Someone said, Jesus God. Els looked to the professor for an explanation, but the man’s face fisted up in fear. The co-ed at the desk behind Els began to sniffle like an engine that wouldn’t turn over. Someone said, Get a radio. Someone put his arm on Els’s shoulder, a last awkward innocence. And the thought — three parts dread and one part thrill — passed through the mind of the beginning composer as if one of them had spoken it out loud: Make what you want, now. The place is up for grabs.
You carry around ten times more bacterial cells than you do human ones. Without their genes, you’re dead.
Els returned to school after that Christmas break with a single-movement octet — cello, violin, viola, clarinet, flute, horn, trumpet, and trombone. Music for uncharted times. The piece had started out studious, even reverent, but something happened as he fleshed it out. The lines insisted on more room, more play, more heat and light. The thing turned demonic, as reckless and motor-driven as those rock and roll anthems that his brother once forced him to admire.
He assembled a group of grad performers and cajoled them through several rehearsals until he produced a satisfying tape. The piece felt strong enough to win him lessons with any of the faculty’s alphas — those men who locked themselves into the Experimental Music Studio for days at a time, outdoing even the north campus scientists in rigor and formal perfection.
For his pedagogical parricide, Els settled on Matthew Mattison. A working-class boy from Lakehurst, Mattison went about in bomber jackets, three-day stubble, and loosened ties that looked like sliced-up Pollock canvases. The man was a dervish of dark energy, not yet forty-four, but his music had been performed in a dozen countries; he seemed to Els like a study for a bust in tomorrow’s Museum of Iconoclasm. His most recent twenty-five-minute tour de force was a contrapuntal pitched-speech chorus for virtuoso verbal ensemble built from the phrase, “So what if it’s so?”
Mattison invited Els to his house to listen to the octet. The home of a real composer: it wasn’t possible. Els stumbled on the loose, weed-covered flagstones twice while coming up the front walk.
The meeting began at eight p.m. and didn’t break up until one in the morning. And in those five hours of vicious back-and-forth, Els found himself defending a musical philosophy he never imagined anyone having to defend.
Els liked arguing as well as the next rebel acolyte. He and Clara had once stayed up all night fighting over which three piano concertos to take down in the fallout shelter for the final stay. But Mattison meant war. He began with a ferocious volley, not merely against the octet itself, but against all the foundations that Els took for granted. He called it cheap of Els to hide behind a melody that the audience would leave the hall humming. That meter so regular you could skip rope to it, those thrilling chord progressions: Why not just send a cozy Christmas card?
The front room where the two men clashed was almost bare aside from three wood-plank chairs, built by Swedes for mannequins. A stand near the window held a fishbowl filled with cobalt marbles. In the middle of the room a wrought-iron cube supported a thin surfboard of glass, a coffee table that had never seen coffee, let alone magazines. On a ledge jutting from one wall sat a sculpture made of bolts and washers and nuts that looked like an engineer’s upgrade of an elephant. Taped to the wall were unframed newsprint printouts — skeins of radiating black lines, generated by Illinois’s massive mainframe computer. Three years later, every child in America would be making similar webbed designs with their toy Spirographs.
For hours, Els and Mattison battled over first principles, and all that time, the master never offered his prospective disciple food or drink. For a while, the student held his own. But at last, herded into a corner, Els broke.
Isn’t the point of music to move listeners?
Mattison smiled. No. The point of music is to wake listeners up. To break all our ready-made habits.
And tradition?
Real composers make their own.
So Gustav Mahler wasn’t a real composer?
Mattison regarded the ceiling of the bare room and stroked his stubble with the back of his knuckles. He considered the question for forty-five seconds — half the length of Els’s octet scherzo.
Yes. I would have to say that Gustav Mahler was not a real composer. A songwriter, perhaps. But caught in the grip of the past.
It was beyond late. Els rubbed his mouth and said nothing. He was hearing things, faraway things approaching, faint and impenitent and electric.
If you come study with me, Mattison said, your very first piece will be about the stop sign at the end of my street.
Els looked around the bare room. The white plaster walls caught the light of the paper lantern and bent it into a cubist bouquet. He listened to the future for a long time. Then he turned back toward his next teacher and squinted. Fine. But I’m going to write it in C.
Life is nothing but mutual infection. And every infecting message changes the message it infects.
The war between Peter and Matthew Mattison lasted years, without any hope of peace with honor. They fought not simply over Els’s tenderfoot soul but over the whole project of music. Week after week, Els tried to revive the once-audacious inventions of the past and make them dangerous again. And week after week, his mentor dismissed his études as pretty sentiment.
The wildest things Els dared to make were too tame for Mattison. And in time, Mattison’s constant harping on freshness began to stale. Still, the rolling clashes taught Els a great deal about theory and harmony, despite Mattison’s contempt for those spent games. Els learned a lot, too, about the human ear, about what it would and wouldn’t hear. But above all, he learned how to weaponize art.
Els grew; he broadened, under the attack. At last, the jagged terrain that Mattison pushed him toward opened up its cold magnificence. And like the businessman who finds one Friday that he might enjoy dressing up as a woman and heading to a dark cellar club on the other side of town, Peter Els embraced his panic and thrilled to realize that he might be free to make anything at all.
For years, the crisis lay in choosing Schoenberg or Stravinsky. By 1966, both those men sounded old and quaint. European postwar weirdness, American pop ballads, magnetic tape, advertising ditties, and gnarly microtones all collided in one big free-for-all. Yet the wider the choice, the more every conscript in the program wanted Els to declare allegiance. He grasped this one night in a campus bar, while Dylan wailed “Desolation Row” on the jukebox, that reworking of the old United Mine Workers anthem: Everybody’s shouting, “Which Side Are You On?”
He knew no earthly reason why he should have to choose. Yet he now saw — crazy late — just how the pecking order worked. The high-concept men got all the performances. The twelve-tone formalists got all the cachet. And with new Ph.D. programs in composition sprouting up all across the country, to compete for grants, you needed a system as pure as physics. And so the choice came clear to Els: radiant versus rigorous, methodical versus moving.
For as long as he could, Els crept between camps like a Swiss diplomatic courier. But the fray said declare, or be despised by all. And soon enough, the fray began to excite Els.
It was his pure dumb luck to be alive in the morning of that revolution. For one more time, music had causes to champion, utopias to foster, and idols worth demolishing. Not since ars nova in the fourteenth century or the development of sonata-allegro form at the end of the eighteenth had there been a better time to be a beginner.