A Life of Harmony
As I said earlier, Jonas regarded his years at high school as an encounter with the hidden face of Norway. As luck would have it, for instance, he attended the nineteenth birthday party of one of his classmates, held not just anywhere, mind you, but in the Rococo Room of the Grand Hotel. In the early days at high school this classmate, who boasted four names rounded off by a ‘Jr.’, had seemed pretty ordinary — apart, that is, from a rather suspect green loden coat — but he had eventually given himself away with such remarks as ‘Can’t go into town with you, guys, I’ve got a flying lesson with Dad’ or ‘You’ll have to come home and meet these two Oriental girls we’ve got working in the house.’ It turned out that his parents were neighbours of Sir William up on Holmenkoll Heights, but they were not nouveaux riches like Sir William, they had inherited their fortune without having to lift a finger and they handled their status symbols in a casual often surprisingly devil-may-care manner.
For them, popping down to the Rococo Room was really just the urbane equivalent of a Saturday-night hop at the village hall, if not a less strenuous version of the only things that really interested them: sport and open-air pursuits. Incredible though it may seem, as much cachet was attached to a good slalom technique as to a seven-figure bank balance.
Here Jonas was brought face-to-face with Norway’s moneyed class, that one per mil of the Norwegian population who could contemplate hiring the Rococo Room at the Grand and inviting 200 people for a party at the drop of a hat in the middle of January, for example. And even though this was a formal dinner with everyone in evening dress, these people managed, by dint of a sort of innate nonchalance, to give what were for Jonas the most unreal surroundings, the appearance of an ordinary, everyday living-room. After dinner there was dancing to the music of a grand orchestra, strings and all. With something approaching disbelief Jonas, clad in a borrowed suit, watched young people of his own age, and especially the girls in their fabulous gowns, gliding around the floor as if it were the most natural thing in the world, in a room that sparkled with gilt, and with a tapestry on the back wall forming a museological backdrop to the orchestra — disbelief because these young people did not merely shuffle about, as Jonas was in the habit of doing, they glided, they floated across the floor in ballroom and Latin American dances, and they really could dance, adding nifty little variations of their own to the basic steps. Even so, they did not really seem to take it seriously, just as they did not take their wealth seriously, all but yawning as they danced, or with an affected fervour, giving Jonas an impression of something stylized, as if the whole set-up were a kind of opera, an enormous tableau. Jonas did not speak to anyone, he merely strolled about, nodding to this one or that; he really had nothing to talk to these people about, although they all seemed very nice. The plain fact was that they inhabited a totally different world. It was enough for Jonas simply to circulate and watch, to sit on red sofas and soak up the atmosphere — including, if the truth be told, a whiff of the odd joint — of a modern-day Norwegian ball, of a style that was totally vacuous. There was something about it all that was every bit as anachronistic, not to say comical, when compared to the world outside the windows, as all the rustic furniture with which these people filled their homes.
After midnight he suddenly began to feel very tired, because of the wine, he thought, although it might just as easily have been brought on by consternation. Nevertheless, he did not want to go home, he just needed to have a little nap.
And it was his search for a suitable spot to lay his head that brought him to the Mirror Restaurant, which was closed for the evening. He shut the glass door behind him and the sound of the music in the Rococo Room faded to a distant hubbub. He made a tour of the elegant restaurant, across the soft red carpet, beneath chandeliers reminiscent of huge and enigmatic glass plants; ran his eye over white-clothed tables and the mirrors that lined the walls, dim and mysterious, shades of a benighted Versailles. In one corner stood a grand piano draped with a black cover, like a misplaced Kaaba, a shrine. He lifted a corner of the cover, crawled under the piano and was instantly fast asleep.
He was woken by something falling on him, something light. It took a while for it to dawn on him what it was. Music. Music falling from above. Someone was playing the piano: quietly, gently. He turned his head and spied the hem of a dress and a foot on the soft pedal, one high-heeled shoe on its side next to it. He could hear no sound from the Rococo Room, had no idea what time it was. It was still pitch-dark at any rate. He lay quite still, wondering who this woman was who just sat there creating sounds, harmonies, on the piano: soft, muted sounds that ran together. As if it were raining notes. Because he could actually feel them on his body as if they were landing on him, or as if this were some sort of musical acupuncture, the light touch of note after note, soothing, immediately taking the edge off the beginnings of a hangover, filling him with a sense of well-being. She struck chord after chord, gradually building up into an alternative melody in which the notes were strung together in a more intricate fashion than in the main theme. She seemed to him to be making a voyage of discovery across the keys, into the unexplored realms of harmony, seeking out more and more new combinations, becoming more and more adventurous. Slowly the notes twisted into new patterns. A kaleidoscope for the ear. Original. He played the piano himself, knew that this was something else, something radical, the most bizarre sounds, making him think at one and the same time of Norway and of faraway places. Part of him wanted to see who was playing, another part simply wanted to lie there listening, enjoying. He lay there under the grand piano, surrounded by dark mirrors, beholding a sort of ribwork, four beams fanning out, like rays; he lay there, feeling the music created in the case above his head, infinitely beautiful music, making a tangible impression on his body, like vibrations, caresses. As if the piano itself were lying on top of him, making love to him.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Me.’
‘No, I mean who composed that?’
‘I did.’
‘It sounds … different somehow.’
‘That may have something to do with you.’
Her voice had a strange note to it. He heard her get up, the rustling of fabric, layers and layers of fabric, then saw a face peering in at him. It was her, he ought to have guessed: the girl from the Opera House. She had been very late getting to the party in the Rococo Room. Jonas had not seen her, but she had seen him.
This was, of course, Nina G. Yes, that Nina G., a composer who in years to come would occupy the same position in the national consciousness as Arne Nordheim with innumerable international projects and commissions to her name, compositions premièred at ISCM festivals, a regular visitor to such avant-garde strongholds as IRCAM. By the time Jonas met her she was already displaying an experimental approach to music, but even Jonas could not have guessed that this rather shy, sedately dressed girl — a girl who, during the summer months, dusted off both the dialect and the national costume of her native region and worked as a guide at the Folk Museum, among the lofts and wooden storehouses — that this girl would become an acclaimed pioneer, in international terms at that, in the field of computer-based composition with a flat full of electronic equipment and advanced software. Most listeners, of course, perceived her music as a series of stringent constructions, but Jonas for one realized that they in fact represented powerful emotions expressed in an alternative form.