Anyone listening outside my practice room door must wonder what the hell is going on. First, there’s the scratchy fiddle music. I’ve been playing fiddle for hours every day since I returned to Evergreen, and I’m getting better, but it’s definitely easier to tolerate amid the raucous blur of the square dance—where I’m allowed to play fiddle on a few tunes, standing behind the rest of the band, when my guitar playing is not required—than alone in a secluded chamber with all the grotesqueries of my pathetic technique laid bare. And then there are the Webern pieces I’ve been trying to play—piano parts for ensemble music pecked out by my bewildered digits, the dissonances excruciatingly sustained, rusty daggers of sound followed by portentous silences awaiting the next fractured chord, reluctantly voiced by my fingers as if they don’t believe I could possibly want to release that combination of pitches into the cramped, stuffy box of the practice room.
I found the Webern manuscripts in the library. I’m not sure what I’m learning from them. At this point, they resemble sequences of randomly generated notes, capriciously shaped collages of sounds and symbols. Maybe that’s the point. Twentieth Century Harmony doesn’t have much to say about serial (twelve-tone) composition, categorizing the method associated with Schoenberg and Webern as a contrapuntal technique and not “harmony.” This seems like a weird distinction to me, but prescription and strict categorization seems to be the way of the bloviating academic, and Persichetti is clearly less interested in “stimulating creativity” than his rapturous foreword first led me to believe. I’ve been trying to analyze some of Webern’s pieces, mostly works for string quartet, which appear to be constructed with a sort of loose serialism, not always sticking to a strict tone row. But I get confused by the various clefs in the string quartet score, and I may have gotten some of the pitches wrong. It’s a purely intellectual process, and I can’t say why I’m interested in this stuff. But the pure sound of Webern’s music, which I’ve listened to via a few cassettes I found in the Library, is intriguing, and I want to try to understand it in some way.
When I listen to the music, as opposed to reading the score or trying to play it, it doesn’t sound random, it sounds like . . . I don’t know what it sounds like. Maybe that’s why I like it. The dry, unemotional quality of the music is a good antidote to the overwrought rock that Eddie keeps playing around the apartment, most of which sends me scurrying to the relative quiet of the library or practice room. Webern’s music has a strangely pastoral, soothing quality, though most people would find the sounds jarring and unmusical. I’m tempted to compare it to On the Corner, but since Angelica’s rebuke of my Miles Davis/Louis Armstrong thesis, I’ve come to distrust my ability to make coherent musical comparisons. For now, I’m just trying to poke around, find things I like, and try to understand why I like them—and possibly how they work.
I often manage to get the use of a practice room for two or more hours a day, though we’re only allowed to sign up for one hour per day. Most people sign up for slots at the beginning of the week: two P.M. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday; eight P.M. Thursday and Friday; something like that. But not all the time slots get taken, and I’ve been using unreserved practice rooms during empty periods without signing up. I often linger in a room past my allotted time—I almost never leave on time, waiting instead for the next student on the schedule to kick me out. Sometimes, I’ll walk by the rooms ten or fifteen minutes after the hour, and if there’s a quiet or empty room, I’ll claim it, hoping that the student who reserved it has found something better to do.
I’ve been avoiding my dorm room as much as possible. Eddie hangs out there a lot more than I would have expected from a gregarious, outdoorsy Man and Nature student, but I can’t complain. He’s a nice enough guy, and I like him, despite his musical tastes, but his cheerful, “friend to everyone” vibe gets tiresome, especially in contrast to the “friend to no one” existence I’ve been cultivating.
I haven’t seen much of Angelica since New Year’s Day, besides one guitar lesson, during which I mostly tried to help her with some swing chords she learned from a book by guitarist Micky Baker, whose author photo is clearly meant to communicate “hip jazz dude” but comes across more as “creepy reprobate” or “hipster pedophile.” Angelica postponed our post–New Year’s date to work on her new songs for reasons she never made clear to me. I did see her the next Monday at the first book group meeting of the semester, but she was uncharacteristically quiet—smiling and attentive, offering an occasional harmless wisecrack, but not venturing any of her usual insights or withering criticism.
