*** ***** ******** ***** *** PROLOGUE *** ***** ******** ***** ***
The secret is how to suffer.
That's been the story of the artist's life since the beginning of music history – whether it was in the number of solitary hours one spent practicing to become the successful performer one aspired to be, or whether it was something like Beethoven's deafness or Schubert's premature death at the age of 31.
Becoming a composer, he'd been told, was like playing Russian roulette – maybe you'd win, maybe you'd lose.
Go ahead, spin the revolver – what've you got to lose? Who would notice another dead composer, any way?
“The only good composer is a dead composer.”
“Here is music that stinks in the ear.”
He remembered back to that June day years ago – so many years ago, it seemed, yet in a way, a recent memory – when they had gathered in a reception room, the members of the composition department's graduating class from one of the most prestigious conservatories in the world – the Juilliard School of Music at Lincoln Center.
And here, today, standing in his brownstone home, he thought, I am just blocks away from Lincoln Center.
This icon of American arts, located between 62nd and 66th streets on Manhattan's Upper West Side, was designed to modernize the great concert halls of old and yet bring to mind the grandeur and symmetry of the Ancient Greeks. It was a cultural Acropolis in the midst of a busy, modern city, considered one of the premiere music venues in the world.
The egos in that room, at that reception long ago, could easily have filled the Parthenon itself. Young composers about to enter into the competitive world, some already with colleges to go to – to teach, perhaps, or to attend another level of training; others still waiting to hear; and some with no prospects other than an immensity of hope. The older, respected composers – teachers or those guests who influenced the younger generation – probably thinking back to the time they had once been on the receiving end of their training, mere grasshoppers in the world of New Music, now passed on their knowledge, their inspiration to the next generation of composers who hoped, one day, to replace them.
There were rivalries, of course. There were always rivalries: how could anything so intensely personal as a composer's individual style not kindle some amount of friction when rubbed up against someone else's compositional style?
All art, he had learned, was political: before there were Red States and Blue States, there was Uptown vs Downtown with Juilliard trying to maintain its Midtown identity. If it hadn't been German vs French or sacred vs secular, it had been something else, all the way back to Apollo and Dionysus.
They stood around in their graduation robes, many still wearing or holding their mortarboards, drinking wine and hoping not to spill any since the robes were rented and needed to be returned soon.
His face hurt from trying to smile. I'm a composer, not an actor. He shook hands, he wished his classmates luck and offered platitudes as easily as he accepted them but deep down in his heart, he knew otherwise.
He knew the truth.
There had been speeches about success and hard work, about integrity, about not worrying over what was original and what wasn't, about not giving in to the path of least resistance.
His teacher, the one with the intense blue eyes, looked him in the face and wished him well, glossing over the arguments they had had, the enmity they shared.
Some day, you too will recognize the truth. There is much I have to learn but there is much that I will teach you. And for that, I will have your soul.
He joined in the toast and, standing next to his teacher for the photograph, raised his wine glass “to the future.”
And your little doll, too.
*** ***** ******** ***** *** CHAPTER I *** ***** ******** ***** ***
They said it would be just another routine elevator ride, even if a very long one, all the way to the top of the Washington Monument, but once we got there, the view would be spectacular. There were maybe fifteen of us, the first group of fifth graders from Eastedge Elementary School, crammed into it with one of the teachers, Miss Eliza Messerschmidt, an older woman – she was probably over 40 – and not much taller than us kids. She taught one of the other classes and I only knew her by reputation, what my friends had said about her at recess or after school: they called her Sarge and wasn't it just my luck she was standing directly behind me? It's so cramped in here, I thought, and why is this bony woman standing there with her hands on my shoulders?
The door cranked shut and slowly we took off, lurching upwards bit by bit. It didn't really feel like there would be any problem as we chugged up and up through the cold stone needle but several of the children were becoming uneasy. After all, it was unnatural to be confined in such a small space, unable to move for even a very short time, anything more than a few minutes, really.
Then there was a snap, a jolt and the light went out. We had stopped climbing. I could feel Miss Messerschmidt's fingernails digging into my skin. At first the kids were silent for maybe five seconds, if that long, but then a slow wail began to grow from deep inside someone behind me. In a matter of seconds, we were all freaking out, wondering what had happened, if we were stuck and if so, how long would it be before we'd be rescued. Suzy Spartnik began chanting under her breath “Please, God, I don't want to die.”
