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– PART THREE –
CHAPTER 17
“So, it is this very sense of 'Now',” Uncle Terry pointed out, “that's one of the most elusive things for an artist to figure out – whether for a composer or novelist, even a performer. It's something more intuitive, more visceral than intellectual, something you can't learn, except with hours and hours spent working at it.”
Toni couldn't remember where this was or when it took place: recently, but her Great-Grandmother Frieda was there – hadn't she died before Toni had this conversation with Dr. Kerr in the garden that afternoon?
Uncle Terry had been telling Cameron and her in one of his part-lessons, part-conversations, about an interview he'd heard with the conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, who, he thought, always seemed to know just where to put that moment of “now-ness” into a piece of music, whether it was Mahler or Beethoven, Stravinsky or Elliott Carter.
“This knock-out passage was 'so now,' so in-the-moment in this particular rock song he'd heard on the radio when he was a teenager, he had to stop everything and concentrate on listening to it.” Kerr forgot which legendary song, or who the rock star was Tilson Thomas was telling this to (Terry was never good with pop music), “but decades later he realized his job as conductor was to convince a hundred other musicians where 'now' was – and this particular rock legend, whoever it was, smiled and laughed, 'Exactly!'”
Toni realized she'd nodded before Cameron, stretched out across from her on the grass, had frowned, not because he didn't get it but he'd realized not only hadn't he understood it, she, clearly, had. It's not that they're always competing with each other, but she was conscious of treading carefully not to hurt his feelings. She wasn't really sure she had gotten it; maybe she assumed she'd understand it next time she'd come across it, like recognizing someone when you'd see them but you couldn't remember who they were.
So, if Cameron wasn't about to ask it – he was always afraid of “stupid questions” – she would ask Dr. Kerr why it was there and not somewhere else: “how do you figure that out?” Why would a composer, she wondered, decide it belonged here and not there; and how could a performer tell the difference?
Like a professor trying not to sound professorly, Kerr went on about “how the precision with which all these component parts came together – the performers, the music, the words and harmony, our awareness of its structure, whether you the listener understand or rather comprehend them intuitively or not – depended on one thing: their complete sincerity.” He always came back to that ambiguous word, “sincerity,” which he considered the hardest thing for a student to grasp, whatever the inevitable pun about being made “without wax” had to do with it.
“If you could see how Tilson Thomas built up these phrases with his hands, how he'd pile different elements on top of another, stretch them out, increase the tension, give motion to this tension; then he'd reach a point and suddenly clap his hands together and – bang! – he'd shout 'Now!' His hands cascaded like fireworks.”
It confused Toni when Kerr critiqued something she had worked hard on, how she had grasped “the finer points of craft,” because she had no idea how exactly she'd done that: she just did. He'd go on about balance and the Golden Section (which he did a lot) but she just wrote what she felt.
“Craft,” he stressed, “must be tempered by emotion: nothing made sense if it wasn't a union of the heart and brain.” To Toni who loved mathematics, this made perfect sense; Cameron looked completely lost.
There were others in this gathering, now that she looked around, all nearby on the lawn – the great North Lawn not far from the hawthorn hedge which was in full bloom and smelled heavenly – and she was glad to see her great-great-grandmother Frieda Erden had joined them, walking with only the aid of a cane. She was an immensely old woman and had become increasingly frail over these last years since she'd been introduced to her and discovered she was the great-granddaughter of her long-lost twins, William and Gracie. There were fond memories of Uncle Terry's few visits, especially in the springtime with the four of them: she'd hold her Grandmother Frieda's hand while Dr. Kerr pushed her wheelchair, Cameron strolling beside them. It was good to see her walking on her own and maybe point her cane at Kerr to argue some detail.
“You can be as analytical as you please, Terry,” she'd say, not a bit imperious but with considerable poise and finesse, dressed in shades of violet, as she strolled toward them across the lawn, “but it all boils down to the emotional response which, if it doesn't exist, means nothing however much you analyze it. Really, isn't this 'now' you so rhapsodize about, when both the intellectual and the emotional coincide – perception or understanding – isn't this the epiphany that is the result of previously made choices fulfilling their consequences?”
