And beginnings were everywhere for the taking. One Saturday, out scavenging his week’s stock of TV dinners in the freezer aisle of the Jewel, Peter heard a girl, no more than ten, in pink shorts, flowered peasant blouse, and flip-flops, humming to herself while bathing in the cold clouds that poured from the open door of a Popsicle case. The tune hit Els like a distilled Magnificat. Over the span of two manic months, he took the girl’s ditty and turned it into the twenty-minute Rapture, for chamber orchestra, soprano, and four reel-to-reel tape machines. The six pitches of that singsong fragment, combined and recombined, slowed, sped up, inverted, reversed, stacked into evolving rhythms and incanted in banks of antiphony, blossomed into a fantasia.
Mattison condemned the finished piece as decorative. Johnston liked the virtuoso reach, but wanted something more purged of familiar harmonic gestures. Hiller found it intriguing but inchoate. And Brün wanted to know how such music helped bring about a more just society.
Els squirreled away his teachers’ cavils and crafted his revenge. He spent nights in the electronic studio, coaxing the theremin, splicing tape loops, and learning how to program. The computer made it possible to shape any pitch, amplitude, timbre, and duration, and combine these into the voiceprint of the early space age. But omnipotence made Els sad. He yearned for the clumsy, freighted flights of earthly instruments.
In secret, he returned to the exhausted vocabularies of the old masters, looking for lost clues, trying to work out how they’d managed, once, to twist the viscera and swell whatever it was in humans that imagined it was a soul. Some part of him could not help believing that the key to re-enchantment still lay in walking backward into the future.
Picasso: “Art is dangerous. Art is not chaste.” Ellington: “When art ceases to be dangerous, you don’t want it.”
There were women in those years, one brittle and misgiven, the other glad and loud. Each had a music, though neither was Clara, whom Peter now hated with such force it left little room in him for other need. There were entertaining men, too, friends whose crackpot ideologies seemed just the thing for a month or two. Above all there was his growing technique, the greatest chemistry set a boy could want.
By demented but rigorous Cold War logic, composing kept him out of the jungles of Southeast Asia. People in marble buildings out East vowed to beat the Communists at every available proxy war: athletics, chess, showpiece architecture, even high culture. And that meant deferments for student composers. The State Department and the CIA even sent the best of Els’s colleagues on concert tours to Thailand, Argentina, Turkey, and other contested world hot spots.
Back in his first year in graduate school, Els had sat in a TV room at the Illini Union, surrounded by giddy students, watching a bulky, grainy, rabbit-eared black-and-white set bolted to the wall as the Beatles played Ed Sullivan, their infectious seventh chords electrifying the room. By the time he started his doctoral portfolio, a great feedback loop of influence had swept him up. Everyone was picking everyone else’s pockets: the Fab Four stealing from Stockhausen for Sgt. Pepper; Andriessen and Berio rearranging Lennon and McCartney. For a few bright months, high and low, timid and adventuresome, coarse and intricate, all braided around each other in complex counterpoint. But by the year Els left school for good, the gods were fumbling around up on a London rooftop, trying and failing to get back home.
For three years, Peter lived in a graduate flophouse in West Urbana — a majestic old turn-of-the-century American Gothic carved up into separate units, each serviced by its own fire escape, with a dozen mailboxes in a police lineup on the front porch. There, in the fall of ’66, his roommates clamped him in a wing chair, fed him hash brownies, and launched him on a marathon listening session that seemed to spread out across days. They started him on The Well-Tempered Clavier. Kaleidoscopic lines burst in Peter’s head like tangled stairways in a Piranesi labyrinth. Indescribable arcs separated themselves from the flood of music and struck off on lives of their own. Those independent lines in turn formed — in the surprise intervals they struck when gliding over each other — further unheard melodies, airs folded perpendicularly inside other airs, or buried like cryptic crossword hints that hid the keys to their decoding inside another would-be clue. The weave staggeredhim — a two-minute proof of time’s divine design.
Who’s playing? he shouted, with an urgency that sent the group into hysterics.
He was disappointed to learn that it was Gould. I always hear all the counterpoint, with Gould. Try me with Richter.
The secret weaving was still there, even in Richter’s pedaled blur.
Six more hash excursions with much careful note-taking ended in disillusionment. Pot was a private aha. All the glories were sealed in the locked room of the smoker’s brain, and turned to a joke when he sobered. Els was after something more solid, a priori, shared — durable wonder raining down on whole roomfuls of listeners at once.
Then a summer night, a gram and a half of P. cubensis, and Els found himself swimming upright, propelled by thought through a field filled with what announced itself as filaments of pure life stretching out much farther and deeper than the mere world. The stars spoke in patterns of brilliance so obvious he’d forever overlooked them. The field was pure music, Jupiter unbound, one of an endless, renovating series of theres that the brain might live in, were it not shaped so mercilessly for here.
Music has killed more people than Serratia ever did.
Babbitt asked the question to the country’s face: Who Cares if You Listen? His manifesto made the rounds, drawing more readers than his music had listeners. Music knew things. It had its expanding toolkit, no less than chemistry. If you wanted to go deep, to make the full journey, you had to study the language.
The great mystery of those days was how many people still thought the journey worth the effort. Audiences sat for hours in somber black-box theaters to listen to a rash of abstruse blips and bleeps. Even downstate Illinois crawled with people — bright, energetic, hip, inventive explorers in loud stripes and madras and sideburns the shape of Idaho — people on the verge of a newfound America of sound.
In the middle of this efflorescence, the Imp Saint came to town. He walked into that wasteland of corn like the Apostle Paul wandering into the boonies of Lystra. A chance toss of the I Ching led Els to John Cage. Yet chance was just an order that you hadn’t yet perceived. The Imp Saint himself had written as much: every item in existence was linked to every other.
But then, the man had also written, many times in many ways, I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.
Music is awareness flowing in through the ear. And nothing is more terrifying than being aware.
He wanted to go home, shed his walking clothes, take a shower, and eat lunch. But camera crews encircled his house and lab techs were autopsying his dog for biotoxins. His face would be all over the local news by afternoon. Renown had evaded Peter Els his whole life. Now he had only to drive home and wave his arms, and he’d become America’s most famous living composer.
His brain was pure noise. Els drove at random, turning often, his eyes on the rearview mirror. The strip mall where he bought his groceries swung into view. He turned in. The familiar gauntlet of shops felt like the set for a comic operetta: tanning salon, weight loss clinic, dentist-in-a-box, Pretty Nails, Eyemart.