You have a lovely voice, Els said. He wanted to say: Worth waiting for every spring.
Pleasure reddened the jogger’s face. Thanks.
She edged away. Els ached to call her back. Faust’s parting shot to life: Stay awhile; you’re so beautiful. But then, he felt like saying that to everything, these days. She smiled, put the buds back in her ears, waved, and looked again up into the tree, at the invisible maker. Then she turned back to the jogging track, and, like so much else that Els took for granted on that disastrous morning, vanished forever.
Prodigiosins kill fungus, protozoa, and bacteria. They might even cure cancer. Their red is the color of pure possibility.
It’s 1963, Els’s final month at that massive musical factory pumping out performers from the fields of rural Indiana. All winter long, he’s studied with Karol Kopacz, and now it’s spring, his last undergraduate May. Old Klangfarben Kopacz: Polish by way of Argentina, one of those aging terrors from the era of cultural giants who died in the war and were resurrected in the Americas, the marble guardians of a lost art. From what Els can tell, Kopacz hasn’t put a note in front of the public for twenty years. The man seems to care nothing for music anymore, though he knows it better than most people know how to breathe.
Els sits in his mentor’s office in a corner of the Old Music Building. Every surface of Karol Kopacz’s lair, including the baby grand, is heaped high with moldering books and papers, loose scores, records long divorced from their cardboard sleeves, brass Shiva Natarajas, a broken bandoneón, a stringless oud, plates of forgotten sandwich, and a framed photo of an almost handsome younger man underneath the bear paw of Stravinsky that Kopacz has never bothered to hang. Channels through the clutter lead from the door to the desk, the desk to the piano, the piano to the veined leather love seat where cowed composition students sit and take their weekly beatings.
Every seven days, Peter Els brings the man the best that his green soul can generate. Kopacz sits and scans Els’s systems in silence. Then he tosses the scores back, saying, Lots of traffic and no cops, or Too many peaks, not enough valleys. For days afterward, Els rages against the man’s glib dismissals. But a month later, he’s always in complete agreement.
Today Els brings a thing of antic splendor for solo piano. It feels fresh, quirky, and young, everything art ought to be. It’s an openhearted gamble, keen with both reason and love.
His professor looks at the first measure and grimaces. What is all this?
It’s a compact chromatic phrase, packed with every one of Western music’s twelve available notes, twice over. Els stole the idea from Henry Cowell, who may have stolen it from Scriabin, who surely stole it from someone even older.
Go to the piano, Kopacz commands. Peter does as told. He may be a budding revolutionary, but he’s an obedient one.
Hit a key.
Els reaches out one finger. Which. . ?
The émigré presses one hoary hand over his eyes, as if the genocidal century has finally caught up with him and he can flee no farther.
Peter hits a key.
Thank you, his mentor says, oozing grace. What do you hear?
C? Peter tries. His brain scrambles for the real answer. C-two. Great C.
Yes, yes, Kopacz snaps. What else? Again!
Bewildered, Peter restrikes the note.
Well? Mother of God. Just listen.
Els strokes the key. He doesn’t understand. It might be a foghorn at night. It might be the singing radiator from his childhood bedroom. It might be the first note of the first prelude of the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. He strikes again, harder, but says nothing.
His teacher hangs his head and groans for civilization’s sad waste. Just listen, he begs. Stay inside the sound.
Els does. The building’s torrent of heating switches off, audible now that it stops. He hears the plosives of two people bickering. Down the hall, someone runs through the Adagio from the Pathétique. Someone else grinds out four measures from the Elgar Cello Concerto until it sounds like Fluxus. A soprano vocalizes in rapid chromatic swells and dips, the cartoon cue for seasickness. Something that sounds like a large cardboard box knocks against the brick wall at six-second intervals. Outside, a young couple flirts in muffled Spanish. Blocks away, a siren makes its way toward someone’s life-erasing disaster. Through it all, Karol Kopacz sits slumped at his desk, face in his hands, drowning in bitter music.
Els blocks him out and listens. He focuses until the note he keeps striking breaks in two. Obvious, what else is there, now that he stops assuming that there’s nothing else to hear.
I also hear C-three.
He braces for abuse. But his teacher barks in triumph.
Thank you. Maybe your ear does function, after all. What else?
Relief turns back into panic. Surely there’s more to the game. But since Peter can now hear the G above that octave C, a perfect fifth shining out like a ray through cloud, he’s forced to say so.
Go on, the displaced Pole commands. Now the game is flushed out into the open. Above that perfect fifth, a perfect fourth. Els has never before taken the fact seriously: hovering above any tone is twice that tone, and triple it, and on up the integers.
He has the map; he knows what islands must be out there, farther off at sea. He stops breathing and concentrates himself. Soon he thinks he can hear the C above the G above the C above the original C ghosting in his ear. He claims as much, and glances at his teacher for a reward. Kopacz’s curled fingers wave lazy ellipses in the air: Don’t stop now.
Higher still, there hides a major third, then a minor one, and out above that, the entire harmonic series. Els knows the sequence; he could cheat with impunity. But he’s still a beginner in his own life, saddled with virulent idealism. He won’t claim any pitch he can’t in fact hear.
It dawns on Els that even a newborn must feel suspense and resolution, tensions drawn from this series of concealed pitches that the ear detects without knowing. For a beat or two, he flirts with apostasy; maybe the laws of harmony aren’t a straitjacket imposed by random convention, after all. He strikes the key harder. It blots out the performance students down the hall, struggling to master their craft. He strains to extract that E above the third C, high up the rainbow of this single note. But the longer he listens, the more that pitch is lost in the angry hum of the fluorescent lights.
E, Kopacz taunts, in a half reverie. Another G. B-flat above that.
Peter can’t tell if the man claims to hear those pitches, or if, like a high-energy physicist, he’s simply asserting their theoretical existence. Audible or not, they’re all present: every pitch in the chromatic scale. Sweet stability and crashing discord, the palette for everything from sultry seduction to funeral mass, and Peter has gone his whole life hearing nothing but the fundamental.
Kopacz holds Els’s composition up in the air with his left hand. He smacks it with the wiggling fingers of his right. How many busy little notes do you need to play at once? Use a single C, and be done with it.
Peter glares, but his teacher doesn’t notice. The man busies himself with pushing back the frenzied referendum of his white hair. He slumps in his broken Bauhaus chair and commands, Now: C-sharp.