I reached that age where every six weeks, I had another birthday. I turned forty, and didn’t even feel it. It hit me that I’d given most of my thirties to my brother, as I’d once given him my twenties. Jonah had gambled on returning me to singing, and we made the gamble pay. I’d never be a transcendent bass; I’d started lifetimes too late. But I had become the foundation for Voces Antiquae, and our sound came from all six of us. Yet even as I reached my singing peak, I heard my tone wearing away, concert by concert, chord by chord. As doomed lives go, singers are not quite basketball players. But the eternity we make for fifty minutes every night lasts, if the wind is with us, for only a score of years.
It stunned me to discover I’d been in Europe for over half a decade. In the first year, I’d learned what it meant to be forever American. In the next two, I learned how to hide that fact. Then somewhere, I crossed an invisible line where I couldn’t tell how far I’d drifted from my inalienable birthright. All that time, we didn’t step foot on our home continent. There weren’t enough bookings to make a tour worthwhile, and we had no other reason to return. The country had named an actor to the helm, one who proclaimed it morning again in America and who napped most afternoons. We couldn’t go back there, ever.
I could follow conversation now in five languages and acquit myself in three, not counting English and Latin. I went sight-seeing when we toured, now that I no longer had to spend every waking hour vocalizing. Visiting dead landmarks became my hobby. Sometimes I saw women. In moments of unbearable loneliness, I thought of the years I’d lived with Teresa. Then being alone seemed more than complex enough. I was a forty-year-old man living in an adopted country that took me for a guest laborer, with my forty-one-year-old brother and his thirty-two-year-old wife, who treated me as if I were their adopted child.
Everything I had belonged to him. My pleasures, my anxieties, my accomplishments and failings: These were all my brother’s piece. So it had always been. Years would go by, and I’d still be working for him. There came a month when I needed a secret project or I would disappear forever into his accompaniment. The nature of the work made no difference. All that mattered was that it remain unsponsored, unaccountable, and invisible to my brother.
This time, my supplies were more modest. I carried around Europe a single A4 notebook, clothbound at the side, with eight blank staffs per page. On long train rides to distant concerts, in hotels and dressing rooms, in the dull, wasted stretches of fifteen minutes and half hours that ravage a performer’s life, I fished for tunes in me that were worth writing down. I did not compose. I was more of a psychic, a medium taking dictation from the other side. I’d hover with my pencil over the blank ledger lines and just wait, not so much for the prediction of an idea as for the revision of a memory.
Just as when I’d tried to compose in the States, everything I wrote down was some tune from my earlier days, changed just enough to be unrecognizable. If I studied what I wrote long enough, I could always find a source hiding in it, evading and yet craving detection. Only now, instead of the misery that this discovery caused me in Atlantic City, I felt an excruciating release in watching these hostages escape. Over the course of three slack afternoons, I labored over an extended passage that took me until I was free of it to recognize as a reworking of Wilson Hart’s chamber fantasy, the one that years ago had struck me as a reworking of “Motherless Child.” I’d sworn to him to write what was in me, and managed only to rewrite what had once been in him.
But the scribbling was mine, and had to be enough. My notebook filled up with floating, disconnected fragments, each of them pointing toward some urgent revision they couldn’t get to. The tunes spelled out the story of my life, half as it had happened to me, and half as I’d failed to make it happen. I knew that none would ever become the mystery it was after. All I could hope to do was stumble about, belatedly throwing open their cages.
Jonah often saw me struggling away. He even asked me once. “So what’s with the hush-hush hobby, Joseph? Business or pleasure?”
“Business,” I told him. “Unfinished.”
“You writing a good thousand-year-old Mass for us to do?”
“We’re not good enough,” I said. That was enough to guarantee he’d never ask again.
In the world we occupied, our future was fixed and we could do nothing about it. But the past was infinitely pliable. We were in the thick of a movement that made sure history would never be what it used to be. Every month brought a new musical revolution, constantly updating where music had come from. Supporting evidence for half the revolutions was scant, and the experts lashed into one another with the fury of the antiballistic missile treaty debate. Voces Antiquae was ahead of the curve on the newest developments in oldest performance practice. We sang one voice per line three hundred years after and five years before it was the hot thing. Jonah applied the ethereal sound to anything that stood still long enough for the treatment. He fully subscribed to Rifkin’s bombshell theory that Bach intended his sacred music to be sung one singer to a part. Jonah was convinced on sonority alone; no amount of documentary proof either way could alter his conviction.
He wanted to perform Bach’s six motets — just us and a couple of ringers to pad out the eight-part extravaganza, Singet den Herrn ein neues Lied. The others — Hans in particular — opposed the idea. The music was a full century younger than the latest piece we’d ever sung. It lay way outside the idiom we’d perfected. Our caution maddened Jonah. “Come on, you bastards. A world masterpiece that hasn’t been sung properly in all its two hundred and fifty years. I want to hear these things once before I die, when they’re not a Sherman tank with one tread falling off.”
“It’s Bach,” Hans objected. “Other people already own this. People know these pieces, forward and retrograde.”
“They only think they know them. Like they thought they knew Rembrandt, until the grime came off. Come on. ‘Sing unto the Lord a new song.’ Johnny Bach, heard for the first time.”
That became the project’s slogan, the one EMI promoted our recording with. Whatever the legitimacy of the performances, our agility justified them. The thing about Bach is, he never wrote for the human voice. He had some less plodding medium in mind to carry his memo into space. His lines are completely independent. His part-writing combs out some extra dimension between its harmonies. Most performances go for majesty and end up mud. Voces Antiquae went for lightness and wound up in orbit. The group’s turning radius, even at highway speeds, was uncanny. We brought out counterpoint in the works that even Hans had never heard. Every note was audible, even the ones buried alive in that thicket of invention. We goosed the giddiness and laid into the passing dissonances. We brought those motets back to their medieval roots and pushed them forward to their radical Romantic children. By the time we finished, no one could say what century they came from.
Our disc was notorious from its day of release. It started a pitched battle, venomous in proportion to how little was at stake and how few people cared. I don’t mean Le sacre du printemps or anything. But there was flack. The new had lost its capacity to shock; only the old could still rattle people. We were derided for emasculating Bach and praised for sandblasting a monument that hadn’t been hosed down in a long time. Jonah never read a single review. He felt we’d acquitted ourselves well, maybe even superlatively. Yet he wasn’t satisfied. He’d wanted to make that music give up its secrets. But that was something it wasn’t going to do until long after we were all dead.
We toured with the motets but returned, after a while, to our roots. We revived the Renaissance in every burg in Germany. We sang in Cologne, Essen, Göttingen, Vienna — every city Da had ever mentioned to us. But no relatives ever came out of the audience after any of our concerts to claim us. We sang in King’s College Chapel, a homecoming for Peter Chance and a stunned first for the Strom brothers. Jonah craned up at the fan vault, which no photo can even be wrong about. His eyes dampened and his lips curled bitterly. “Birthplace of the Anglican hoot.” He was coming home to a place that would never be his.