My failure to practice also made her sad, and only six months after her husband died I told my parents that I didn’t want to have piano lessons anymore. Instead I learned to play the bassoon. I learned a lot of terminology, like “senza vibrato,” which I thought meant “with vibrato” but actually means “without vibrato.” Vibrato is just when you add a wobble to a note. You can wobble the note by making it louder or softer, say with your diaphragm if you’re a singer or a wind player, or by moving the pitch up and down slightly with the rockings of your abused fingertips if you’re a string player or Segovia. Electric guitar players get to use a special twanger to stretch the strings and produce vibrato, which is how Jimi Hendrix played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Opera singers sometimes use too much vibrato and it drives everyone mad.
What is a note? A note is a sound represented by a black blob on the page. Notes can be long or short, and in real life they are always bending up and down like flexible claymation figures. I had a bad dream once in which I was a successful composer of scores for horror movies. I’d written a very frightening and suspenseful track for a chase scene where a man tries to protect a woman from a disfigured eyeless monster — or so I reconstruct the setting — but the movie that I’d scored so well was never released and the chase scene music had nowhere to go, and was condemned to wander the world pursuing people. In the dream I woke up, and in the dimness of the room I saw the chase scene music there hovering at the foot of my bed — a shadowy humanoid made of writhingly alive notes like long black water balloons. It had found me. I got up and tried to touch the notes and that made them angry. The chase scene music began chasing me, with terrible violin-harmonic screeching sounds and glissandi from the double basses. The music could find no peace. It was an awful dream. Fortunately I don’t have nightmares that often.
So a note can be long or short. When Paul McCartney sings, “Blackbird singing in the dead of night,” the “of” is a slide upward. It could be written as two notes on the page, but it’s sung as a single upward-swooping sound. When Marvin Gaye sings “bay-eee-eee-bee-eee” in “Sexual Healing,” there are five distinctly audible notes, and yet nobody is counting them because numbers have nothing to do with sexual healing. Each of the “notes” has been healed by being annealed, that is, by being melted into the next note, and you can hear that Marvin Gaye knew that this song, cowritten with an admiring journalist, was going to be an enormous hit, bigger than anything else he’d done, even though his life was sliding downhill.
Sung notes are always sliding uphill and downhill into each other because it’s not possible for a human voice to leap from one note to the next instantaneously. But why are they called notes? I don’t know. I guess a note is a little memorandum to self, a way of remembering a melody. A melody is a tune — something you can hum — like a move in chess. You can hum a tune but you can’t hum the harmony underneath a tune, and you can’t hum a clever sacrifice in a chess game, even though you can write Bxd6. If you look at old musical scores, from the fifteenth century, they write the notes as little diamond shapes on a stave. Meanwhile the itinerant jongleurs were singing and clapping and writing nothing down. Having assignations in the beer pantry.
What’s a stave? Ah, the stave is the set of five lines onto which you hang the notes. There’s the E line, the G line, the B line, the D line, and the F train. I was taught a helpful mnemonic: Every Good Boy Does Fine. It’s not true, though. Some good boys do not do that well in school. Or in life. There’s also Elvis’s Guitar Broke Down Friday, and Earth Girls Blow Dairy Farmers — no, I made that last one up. You’re putting the notes out for display on the staves. You are in fact espaliering the notes like a pear tree on a wooden frame. If you put the note up here on Friday, it’s going to be higher in “pitch,” meaning higher up on the pitch of the slope. And if you pin the note on Elvis down here, it’s going to be lower in pitch, because up is vocal constriction and tension and upwardness and mountaintops, and lower is moon river and the bass singer in the Four Tops.
So the stave, or staff, is simply five lines of wooden framing onto which you hang the notes for the sake of convenience. And the really confusing thing is that middle C is not located in the middle of the stave, it’s below the stave. Middle C is a key next to two black keys roughly in the middle of the piano keyboard. It’s the center of everything and yet perversely it’s represented as a note below the first line of the staff, or stave — a note with a little line through it to signal that there’s a virtual line below the five lines, so that it looks like a flying saucer.
And then there are bar lines — vertical lines that neatly cross the stave every so often. They form measures, which are little aquariums of time in which the notes must forever swim. At first there were no bar lines, because the choristers figured that all you needed to know was the tune. If you’re singing a monkish chant you just need to be reminded of the tune. But then they began working out a code for longer notes and shorter notes — shorter notes were black blobs and longer notes were open blobs that weren’t colored in — and then they resorted to fiddling with the tail of the notes, so that some notes were so-called quarter notes, which were very important because they fell on every beat, and they had upsticking or downsticking single tails, while eighth notes had curvy spinnakers off their poles and if they joined up with other eighth notes they were united by angled bars between their poles as if they were going by too fast to stand on their own, and sixteenth notes had a second droopy thing, or a second connecting bar. The angled bars that connect notes are different from the vertical bar lines that separate measures — very confusing. I’m falling apart here.
Another oddity of nomenclature: A piano key is a physical object that is different from the key, or “key signature,” that the music is in. A piece of music may be in the key of C major but the melody might begin on the D key or the E key or any key at all. Debussy called the piano a “box of hammers.” “The Sunken Cathedral” is in the key of C major, more or less.
But the main thing to keep in mind is that the melody, or tune, the hummable essence of a song, is like a thread that is wrapped around various doorknobs in a large ornate eighteenth-century room of harmony designed by an architect named Rameau, and the knobs of harmony are made up of groups of constitutive notes called chords, and each chord has a little positive or negative ionic charge in it that moves things forward with colorn;;;;;”“’n
I seem to have fallen asleep.
• • •
JEFF THE BARN MAN and two of his guys showed up first thing in the morning, and we set up a ladder and a bucket brigade and started rescuing the boxes and putting them in a back part of the first floor of the barn where the crossbeams had several upright supports. By the fiftieth book box Jeff said, “I think I’m getting a better sense of why the floor collapsed.” A carton of my family letters had broken open — postcards from uncles and aunts, and birthday wishes, and a “Dear Grandmother and Grandfather” thank-you from me, in blue felt-tip pen, for the Mediterranean cruise. “The Parthenon was ineffable,” I’d written. I remembered my mother suggesting the word to me when, sitting at the kitchen table, I’d asked her for something that meant “mysterious.”
One of my three traveling sprinklers had its sprayer arms mangled, but my father’s original Sears model was in fine shape. And, miraculously, his collection of plastic packaging, egg cartons and foam clamshell boxes and appliance-cradling abstract shapes of Styrofoam, was completely untouched — stretch-wrapped in clear plastic sheeting on a pallet out of range of the avalanche. The canoe, however, was totally squashed. “Yep, I’d say you’re not going to get very far in that,” said Jeff. I dragged it out onto the grass and swore and took a picture of it to email to the Allstate man.