Nineteen
As his premiere nears, Ben rises even earlier, and Suzanne stays up late. Unable to practice in a sleeping household, she uses the late caffeinated hours to study Alex’s score. Using an electronic keyboard and earphones, she begins to sketch ideas for its arrangement. But the concerto is an unfinished composition, and she knows that she cannot finish the work without coming to a deeper understanding of its nature — an understanding profound enough to complete it on its own terms. At moments she feels as though she is inhabiting Alex’s very soul, and it is a place more foreign than any country she has ever stood in.
Her days go to practice, both alone and with the quartet as they prepare the Black Angels for performance. There are key problems to solve, most pertaining to amplification. All four musicians listen to what the music tells them to do, and their answers are remarkably similar. Perhaps this is why, despite their personality differences, they formed an ensemble.
They will not use an electric violin. They will amplify more than was possible when Crumb wrote the music but not as loud as is possible now. They will use bold physical gesture in addition to sound to create the necessary triple fortissimo. They will rosin heavily to play the ponticello right on their bridges without falling off. They hire a mixer — a young man Kazuo recommends — to ride the levels so that the nuances they have discovered while taking the music apart bar by bar will not be lost. They will highlight Crumb’s superstitious numerology: the trinity of three, the holiness of seven, the devil of thirteen. When it is suggested that Daniel be the one to cue, he says, “I don’t cue. That’s why I picked the cello.” But he is joking; he will cue the opening.
All four musicians agree that the Black Angels will be the concert centerpiece and will follow intermission. Everyone but Anthony wants to begin the program with the only quartet Ravel ever wrote. Rejected by the Prix de Rome and the Conservatoire de Paris, the music was criticized by none other than Gabriel Fauré, the man to whom it was dedicated. Fauré declared the final movement to be stunted, poorly balanced, a failure. Ravel himself viewed it as imperfectly realized but a great step forward. Frustrated, he left the Conservatoire in what proved to be a good move. The listening public soon embraced him, and Debussy wrote to him, “In the name of the gods of music and in my own, do not touch a single note you have written in your Quartet.”
“Debussy was right,” Petra declares. “It’s imperfectly perfect.”
They sit on the green outside Richardson Auditorium, each cross-legged except for Anthony, who sits with his legs in front of him, knees just a little bent. There are clouds, moving slowly, obscuring and then revealing the sun. Suzanne likes the warmth on her face but is relieved when a cloud takes it away and again pleased when it is returned.
Anthony argues for Haydn’s String Quartet in G major. “It does contain some real surprises, particularly that ending. It’s a good setup.”
Suzanne looks around at the other three. “Maybe Anthony is right. We could pitch it as a history bookends kind of thing — an early quartet and a late one.”
A black squirrel chases a gray one as she speaks.
Daniel’s expression is muddy. “That’s strange, isn’t it? I thought places were supposed to have either black squirrels or gray ones, not both.”
Petra cocks her head. “Let me get this straight. Suzanne is advocating that we play Haydn? You’ve got your eye on the checkbook, too? Counting people in seats?”
“Let’s just say I’ve been reconsidering a few things. Anyway, it’s not like Ravel is some risky statement. Who doesn’t like Ravel?”
Petra shakes her head. “People say they like Ravel. Really they like Haydn and Vivaldi. People should like Ravel, and we should make them.”
“People,” Suzanne whispers. “Who is that, anyway? And how can you make them like something they don’t just by playing it? They either won’t come, or they’ll come and won’t like it, though they may, as you say, say they do.”
“As long as musicians have required food, money has played a role in music,” Daniel says, a sarcastic imitation of one of their teachers at Curtis.
“Perhaps,” says Suzanne, looking directly at Petra, “we should be like Meyerbeer and pay off some critics and hire our own corps de claque.”
She is thinking of the worst night of her musical life: downtown Charleston, beautiful warm weather, swaying palmetto trees, the orchestra’s back to the bay, streets filled with tourists and Spoleto festivalgoers. Between pieces the conductor broke off to raffle off a Jaguar, assuring the audience members that they could understand classical music. He brayed like a donkey — the memory still reddens her cheeks — as he introduced the worst piece of classical music she ever had to perform. “Hee-haw!” he cried, shaking his intentionally stereotypical white mane. “Hee-haw!” And then Suzanne and her new colleagues sawed away at Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite, the music swaying ugly to suggest the covered wagons, the musicians’ humiliation complete.
The next day Ben told her he’d turned down a paying stint at a conductors institute in Maine — a chance coveted by composers better known than he. He said, “I don’t want student conductors butchering my music, me having to scream at them not to speed up the crescendos and sitting around while professional conductors tell them how they look from the back, calling out, ‘Your hands are going to run into each other! Put your left hand down! No, not in your pocket!’”
When he told her how much it paid and who would have heard the piece, she couldn’t speak to him for a day and a half. Then her anger shrank into something cool and hard and she vowed to put her career ahead of his.
“Now I know you’re kidding,” says Petra.
“There’s nothing wrong with starting with Haydn,” Suzanne says. “He invented the goddamn string quartet, so who are we to be too good for him?”
Petra leans back on straight arms, stretching her long legs out in front of her. “Okay, okay, I don’t care. This is the question I have for you: How is a viola like a premature ejaculation?”
Suzanne knows the punch line but lets Petra have her fun.
Petra shakes her legs and says, “Even if you see it coming you can’t stop it.”
Suzanne watches the gray squirrel chase the black one around and up a young ash tree. She turns and sees Daniel watching the same scene, and then he turns, his eyes meeting hers, sharing this small seen secret.
“So you’re really going to break our hearts and marry someone else?” she asks him.
He tilts his head, the lids of his eyes lowering, giving him a sleepy look. “Somehow I think you’ll get over me.”
“I’m happy for you, you know.”
He nods slowly. “I know you are.”
Suzanne lies on her back when the sun emerges from another cloud, her face absorbing the warmth, her ears softening to the rustling leaves of the trees surrounding the green, her mind retuning to Alex’s confounding concerto. It is time to begin the hard work in earnest.
Twenty
While the Black Angels rehearsals are going well, Suzanne’s work on Alex’s score is an ongoing failure. The second movement of the concerto in particular feels beyond her ability, beyond even her powers to understand. She can play it now, without the score in front of her, but this is more a matter of memorization and counting than interpretation, and she cannot imagine an arrangement. The music simply doesn’t add up — angry crescendos alternating with slower mournful sections, the odd additions during the longest section of recapitulation.