She sang one of her new songs for me after we returned from the Brown Derby on New Year’s Day, and I taped it, intending to work out some “Bessie Smith–style” chords for it, as Angelica requested. The Bessie Smith tape she loaned me was enjoyable at first, reminding me of the Louis Armstrong/Earl Hines LP I love, but after a handful of songs I grew tired of its plodding, monochromatic vibe, and I had no idea how I would translate the chord changes played by the pianist on the recording to guitar. The melody of Angelica’s new song sticks to a minor pentatonic scale, with a couple of exceptions, and I could easily harmonize it like a standard twelve-bar blues, but I know this isn’t what she’s looking for. Then, before our lesson last Thursday, I made myself listen to the whole Bessie Smith tape and discovered the song “I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” which I remember Glinda singing at the Quantum Repair concert at the beginning of the year. Since Glinda had figured out how to play the song on guitar, I suggested that Angelica find out if she gave guitar lessons. She said that Alma knew her, or would know how to get in touch with her, so the pressure to figure out how to play Bessie Smith music on guitar is gone, at least for the moment.
The majority of the first meeting of the Twentieth-Century Classical Music class was a listening session of vocal music, primarily: excerpts from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck, and some Richard Strauss songs (lieder), the German names of which I can’t remember, as well as some piano music by Hindemith, Schoenberg, and Debussy (something about the “afternoon of a faun”). The music ranged from mawkish hyper-Germanic bombast to melodic, modern tone poems, but much of it reminded me of moody, art-house movie music intended to convey angst and despair, or the anthemic, heart-stirring overtures in dramatic screen epics. The class ended with the first part of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, during which we all sat quietly transfixed by the music’s complex beauty, but it, like the rest of the music we listened to, didn’t seem to have much to do with the Cage and Webern pieces I’ve found, and it clearly has no kinship with free jazz or On the Corner.
I asked the instructor, Mr. Harmon, who leads the school choir and musical theater group (which explains his emphasis on vocal music) about John Cage, and he said that we would get around to Cage, but that he belonged to the post–World War II contingent and that we had a lot of pre–World War II music to cover beforehand. According to Mr. Harmon (whose name suits him to a T—a pleasant, welcoming bear of a man who always seems to be humming quietly to himself whenever he’s not speaking or listening to something or someone), most of the great twentieth-century classical music was written during the first two decades of the century. There’s no textbook for the course, or any reading assignments to speak of. We’re mostly going to be listening to music in class and then writing about some piece of music or composer that interests us. Mr. Harmon suggested we could look at scores in the Library, if we’re interested in the details of what we’re listening to, but that it’s not necessary.
The oddball, severe-looking accordion player who played with Jenny and Alma at the open mic last fall is also in the class. I sat down next to her, and she greeted me with “well, this is a surprise,” with no explanation, although since she’s only heard me play old-time music, it might not occur to her that I would be interested in anything more adventurous. She’s not in the American Music program, but Mr. Harmon knows her; he called on her by name (Lulu) when she raised her hand to ask a question, though there had been no class introductions.
After the class, I went straight to the Library’s music collection and found music for a number of Webern pieces, most of which are, thankfully, extremely short. I had to request the sheet music from the librarian, so I asked for as many Webern scores as she could find, intending to choose one or two to check out.
After I had been scanning the pieces for about fifteen minutes, I heard, “So, it’s you!”
I looked up to see Lulu approaching with an amused scowl.
“The librarian said someone just asked for all the Webern scores. Imagine her surprise when I had the same request minutes later.”
“There are a lot here. Help yourself.”
“Anything for piano or voice?”
“I’m not sure. This one’s for cello and piano, but it’s only two pages long.”
“Hmm,” she said, sitting down across from me and pulling out one of the manuscripts near the top of the pile. “This one’s for guitar, clarinet, and voice. You should check it out.”
“I did. The guitar part looks totally unplayable, at least by me. And it’s mostly in bass clef, which would be fine if I had my cello, but guitar music is usually in treble clef.”
“You’re going to play this stuff?”
“I don’t know. I’ll try, slowly maybe, to get a sense of what’s going on.”
“Huh. How did you get turned on to serial music? You don’t see too many square dance guitar players among the Webern crowd.”
“He has a crowd?”
She laughed. “You know what I mean.”
“I read about him in a book on John Cage, and he sounded interesting and possibly accessible, unlike Berg or Schoenberg. And it’s not like I’m going to try to play The Rite of Spring on guitar.”
“That would be tough.”
“How about you?”
“Hmm? Me?” she said, looking up from a piece of music she had suddenly become intensely focused on. “Yeah, uh . . . I’m doing an individual contract focused on twentieth-century lieder and art songs. Webern seems like he might be the most interesting of the serialist Germans.”
She returned to the piece of music she was reading, her right-hand fingers spidering over the page as if she were playing piano.