The teacher told us to remain still – still?! – but her voice was already quivering. Many of us were just rolling our eyes, but then that was about all we could move. One of the girls on my right began whimpering “What's going to happen to us? Are we going to be stuck here all day?” The guys, for the most part, were taking it all in fun. One of them suggested if we all jump up and down together, we'd get the elevator car unstuck and soon we'd be moving again. Or crashing down 300 feet to the bottom of the monument, you dork! Count on Billy Bellwin to come up with something completely the opposite of what we should do. I could imagine the elevator car gaining speed as it rushed headlong – or rather, feet-first – to the ground level, gaining speed with every yard.
Judging from the look on Robertson Sullivan's face, I could imagine he had already calculated the speed. The class geek before we had a term for it, he was a mathematical as well as musical whiz and if anybody could do it, he could. I just hoped he'd keep it to himself. Generally. he was better at hiding his geekiness under a bushel basket than I was. I would've blurted it right out.
Then there was another lurch and we started to drop. Fast. The kids started screaming and I felt I was losing circulation in my arms from Miss Messerschmidt's grip. She was shouting louder than the rest, “We're all gonna die!”
Then just as suddenly, we stopped.
Standing there wedged together, too tightly packed to fall on the impact, everyone remained momentarily silent and motionless. The only thing you could hear in the darkness was the faint but annoying presence of the music going on just as mindlessly as before. So cloying as to be unnoticed under normal circumstances, the sound washed its calming melodic strands over us, softly undulating saxophones crooning bad arrangements of tunes familiar to those of us who sat with our parents on Sunday nights watching the Ed Sullivan Show on television. But in a matter of seconds, we each felt the same incredible fear rising from deep inside us. And before we knew it, it had happened.
We all started to vomit.
And with that the elevator began once again to rise, slowly at first, only gradually gaining speed. We remained expectantly silent, standing there almost ankle-deep in barf, our shoes and our clothes soaked in the remains of our late-lamented lunch – spaghetti and meatballs eaten at the House of Representative's cafeteria with our local congressman as part of our tour – and also in our hair. I could feel something dripping down the back of my neck and I hoped to God Miss Messerschmidt was playing that game where someone'd come up behind you and pretend to crack an egg over your head and touch their fingers to your hair, slowly sliding them down the back of your head. But Miss Messerschmidt didn't seem to be that kind of teacher, not Sarge...
The whole way up, the muzac played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Then, once we heard the door grinding, trying to open, it switched to “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” and a number of other tunes before it reached “Unchained Melody.” It wasn't so much the song itself but the sappy arrangement that got to me. It was then I felt a second wave developing and before long I had begun the whole process of regurgitation again.
Gaa-aack!
Like a chorus on cue, everyone else began to join in, including Miss Messerschmidt. It was a half-hour before they were able to get the door opened: apparently, someone later explained, the ever increasing flow of puke creeping out under the door-panels had shorted some key circuits.
I woke up from my dream with a jolt, the spaghetti I'd wolfed down for lunch sitting uncomfortably somewhere beyond my stomach. We had to be in New York City by 7:00 for the pre-concert talk and reception. The way things were going, I doubted there would be much time before I was scheduled to speak. Buzz was driving and had begun to express reservations about the traffic as we approached the Lincoln Tunnel. Though it had taken only two hours to get this far, even with Buzz's legendary lead-foot, just going with the flow averaging ten miles above the posted speed-limit (and still being passed), we might spend another hour before we'd actually get through the tunnel. I didn't want to give the appearance of impatience by constantly checking my watch, only adding no doubt to Buzz's frustration as well as my own, but there wasn't a lot of wiggle-room in our schedule.
The dream had left me feeling even more nervous, bringing back nasty childhood memories, most of which, by this point in my life, seemed categorizable as “unpleasant.” It certainly explained my aversion for insipid background music intended to blunt our everyday existence with pleasantness and familiarity, lulling us into a sense of comfort and security without our needing to be aware of what we were actually listening to. In fact, in most cases, we were listening to nothing, only aware of hearing something without any intellectual or spiritual involvement: carrying this attitude from the nation's elevators, supermarkets and radio stations into living rooms and concert halls across the land, this societal insidiousness had relegated music to the level of ambient noise, little different from a fish tank in a doctor's office.
But then, every time I would hear “Unchained Melody,” I got a distinct whiff of barf.