“But isn't this all just another argument about the chicken and the egg?” Cameron was, as usual, confused, taking this in. Toni tried to hide a smile she was afraid he would think condescending. He always excused himself, how this was new to him, stuff he'd never thought about before, more holes in his training. “If it doesn't have any logical foundation – like a building,” he went on, “wouldn't an emotional response – 'oh, isn't that pretty...' – collapse for lack of support, being only about its surface and therefore superficial?”
“You could build something perfectly according to plan, do all the right things, and it could stand for generations,” Kerr responded, “but if the majority think it's ugly or, worse, don't even notice it...?”
“Well, you always say how there's no accounting for popularity,” and everybody laughed.
Their little picnic continued and Toni was delighted.
The sky still dark beyond her bedroom window, Toni woke up, unable to remember who'd been there or who'd said what. Something had just interrupted Vector who, as ever, stood guard behind Miss Frieda. Even though he'd retired since Granny died, he continued to look like a butler who, unless beckoned, dissolved into the background. Toni thought of him more as a grandfather in this new family of hers, so many levels of generations to consider. Never knowing any of her birth family, this was a whole new experience.
She didn't want to rub her eyes and become any more awake than she already was, especially if she could go back to sleep for even another hour – “What time is it? Almost dawn...” And would she be able to pick up the dream where she left off or would it veer into another direction?
Her parents, Burnson and LauraLynn – her second pair of adoptive parents (abandoned once, then orphaned when she was 13) – stood on the periphery near the hedge and talked to some people she didn't recognize. If she went back to sleep, would everyone in her dream be killed by an onslaught of terrorists in black masks? She had no idea why this was a recurrent nightmare. Her first set of parents were killed in a car crash shortly after she'd left for England. There'd been no terrorists involved, had there?
For all her vague talk of adventures, Granny – everyone else called her Aunt Frieda, regardless – died of natural causes (she must've been, like, a hundred years old); but, oh, how Toni missed her smile. She would always smile at her whenever she walked into Toni's room, the only room of her own she'd ever known. Everyone was so kind to her, especially Dr. Kerr – Granny promised he'd look after her musical studies – who treated her more like a niece than a student. And Cameron was like a big brother.
Toni continued to lie in bed, hoping to stay absolutely still. The rest of the house was silent but it was also mostly empty since Granny had died and Burnson was still in Venice. It was a big, echoey house with not that many people, mostly servants. Out of the silence, she heard Frieda's voice.
“Why would you do something so stupid?”
Granny, who had always been strict when it came to her piano lessons, sounded stern, and Toni looked over at her, as if asking “what was stupid?”
“There,” she said, “that,” pointing at a spot in the music, tapping it irritably with her long bony finger, three times.
It was two measures before a big cadence that modulated to the dominant. She wasn't really sure she'd done anything wrong.
“Not wrong,” Frieda said, “but it didn't make any sense,” tapping it again.
She'd been working on this sonata, Beethoven's C Major Op.2 No.3, for a few weeks and she was happy enough to get through that tricky parallel thirds figure in the right hand without fumbling. If not a wrong note or rhythm, was it the phrasing? “That's how you said I should play it, last week.”
“I said? I did no such thing!” She definitely sounded imperious and, finesse and poise aside, considerably peeved in the process. “Here... and here,” she turned back a page and tapped again, “you played it one way – good – but here, you played it differently and it makes no sense. So why did you do that?
“Music consists of patterns. You make decisions to bring these patterns to the surface. You must realize these decisions have consequences! This... and that” (tapping again), “good; but this? Flies drowning in soup! Again...”
“The thing is,” Toni reminded herself, “both Frieda and Dr. Kerr said they had no interest in telling me how I should do it – what to compose or how to interpret what I'm playing.” And for that, she realizes, though she's only 16, she should be grateful except that doesn't always make it less confusing. Once she's learned the basics – how harmony works, why “form” does what it does – it's up to her to consolidate their suggestions and questions to figure out for herself the “why”s and the “how”s. Frieda wanted her to figure out, like a painter, what the underlying anatomy did to make sense of this “musical body,” beyond just a matter of playing the right notes in the right place. It was a way of solving the riddle each piece of music uniquely proposed to find the music behind the notes.