“I think I’ll take these two,” I said, holding up the cello and piano piece, which seemed somewhat decipherable, and Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, thinking I could play through some of the string parts.
“Take this one, too.” She handed me the piece for guitar, clarinet, and voice. “Maybe we could find a clarinetist and play through it some time.”
“I doubt I could manage that, but yeah, I’ll take it. I’ll tell the librarian you have the rest of them.”
“Thanks. Oh, hey, I’m Lulu,” she said, as I rose from the table.
“Yeah, I know. I’m Lucas. Nice to meet you, officially.”
“Cool. Have fun with that,” she said, waving at the music in my hand.
“Thanks for doing this. Sorry it’s so early.”
“That’s OK, it’ll be fun. And I’m an early riser.”
Sally has agreed to give me a fiddle lesson and the best time for both of us is nine A.M. Monday morning, before book group. We’re crammed into a practice room that was clearly designed for one pianist, not two fiddlers.
“Can I try your fiddle?” Sally asks. I hand it to her and she starts playing “Mississippi Sawyer.” I pick up hers and try to follow along, but I don’t know the tune.
“Oh, sorry,” she says. “Let’s play something we both know. How about ‘June Apple’?”
I’ve been working on the archaic tune regularly since I got the fiddle. After a couple passes through the melody, Sally moves to the lower octave, and the sound of the two fiddles playing in octaves fills the small space, producing a swell of vibrations from the upright piano we’re sitting next to. Playing with Sally, I sound better than I have since I started on the fiddle two weeks ago.
“We should try that in cross tuning.”
“What’s that?”
“You know, where you retune the bottom two strings so they’re an octave lower than the top two. Like this.”
After tuning her lowest string from G to A and the next from D to E, she plays “June Apple” again. The fiddle’s volume and resonance has increased considerably, the two lower strings visibly oscillating as Sally bows the top two strings.
“Far out. I didn’t know about that.”
I tune my fiddle like Sally’s and give “June Apple” another try. When Sally joins me, it’s as if the two of us have become a quartet. I miss a few notes, forgetting to modify my fingering to match the new tuning, but eventually I figure it out. Then I try it in the lower octave, since the fingering on the lower strings in cross tuning is the same as on the highest strings. It’s a little awkward but once I get it, it sounds thick and buttery.
“That’s worth the price of the lesson right there,” I say when we stop.
Sally laughs. We had agreed that I would treat her to dinner at the Brown Derby as payment for the lesson.
“That’s good, because I’m not sure what else I can teach you,” she says. “You sound great already. Your bowing arm has that loosey-goosey wrist thing going on. I’ve been working on that, but my wrist is too stiff.”
“Really? That’s a good thing?”
“Oh yeah, your bowing arm looks great. Why don’t you play something by yourself, so I can watch you, since I’m supposed to be the teacher here.”
I play “Salt Creek,” which I first learned on the guitar.
“That sounds like the way Eric plays it on guitar.”
“Probably because we both learned it from Doc Watson.”
“That explains why you went up into third position on the B part. I’m impressed, but you don’t have to do that.” She shows me a different version of the second part that stays in first position and is much easier to play.
“So, have you been jamming with Eric?” I ask after we play through “Salt Creek” a few times.
“We got together with him a couple times, once before break and again last week.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Shit. I guess nobody told you, but . . . Walt and Tracy thought you probably weren’t interested in playing with us anymore, so Tracy asked Eric to play guitar.”
“In the Sea Slugs?”
“Yeah, sorry. We should’ve told you. I guess that’s what I’m doing now. Are you cool with that? If you still want to play with us, I can let them know.”
“No, no, that’s probably good. I like playing tunes with you guys, but I get to do that at the square dance, so that’s cool.” I’m relieved that I don’t have to be the one to make the break, but insulted that nobody bothered to tell me.
“We’ll find a new name for when we play out.”
“Don’t worry about it. I have no particular attachment to sea slugs.” She laughs.
“So, how are you and Tracy doing?”
I hadn’t intended to ask about their relationship, but I want to change the subject. I’m happy that the band situation is resolved, but it feels yet again like I’ve been abandoned or ignored, and a bitter slug of resentment settles to the floor of my stomach. Why is it that I have to leave the band, instead of the guy who uses racist epithets in public? But the Sea Slugs were Tracy and Walt’s idea. I got added later, so if anyone is going to get the ax, it’s not going to be one of them.
“We’re good, I mean, we’re not hanging out like we were. You probably heard he was with Jenny for a while.”
“But not anymore?”
