a convertible, and visited a suburban house where an upper-middle-class teen party was in full swing. As the clip rolled, the hit count rose by ten thousand viewers. Shaking off the song, Els searched for an explanation. The Web teemed with ten thousand parodies, reactions, tributes, covers, homages, analyses, and news segments about the global phenomenon.
He looked up. It was past dinnertime, and he was starving.
. . .
THE LEBANESE MEZE restaurant not far from campus was hopping. But the oblivious crowd was just what he needed after his morning’s run-in with the law. Noises everywhere—ice sliding from pitchers, a rumble of silver on stoneware, the diffuse, rolling chorus of clientele swapping their strands of gossip—like one of those mad Stockhausen pieces composed in a fireworks-testing facility. Drink your wine with a glad heart, for God accepts your works.
Els asked for a table near the center of the room. Maddy had always accused him of being a closet extrovert. You are the Thomas Merton of music . You want to live in a hermitage in Times Square, with a big sign pointing to you reading, hermit.
Els smiled at the accusation, decades downstream. He imagined his wife across the table, shaking her head at the fix he’d gotten into. They had lived together for a handful of years, each year leaving them a little less explicable to each other. And still he sometimes joked with her ghost or sounded her out on the latest strangeness. Once Maddy had admired his compulsive need to make music; by the end, it merely baffled her. Garage genomics would have struck her as total madness.
You don’t hate the public, Peter. You need it. You want people to come drag you out of your cave and make you play them something.
Once, in his late twenties, in the full flush of skill-driven freedom, he wrote a hermetic, harmonically adventuresome song cycle for piano, clarinet, theremin, and solo soprano on texts from Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China.” The third song ran:
You do not need to leave your room.
Only sit at your table and listen.
Don’t even listen;
simply wait, be quiet,
still and solitary.
The world will offer itself to be unmasked.
It has no choice;
it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
The songs were performed twice, seven years apart, for a dozen puzzled listeners each time. That was the kind of music Els wrote: more people onstage than in the audience. Sometime in the late nineties, after the disaster of his three-hour historical drama The Fowler’s Snare , Els destroyed the only copies of many of his scores, including “The Great Wall”songs. The cryptic music now existed nowhere but in his ears. But he could hear it again, even above the restaurant din. He’d forgotten how jagged and eerie the whole cycle had been, how bent it was on its prophecy. He regretted destroying the piece. He could brighten the songs now. Give them room to breathe. A little light; some air.
He lifted his water glass and toasted the ghost sitting across the table from him: Guilty as charged . No one in the noisy room heard him.
AT HOME, HE had no lab to occupy his evening. He switched on the giant flat-screen. Sara had gotten it for him for his seventieth birthday, to keep him on progress’s forced march. On the vibrant high-def screen, a cloud of radiation drifted toward the largest urban conglomeration on Earth, just as in the worst disaster movies of his youth.
Els switched to a documentary on western wildlife. The soundtrack—a mythic, pentatonic meandering—bugged him, and he switched again. One click, and he landed on a corral full of string-bikini models whacking each other with giant foam hands. He killed the set and vowed to remove it from the room tomorrow, as he’d promised the doctor at the insomnia clinic he would do, months earlier.
The book on his nightstand opened to where he’d left off the night before. He stopped each evening at the top of the left-hand page, the end of the first
He looked up. It was past dinnertime, and he was starving.
. . .
THE LEBANESE MEZE restaurant not far from campus was hopping. But the oblivious crowd was just what he needed after his morning’s run-in with the law. Noises everywhere—ice sliding from pitchers, a rumble of silver on stoneware, the diffuse, rolling chorus of clientele swapping their strands of gossip—like one of those mad Stockhausen pieces composed in a fireworks-testing facility. Drink your wine with a glad heart, for God accepts your works.
Els asked for a table near the center of the room. Maddy had always accused him of being a closet extrovert. You are the Thomas Merton of music . You want to live in a hermitage in Times Square, with a big sign pointing to you reading, hermit.
Els smiled at the accusation, decades downstream. He imagined his wife across the table, shaking her head at the fix he’d gotten into. They had lived together for a handful of years, each year leaving them a little less explicable to each other. And still he sometimes joked with her ghost or sounded her out on the latest strangeness. Once Maddy had admired his compulsive need to make music; by the end, it merely baffled her. Garage genomics would have struck her as total madness.
You don’t hate the public, Peter. You need it. You want people to come drag you out of your cave and make you play them something.
Once, in his late twenties, in the full flush of skill-driven freedom, he wrote a hermetic, harmonically adventuresome song cycle for piano, clarinet, theremin, and solo soprano on texts from Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China.” The third song ran:
You do not need to leave your room.
Only sit at your table and listen.
Don’t even listen;
simply wait, be quiet,
still and solitary.
The world will offer itself to be unmasked.
It has no choice;
it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
The songs were performed twice, seven years apart, for a dozen puzzled listeners each time. That was the kind of music Els wrote: more people onstage than in the audience. Sometime in the late nineties, after the disaster of his three-hour historical drama The Fowler’s Snare , Els destroyed the only copies of many of his scores, including “The Great Wall”songs. The cryptic music now existed nowhere but in his ears. But he could hear it again, even above the restaurant din. He’d forgotten how jagged and eerie the whole cycle had been, how bent it was on its prophecy. He regretted destroying the piece. He could brighten the songs now. Give them room to breathe. A little light; some air.
He lifted his water glass and toasted the ghost sitting across the table from him: Guilty as charged . No one in the noisy room heard him.
AT HOME, HE had no lab to occupy his evening. He switched on the giant flat-screen. Sara had gotten it for him for his seventieth birthday, to keep him on progress’s forced march. On the vibrant high-def screen, a cloud of radiation drifted toward the largest urban conglomeration on Earth, just as in the worst disaster movies of his youth.
Els switched to a documentary on western wildlife. The soundtrack—a mythic, pentatonic meandering—bugged him, and he switched again. One click, and he landed on a corral full of string-bikini models whacking each other with giant foam hands. He killed the set and vowed to remove it from the room tomorrow, as he’d promised the doctor at the insomnia clinic he would do, months earlier.
The book on his nightstand opened to where he’d left off the night before. He stopped each evening at the top of the left-hand page, the end of the first
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