The dream had probably been triggered by the thought of seeing my old school friend again. Robertson Sullivan and I had often met since we went our separate ways in college, reconnecting by random phone calls and generic Christmas cards over the intervening years. On those occasions I'd get to New York for a special concert or what I referred to as a day of “music sight-seeing,” we tried to get together for lunch if not dinner, but usually his schedule was so busy, it was rarely possible.
This time, it was going to be different, I just knew it.
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
Only a few blocks from Lincoln Center, in an old brownstone house on West 69th Street just a block from Broadway, a tall muscle-bound man – most people would regard him as a monster of a man – stood in the middle of his living room, admiring his near-naked form in floor-to-ceiling mirrors on either side of the rough limestone fireplace. This time, he had remembered to close the curtains to protect himself from the prying eyes of nosy neighbors. Even on such a quiet street as this, you can never be too careful who might be watching you.
He had called himself Tr'iTone, after the musical interval long known through the centuries as “The Devil in Music.” As tall and immense as he was, people had difficulty dealing with him: did they call him “Mr. Tone” or what? People were so hidebound by convention in this country, they had little acceptance of artists whose minds ran slightly counter to societal norms. He had thought of signing himself with a musical depiction of the interval
but the experience of an artist formerly known as Prince recommended otherwise. Still, it annoyed him when total strangers tried to sound chatty by calling him “Tr'i” and so as a precaution he never went about in public except with something carefully selected from a whole library full of alternate identities.
The grand piano stood nearby – the old-fashioned upright he composed on in his sound-proofed study upstairs looked shabby by comparison to the gleaming black sleekness of this new Hamburg Steinway – and the walls of the room were covered in bookshelves stuffed with finely bound volumes, with fine art collected from around the world ranging from paintings by French Impressionists to delicate vases from China. Nowhere visible was anything like a TV set or a simple sound system, yet reverberating through the house were the weird strains of the “Wolf's Glen Scene” from Carl Maria von Weber's opera, Der Freischütz.
Stepping up onto the coffee table before the opulent black sofa, he flexed his muscles, striking various poses that rippled the muscles across his body, his tattoos undulating in the half-light of the room as the villainous Kaspar, after crying out for help from the Black Huntsman, forges one magic bullet after another – seven in all – accompanied by some of the scariest music in the Western Classical canon, including a whole array of his favorite interval. But Tr'iTone knew he had nothing to fear: Samiel, the Black Huntsman, was indeed at hand.
Only a few more parts of the puzzle to put together before I will be complete.
He sighed in admiration over his own handiwork as he proceeded to complete the tattoos with which he has slowly been covering his body, tattoos unlike any he could find at a mere populist tattoo parlor or like any droll loser dude would desecrate himself with. He laughed at the moron he'd seen loitering across the street, his biceps full of Chinese characters that were all the rage these days: little did he know the tattoo artist – as he had self-deludedly described himself – had taken them from a take-out menu dropped off by the Great Wall Diner down the street and instead of bearing the wisdom of ages past, he was merely advertising Orange Beef, Moo Shoo Pork and Sesame Cold Noodles.
Since he was a composer, he had chosen to transform his body into a physical codification of all the possible chord combinations one could build out of the same twelve pitches of the chromatic scale. On his pectoral muscles was the most impressive array, twelve different chords built from twelve different pitches, written out in musical notation, six on the left side and six on the right side, a mere fraction of the chords available but his body was, unfortunately, only so grand. His nipples stood in for the Middle C's in two of the more expansive chords. He had grouped these, as Elliott Carter had done in his Harmony Book, as massive chord structures of inversionally related intervals spanning out from a central tritone. Theoretically, there were 88 of these chords plus 60 more parallel-inverted chords, all built with twelve notes, but he chose only those he preferred using for the major climaxes of his grandest orchestral compositions. It was a shame that no one wanted to play them, but he knew his time would come. And as the days of summer shortened with the inevitable arrival of winter, he knew it would come very quickly. Not in months or weeks or even days.
Perhaps this very night, if all goes well.
Soon he would be regarded as the World's Greatest Living Composer, and the person who was going to help him should now be entering the Lincoln Tunnel.
- - - - - - -
To be continued...
= = = = = = =
The Lost Chord, a Music Appreciation Thriller, is written by Dick Strawser and is a musical parody of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. It is being serialized on this blog: watch for the next segment on Thursday, June 24th.
©2010
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