She had realized now, now that she was getting beyond placing notes on paper, notes that followed rules implied in harmony and counterpoint, in form and the all-important process of developing them, Uncle Terry was telling her the same things Granny'd told her in her piano lessons almost as if he'd been there, too, listening. The principles were the same and while she was introduced to them through the mind of a performer, discovering what worked, she now applied them to her composing, the creative and the re-creative process.
Unlike the teachers she'd grown up with in America – she recalled Mrs. Grinder (which was supposed to rhyme with “cinder” but behind her back rhymed with “blinder”) – Frieda and Dr. Kerr, even her other tutors here, were satisfied to give her an array of information out of which she should eventually draw her own conclusions. There were “fundamental facts” that required rote learning and recitation like the times table, irregular verbs or lists of historical dates, which before was what they'd considered “education” but was really only the brickwork.
Once she'd grasped the bricks, she could figure out what to do with them, taking these facts, sorting out their implications and, “educated guesses” aside, come up with her own observations, perhaps even conclusions. Like math, she could now solve for x. Cameron, she realized one afternoon – speaking of epiphanies – was still learning the bricks.
She came up with the idea shortly after they'd arrived in Venice: she would write a series of short duets for violin and piano, modeled after Bartók's Mikrokosmos, which she and Cameron could play. She would work out certain theoretical details as a composer; Cameron, as a performer, would figure out how to play them. She planned it like they'd dissect a watch and put it back together – they'd turn them into short studies in analysis. But she wanted to do this as a surprise, without Uncle Terry's supervision.
Keeping them a surprise from Cameron might be more difficult – they were always together – at least until she'd written three or four for a trial run and figured out how to realize “a solution-in-progress.” She considered calling them Eine kleine Zergliederungsmusik (“A Little Dissection Music”), an occasional piece which had no further purpose in life.
It became easier, once Terry'd gone back to America on some new secret project, taking his ever-present side-kick Cameron with him. Unfortunately, her own return to England and Amadeus eventually got in the way. Fortunately, she could work on them in complete privacy: she had wondered what she could write next, something short and easy.
Unfortunately, she'd turned them into something more challenging than being “short and easy” because they had to be something worth analyzing. She must set some structural problem in search of a solution – but how?
There was that afternoon last fall when Frieda grumbled after Toni made some “lame excuse” about not being able to concentrate. “That's no reason, because you waste my time and you waste Beethoven's time. As a teacher, I won't have done my job until you can learn on your own once I'm no longer here. But to get there, you must pay attention, remember the questions I ask, how they connect to whatever you're working on, then reach conclusions once you've asked these same questions in the future and...”
Frieda assumed she'd gone too far, that the girl couldn't take the criticism, judging from the tears she now fought back. “I'm sorry, Toni, I didn't mean to sound so harsh, but it's true.”
“It's not that, Granny,” she said, reaching over to hug her. “It's never occurred to me you wouldn't always be here.”
And four months later, the inevitable indeed came to pass. Frieda had died and Toni felt abandoned again, lost without her. LauraLynn tried comforting her with the usual explanations – she was 96 years old, after all – but in the end, no, there was no logical explanation why she had to die, not then, not ever.
Uncle Terry told her Frieda would always be alive in her heart, with her wherever she was, whenever she needed her. “Plus I imagine you will still hear that voice every time you play.”
In fact, the first time she sat down to play after Frieda's death, when the others had gone up to bed – she'd chosen the Funeral March from Beethoven's A-flat Major Sonata which she loved – at one point, barely able to see the music for her tears, a familiar voice complained, “like flies drowning in soup!”
Toni stopped and turned around. She was alone in the room, the only light the floor lamp behind Frieda's empty chair.
“Why play it so freely?” the voice continued. “It's still a march – rhythm!”
Whenever Toni needed to sort things out about a new composition or some problem that stumped her, she'd go walk in the garden and sense Frieda, somehow, not far away.
“What are the connections?”
In the background of their picnic as Freida discussed the “now” with Uncle Terry, Toni could hear Beethoven's Op. 20 Septet.
“You have your basic set of chords available and there's a more or less set order you can place them in.” Vector came around with the teapot; Kerr held his cup out for more.
“But how do you determine what that order is?” Cameron, as usual, focused on the logical, more technical “how” of things.
“Mr. Cameron,” Vector intoned, pouring him some tea, “that order has been around since before 1700, well over three centuries' time – sufficient for Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and to a large extent even Wagner...”
“So why did Wagner” – she knew Vector could barely tolerate Wagner – “start breaking away from it, and why did Schoenberg” – whom she knew Vector tolerated even less – “feel the need to replace it completely?” Toni was one to ask more about the “why” behind something a composer wrote; the “how,” typically, was a mathematical given.
The conversation progressed quite musically with the statement of themes or ideas which often turned in further directions, depending on questions she or Cameron would ask or additional comments made by Frieda or Kerr. There were solos and some duets, a melody with its subject and response over an accompaniment, sometimes even an argumentative fugue.
Listening to these people so important to her, watching how intent Cameron was, how Dr. Kerr and Frieda explained things so simply (well, Frieda, at least...), Toni decided to turn this into a composition.
Uncle Terry was always trying to expand Toni's awareness of musical styles to acquaint her with music beyond her Belovèd Beethoven. One rainy afternoon in Provençe, he played different recordings of Verdi's quartet from Aïda, one with voices, another arranged for winds, pointing out “each character's character” was in the music, not just the words. Then he played (and talked about at great length) two 2nd String Quartets – one by Ives, the other by Elliott Carter – recreating discussions, where players impersonated individualized characters, Ives' 2nd Violinist even nicknamed “Rollo.”
Other than the hapless Rollo, you wouldn't know who they were or what they had said or even what had been discussed or argued about and maybe, in the long run, that wasn't important. But for once, she understood the “why” and asked “how did they do that? – so Kerr went back to the Verdi.
For several days, she picked through Lady Vexilla's vast collection of old opera recordings, especially Mozart's Figaro, once she figured out how to operate a phonograph (much less why), and listened intently to “characterizations.” She soon realized it was all about counterpoint with its independent horizontal lines that also created vertical harmonies, something called “voice-leading.”
But if she wanted to turn this picnic in the garden into music, how would she differentiate the characters: a string quartet with Frieda and Kerr, with Cameron and herself? But what about Vector?
She decided, no, she would not be part of the cast, not one of the performers but just a listener, sitting back, a kind of musical voyeur (was there such a word as auditeur?).
For that matter, there were others there, maybe less important to the moment: who were they? How would she characterize them?
This was something Kerr had frequently harped on, this odd idea called “voice-leading.” Granny had her run through several of Bach's old Inventions, first the 2-part ones, then a few of the 3-part ones. When she'd first learned them, Mrs. Grinder just wanted her to hit the right notes. They were very boring to play. But Frieda, not interested in “just the notes,” focused on how she'd shape each line, first individually, then playing them together. Suddenly, she found these old dry studies had become interesting – in fact, delightful.
But this dream – whether this was how her dream originally unfolded or how, thinking back, she'd “misremembered” it, she couldn't say – instead of words that Frieda and Dr. Kerr had spoken, she heard music. Instead of Beethoven's familiar Septet, this music was already morphing into something different, something maybe she had drawn out of them. Except she hadn't created it herself, had she? Each of these other people around her was creating it, one by one. Musical motives, like groups of words, passed from one to another, effortlessly spinning.
Others would join in, filling out the texture to create a much richer sound, and for the moment the discussion had become quite lively, beyond just one or two of them at the forefront. Whatever they were saying (she couldn't hear words) could become one of those “secret programs” she could hang her music on.
It didn't have to be a long work but if it was going to become a septet which seemed logical, given the Beethoven – would she quote it, maybe embed it in her main theme? – it should be at least three contrasting movements, not as many as Beethoven's had (seven movements?) or a typical Mozart serenade.
She imagined the finale started off like a scherzo, a light-hearted third movement based on a variation of that main theme but it would become grander, ending with a restatement of that main theme.
And what instruments would she use? Most of these works, whether Mozart's, Beethoven's, or Schubert's, were mixtures of strings and winds, but they didn't include a piano and she definitely would want a piano. Plus she wanted instruments that would reflect the various people in her cast, fit their personalities like the music they played. A septet could include three strings, three winds, and piano – or pairs including percussionists (like Bartók's Sonata), or maybe some brass? She remembered a French horn was also part of a traditional woodwind quintet.
She imagined herself going through these different combinations in her head, eventually deciding (for now) on pairs of strings and woodwinds as well as brass in addition to the piano (but, alas, no percussion). She wasn't sure who she could cast as percussionists in this conversation which rapidly turned into more of a round-table seminar.
This reminded her of Frieda's old joke about the difference between a French horn and an English horn (really, an “alto oboe”), how the French horn was German and the English horn was French. But the sound of the horn would be a good match for Grandmother Frieda's resonant voice (she was, after all, German). During one of their earliest conversations, Frieda told her new great-great-granddaughter it was one instrument she wished she'd learned to play. “Young ladies learned the piano. Heavens, why should any woman choose the horn?”
As a girl, she'd fallen in love with a handsome horn player at a performance of Brahms' Op.40 Trio (“the piece was much newer then”) which may have had something to do with it. Plus the Brahms Trio, regardless of her unrequited love, remained one of her few favorite pieces outside the works of Beethoven.
She argued with herself, once she patched the sound of the horn onto the line of music emanating from her grandmother, Frieda was really a pianist, quite a good one, still, at her age. And wouldn't it be more logical to cast her as the septet's pianist, since she had also been Toni's piano teacher? But she felt Uncle Terry should be played by the piano (thinking in terms of “cast”), always playing examples for her at the keyboard even though he was primarily a cellist in his day.
Vector, more on the periphery of the musical discussion, was still an all-knowing voice who offered sage advice, not just about music, and he was certainly quite knowledgeable: she heard him as a bassoon. Unfortunately that reminded her of the Grandfather in Peter and the Wolf, so perhaps the English horn would be less stereotypical.
Cameron was more of a challenge, watching him in this conversation-turned-seminar. He played the violin but not well and it didn't really suit him. The trumpet (if used judiciously) might match his personality better.
These were the four main characters in her little play, but shouldn't her parents, both important, be part of the ensemble? They weren't part of musical conversations beyond liking this or not liking that, and she still had three other instruments searching for characters: who played the violin, the cello, and, what... – maybe the flute?
And the rest of the cast? She remembered it began with her and Cameron listening to Dr. Kerr until Frieda came over and joined them, strolling across the grass. Her parents had stood nearby. Others milled about like an old-fashioned garden party with drinks and light refreshments. Was that Mozart over there, near the yews?
Ah, she realized looking more closely, not Mozart, he's too old for Mozart. “Didn't he used to be Heath Underhill,” she heard LauraLynn say, “who's starring in that local production of Amadeus Toni's in?”
He looked more like Mozart's grandfather, Toni thought. So, if that's Underhill's Mozart there, then who's that fellow by the fountain? Too portly for Haydn, she guessed it must be Rigley Fielding as Salieri. How did they get invited to a garden party when Granny's still alive? Toni only met them at last night's rehearsal.
The two actors quickly joined in the conversation but fortunately as their characters, Mozart and Salieri, not the actors portraying them. She assigned the flute to Mozart even though Mozart supposedly hated the flute (he'd hate Underhill's impersonation of him even more). Salieri, too pompous for the cello, could balance Mozart's flute as a bassoonist.
That left the violin. No one else among the guests came to mind.
“What about the Ghost of Beethoven,” Frieda suggested.
Toni agreed. “His spirit is everywhere, here. Plus Beethoven did play the violin.”
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©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train
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