We tried out a piece — a Solage chanson: “Deceit Holds the World in Its Domain.” We surged to the end on rising delight. The last note died away, dust motes suspended in the light of light. I was beside myself. It had been lifetimes since I’d felt so lifted, so afraid. I couldn’t sleep that night, knowing what we had. Neither, it turned out, could Jonah. I heard him climbing the wooden stairs to my crow’s nest. He came into my room without knocking and sat on the foot of my bed in the dark. “Jesus, Joey. This is it. We’re home free.” I saw him in silhouette punch the air like some teenager finding himself alone with the ball in the end zone. “All my life. All my life, I’ve been waiting for this.” But he couldn’t say what “this” was.
“What about the others?” Some hunger had caught hold of me. I was ready to cast the others aside, rather than let them slow us down even a beat.
Jonah laughed in darkness. “You’ll see.”
I saw, the next week, when all six of Jonah’s hand-selected voices met to sight-read. The others had been singing together in assorted groups for two years, honing their precision sacraments. They’d sprung their combined sounds on audiences in Gothic ghost towns around the Low Countries, France, and Germany. They knew what they might do together, and were having trouble keeping their secret. But five-sixths is as shy of perfection as any fraction. Every new voice starts a group out again, from zero.
I went into that first rehearsal wrecked by stage fright. These people owned the world that I only glimpsed now from a distance. They’d spent their life singing; I was a recovering pianist. The languages we sang were theirs by birth; I got through them by phonetics and prayer. My brother staked his reputation on me. Everything set up for me to fall neatly on my ambiguous face. All I had was a scrap of prophecy, the days through which I came.
We read through a chanson by Dufay—“Se la face ay pale”—and then that oldest of parody masses, based on the same tune. It felt like breaking into a tomb that had been sealed for half a millennium. Ten years later, the rage for authenticity would prohibit using women’s voices at all. But for a brief moment, we thought we had the future pegged and the past cleanly identified.
When the body breaks free of its boundary skin, it rises. How many people, trapped in time’s stream, get to feel, even for an instant, that they’ve climbed up out of the current and onto the banks? Jonah grabbed the tenor and the women lifted, three steps and a leap into weightlessness, scraping the keystone of the highest vault. Their certainty powered me, and the notes rolled off the page into the air without my doing much but spotting them.
The blend was so tight that each new imitative line sounded like the same voice curling back on itself. I’d stepped in front of a dressing room mirror and splintered into whole societies. Now and then, the released lines collapsed back into the unity that birthed them. The universe, Da once proved to his own satisfaction, could be described by a single electron, traveling back and forth in time along an infinitely knotted path whose resulting connect-the-dots shapes formed all the matter in existence.
When we finished, the silence we’d opened rang like a bell. Peter Chance, who sang like a van Eyck angel but who spoke like an unsexed Anthony Eden, took out a pencil and began making tiny reprimands in his part. “Anyone care to place a modest wager on our prospects?”
Celeste asked Jonah for a translation. A grinning Marjoleine deGroot supplied it, for Jonah was staring up at the roof beams, exultant. We looked at one another the way musicians do, slant but seeing all, every one of us terrified to try it again. We wanted to put the sheet music down, walk away, and forever protect that moment. Jonah returned to earth and pulled another mass out of his binder. “Shall we have a go at the Victoria?”
The Victoria sailed up past the Dufay, dropped notes and all. The shower of sound from our initial try gave way to the first feel for how to group-drive this thing. Heaven’s signal bled in and out, like an FM station in a storm. But the message was firm in us. We sprang loose, cut capers, wheeled about. I was their man. My brother had known. When the notes stopped, Hans Lauscher looked down the bridge of his nose and said, “You are hired. How much do you want an hour?” His accent shocked me: the ghost of my father’s.
Celeste blessed me in profuse island slang. Marjoleine, with the closest thing to glee her native climate permitted, threw her Flemish arm over my shoulder and thumped me as if I’d just put a header in the back of the net in a qualifying match against the Netherlands. “You don’t know how many basses we have already tried! Good voices, too, but just not right with us. Why didn’t you come to us sooner? How much time we would have saved.” I looked at Jonah. He grinned without embarrassment, as pleased with his duplicity as he was with his brilliant hindsight.
The fusing of six jagged personalities didn’t happen at once. The delicate dance of negotiated tensions obeyed its own musical shorthand. We had our daily doses of nervous outbursts and repaired hysterics. We practiced in a ring of black music stands, everyone but the fastidious Hans in stocking feet. Sometimes we taped ourselves on an old reel-to-reel, and then the six of us lay flat on our backs against the wood floors of our warehouse stage, conducting our prior lives, singing unison encouragements to the fixed fossil record.
We were a synchronized underwater ballet. Ten hands worked the air, shaping the wayward notes, waving like a Flanders wheat field in the wind. Celeste and Marjoleine especially needed to dance, the arc of the music and the line of their muscles weaving and meeting. Peter Chance, who’d spent his choirboyhood in the chancel of King’s and had stayed on in Cambridge when his voice broke, delighted in the newfound freedom of movement the group allowed him. Hans Lauscher did at least wag his shoulders, which, for a Rhinelander, was almost Swan Lake. Even Jonah, who’d once shamed Mama into keeping still when she sang, and who, during his lieder years, had made unholy drama by standing dead stationary in the crook of the piano, now turned fluid. He crooked his knees and curled forward into the top of his phrase, ready to mount up into empty space and keep on climbing. The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.
When we were hitting on all cylinders, Jonah blessed us. Tied to his omnipotent tenor, we might travel anywhere, run any theft. But when we were off, falling back to earth in a fiery ball like Icarus, his patience grew as thin as a snake’s skin. Then six bruised egos spent hours trying to coax the damn carcass back to life again.
We were like a commune or an infant church: from each according to her abilities. Hans was our font of Teutonic scholarship, a walking manuscript library on a par with Vienna or Brussels. Peter Chance, who’d read Renaissance history at King’s, was our source on performance practice. Celeste served as articulation coach, softening, closing, and relaxing our vowels while tightening our intonation and polyphonic textures. Marjoleine was the verbal interpreter, glossing sense and phrasing stress points in any language we sang in. I did the structural analyses, finding how best to juxtapose long note values and rapid passages or bring out the subtle undulations of pulse.
But Jonah ruled over us all. His face, our focal point, filled with driven will. Our years apart weren’t enough to account for everything he now knew. All I could figure was that he hadn’t learned it. He remembered, resurrecting that dead world as if it had always been his. Through Kampen, he’d acquired a grasp for early idiom. He knew, within a week of reading a piece, how best to find its otherworldly hum. He could get at the universe hidden in any work, find the meter of a line, play the text, harmony, and rhythm off one another, revealing the message that existed only in the tension among them. He led us through a thicket of counterpoint to those moments of convergence that life denied him.