself has set those texts to music, banged on the doors of that smallest thought for his whole life without ever getting in. He’d wanted to be a chemist, to add to the world’s useful knowledge. He’d wanted to repay his first love, the one who taught him how to listen. He’d wanted to see the world with his wife, to grow old with her; but he’d abandoned her after a dozen years. He’d never dared to want a daughter; then he had one, and afterward, he lived solely to make things with her. She’d grown up a thousand miles away, a holiday visitor, shoulders hunched and eyes wary, her hair hacked into different geometrical shapes each time he saw her, forever resenting that small thought that had taken over his life.
Pitches cluster above the throbbing vibes. The piece has lasted twice as long as any self-respecting song and shows no sign of stopping. A voice at the next table says, Let’s get out of here. The boy points his rolled-up score at the ceiling. Can’t hear myself think! The woman he’ll lose but never quite forget smiles back, demurring. The boy stands and slips on his coat, halfway gone already. His friend takes longer to saddle up her backpack. Els watches, caught in the snare of these tangling lines. It’s clear in the way she follows her love to the café’s side door. She’s reluctant to leave with the thousand-year secret about to be revealed.
She turns at the door, surprised by the song’s sudden brightening. She catches Els’s eye and frowns. He holds up two fingers in a covert wave. She waves back, baffled, and disappears into the night. She, too, will die wanting things she won’t even be able to name. Her shed boyfriend will look forever for a music that will revive this night. A few steps into the embracing air outside this café and they’ll both be bewildered, old.
Outside the picture window, a copper moonrise. It hangs above the horizon, four times bigger than it should be. A fist wheels and flickers in front of the reddish disc: a bat, hunting by echo-map, flying in paths so skittish they seem random.
A change of color pulls him back into the music. After so much phasing, circling around the same unchanging key, the switch to E flat minor comes like a thunderclap from a cartoon sky. Wittgenstein’s proverb — that one small thought — darts off into unprepared regions. The effect electrifies Els: one simple veer that changes everything. Where the replicating voices once chased one another down broad meanders, now they turn and flow back upstream.
Melodic inversion: the oldest trick going. But it hits Els like naked truth. The sopranos chase each other up a cosmic staircase, driven higher by the lurching vibraphones. The phrases shorten and slow, like one of those boggling Einstein thought experiments with trains and clocks Els could never wrap his head around. Leading tones clash, hinged on the half step between natural and harmonic minors. How can simple, pulsing lines build to such tension, when they run nowhere at all?
Voices leapfrog into chords that alternate between hopeful and unbearable. He glances up again, but the music has made no more imprint on these rooms than would a stranger’s death on the other side of the globe. The girl with the baize book searches the bottom of her mug for evidence into the theft of her cappuccino. The students with clamshells lined up in front of the plate-glass window haven’t budged. The barista flirts with the dishwasher, a Latino with a ponytail down to the tip of his scapula. The engineer in cargo pants sleeps like a baby, face pressed against his canary-yellow pad.
A stutter in the vibraphones propagates itself. And now the meter, too, starts to evade Els. This phasing motor pattern mutates, a slow metamorphosis, slipping from one crystal lattice to another and another, turning into diamond under the constant pressing. The three high voices braid upward, stepwise by minor thirds, in a triple canon: