This semester I’d signed up for a late-afternoon elective: Compositional Technique. Something about that image of the young composer in the library, laboring over his handcrafted score; it was impressive, and around here — among an entire schoolful of child musicians who were younger and more advanced than me — I longed to be someone impressive. Maybe this would help. I could cultivate a scarf, a pencil behind the ear. There were fewer than a dozen of us in this class, including Arthur.
Every week our teacher brought under his arm a small stack of records. After selecting one and placing it onto the turntable, he turned up the volume so high that the pops between tracks could be felt as thuds in the rib cage: a drumbeat to usher in the agony of the Postwar Era. He called these listening sessions ear calisthenics. We were stretching our ears, he said. Listening to each piece at full volume was intended to wake us up. Tonality’s a drug, he shouted over the music, that lulls you into a complacent stupor! Each piece was a new shock to the system. Each had the quality of spectacle.
Ligeti: the white-knuckle dissonance of a horror movie.
Xenakis: musical instruments performing roadwork construction.
Penderecki: the chaos of an emergency room after a nuclear blast.
Arthur was the only one here who seemed genuinely engaged, who didn’t wince through the pieces or laugh at the more over-the-top pratfalls of sound, who didn’t look every week as though he’d signed up for the wrong class. Arthur listened rapt, eyes closed, flaring his nostrils as though he were trying to pick up the music’s scent. His face recorded the subtlest changes in tone — now hopeful, now restless, now burning with rage! — and through his expressions it seemed clear he got the music in a way that the rest of us did not. Although I thought he was a brownnosing phony, another part of me believed in his understanding enough to take cues for what I should be hearing in these impenetrable walls of sound.
We were given writing assignments that came out less like music than the solution to a puzzle: Compose a piano étude that will pose a significant challenge to the performer — with only four notes. If one half of the class was spent at the turntable, the other half was spent around the class upright, the teacher sight-reading our pieces unless we decided to volunteer. As a result of the tight constraints, everyone’s assignments sounded interchangeably similar. After one was performed, Arthur was often first to comment, often in the form of a question: Is that phrase even possible on the clarinet? Won’t that be lost if you give it to the viola? Questions addressed to the student but seemed meant for the teacher. This confusion often provoked a standoff, a kind of stumped silence that grew hostile and that the teacher finally had to break by rephrasing Arthur’s question to all of us: Well? Who can tell me if this note is playable on a B-flat clarinet? I imagined that the teacher found Arthur as irritating as the rest of us did. When Arthur spoke, we gave each other looks. What is this guy’s problem?
On my morning subway ride uptown the week before the Concerto Competition, I was jolted awake by Arthur, suddenly beside me. Well, he said, what did you think about it? As if resuming some conversation momentarily interrupted. How long had he been here? Had he come over from another seat, or had he been sitting here all along?
I assumed he was referring to the recording we had listened to the week prior, one of the more outrageous experiments from the sixties.
A bootleg tape of the performance:
Under the surf-like ambient noise, a man’s voice murmuring, the creaking of someone walking around on a stage, an incoherent shout, a lull into which comes some coughing, the audience shifting in their seats — then piano sounds, pounding note clusters (fists on keys?), followed by the tinkling refrain of a familiar piece (Schubert?) — pause — a tremendous clap! (the piano’s lid being dropped) — the reverberations of piano strings — then a shuffle, grunting, some creaking, several gasps (the audience), shouts (Hey! What!)—and a thunderous crash that overloads the microphone. Stop tape.
The teacher passed around an oversize mimeographed “score” afterward, which was merely a sheet of paper with a list of instructions:
Recite the Declaration of Independence;
Play “incredulously”;
Picture Dresden after the bombing;
Perform the first piece that comes to mind;
Roll the piano off the stage.
Interestingly, those students who had been quick to guffaw at the slightest musical provocation sat stony; the score passing hands might as well have been a crime-scene photo. It was Arthur who laughed. At the sound of the piano crashing, he whooped with laughter. He laughed for so long that he got out of breath and had to wipe his eyes. It was the sound of someone coming unhinged. And when the score came around to him, it sent him on another peal. Even our teacher looked concerned.
But sitting beside me now, he tried to explain. The guy pushed the piano off the stage! I mean, come on: boom! The audience, jumping out of the seats? Watch it, this guy’s nuts! And the stage manager: You fool, do you have any idea how much that Bösendorfer is worth? The performer: But it was in the score! The composer: I meant offstage, not off the stage! Can’t you just picture it?
The problem was, I could picture it: the growing alarm, the performer’s pounding fists, the incoherent bits of schoolboy lessons. You don’t know how far this guy is going to go. Someone whispers, We should get out of here. Something dangerous about his prowl about the stage. You yourself want to leave — your nape hairs are tingling — but you’re fighting with your impulse not to be rude. And then he’s rolling that piano toward the edge, toward you, and you’re thinking all the way up to the moment it topples off: He’s bluffing. He won’t do it. And as loud as the recording seemed, to be there in person for the crash, two thousand pounds of hardwood and iron? And not just any hunk of furniture: a piano, the very embodiment of grace. To see it toppled like that. It must have been ghastly, like watching an elephant felled.
Exactly! Arthur said. Great art should be dangerous. It should make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up! We neuter music the way we listen to it, culturing it up. It’s polite chitchat, it’s the required two encores, then off for cocktails where a string quartet plays quote ‘classics’ end quote in the background. Next time you’re at a recital look around at your neighbor. Reading the program, dozing off, anything but actually listening! There but not really there. He’s wondering how many more movements before he can clap, how many minutes before intermission. Biding time between breaks in the music. This is what’s become of the art we practice: an excuse to be seen, a cultural equivalent to eating your spinach. Now, put that same man in the audience of that piano recital we listened to last week and woo-boy! You can bet he’s going to sit up and listen.
Since our introduction at the library, my interactions with Arthur had been marginal, brief. This kind of talk was new.
Odd thing I noticed: Arthur’s hands were dirty. Green-black under the nails, grime in the crevices of his fingers. And although his clothes seemed fresh enough — hair fluffy from a morning washing — he gave off the sharp whiff of cat pee. He spoke as though he weren’t used to speaking his thoughts out loud. And in the strange paradox of the very shy, he had a candor that bordered on rude.