“I don’t think so. I haven’t talked to him about it, but Alma told me there was some kind of weird scene at Willowberry right before break. She wouldn’t tell me what happened, and Tracy hasn’t said anything. But it’s OK that we’re not together. I mean, it was nice for a while, but we always just did whatever he wanted to do. He doesn’t really listen to people. But you know that.”
“You’re OK being in a band with him, though?”
“Yeah, Walt is always around, and we’ve become good friends, so . . . Anyway, I try not to let it bother me. Uh, is there anything specific you want to work on? Watching you play, I don’t see anything you need, other than practice, like we all do.”
“You could teach me a couple fiddle tunes. You know, fiddle versions, not guitar versions.” She laughs.
“Sure. Do you know ‘Texas Quickstep’?”
We spend the rest of the hour working on a few square dance tunes I’ve yet to learn, stopping in time to make it to our respective book groups.
“I’m not sure I earned a Brown Derby dinner for that. We mostly just played tunes,” Sally says as we leave the practice room.
“That’s OK. It was super helpful.”
“Good. You know, Walt and I usually make potluck dinner with Maura before the square dance on Sunday nights. You should join us. Come early and we can play tunes while the soup is cooking.”
“Hey there, lover boy. I heard Sally and Tracy split up. Looks like you got the rebound, huh?”
Apparently, Angelica saw me walking with Sally from the rehearsal room. I sit down next to her.
“No, she was just giving me a fiddle lesson.”
“Too bad. I like that girl. You should hang out with her more often.”
“OK, let’s get started,” Mr. Coleman says, interrupting a few conversations. “We’re running a little late, and I want to talk about U.S.A. How far has everyone gotten? Anybody finish the first book, The 42nd Parallel?
“I did,” Angelica says.
“Me too,” I say.
“Anybody else?” Andrew and Shelley raise their hands, but that’s all.
“Those of you who haven’t finished it, have you gotten to the Eleanor Stoddard sections?” Nobody says anything. “OK, well, does anyone have any observations they want to share right off the bat?”
“Maybe this is a weird place to start,” Shelley says, “but the language was kind of annoying to me, and hard to read. I guess he was trying to write the way the supposed ‘common people’ of the time spoke, but I don’t know. I’ve never heard anyone talk like that. It was written in, what, the 1930s? Is that really how people talked back then?”
“It reminded me of some old Jimmy Cagney movie or something,” Andrew says. “But it was like he was trying too hard to be unsophisticated, you know, part of the working class he’s writing about. Or is that how people wrote in the thirties? Is that, like, a Hemingway thing?”
“It reminded me of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” I say. “At least the run-on sentences, the and and and and and. Not the American working-class lingo, obviously.”
“I have a question,” Gabe says after a long silence. “Why are we reading this? It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with music. Or do I just need to read further?”
“There’s nothing about music in The 42nd Parallel,” Andrew says. “I don’t know about the other two books.”
“Anyone care to take a stab at Gabe’s question?” Mr. Coleman asks, after another lingering silence.
Sofía, a short, quiet girl with long dark hair, who plays clarinet in the Evergreen jazz band, says, “Well, this program is called American Music, so maybe if we’re trying to understand American music, we also need to try to understand America? And we’ve been reading about American music from the early twentieth century, so it would help to know something about America in the early twentieth century. You could have assigned a history book, but I think this is more interesting.”
“That’s as good a rationale as any I might have come up with,” says Mr. Coleman, smiling. “We read a lot of nonfiction in the first semester, and yes, we want you to think about America and what it means to be an American historically, but we thought it would be more enjoyable to do that by reading fiction, historical fiction specifically, which is, in a way, history told from a personal perspective. We also wanted something written during the same period as the music covered in Early Jazz and Country Music, U.S.A., like Sofía said. We could have picked The Grapes of Wrath or The Great Gatsby, and I would suggest you read those, if you haven’t, but, like most novels, they focus on a particular time or part of the country. U.S.A covers a lot of different areas and kinds of people.”
“Except black people, or ‘colored’ people, as Dos Passos calls us, when he’s being polite,” Angelica says. “I mean, there are ‘Negroes’ in the book, but they don’t even register as human beings. They’re just part of the scenery, usually used to indicate the bad side of town.”
“Even I noticed that,” Ted says. “At first, when Dos Passos used, you know . . . that word, I thought, well, those are words his characters would use, but then I realized he was also using it in descriptions of places.”
“The old ’N-word’ stings, obviously,” Angelica says, “but what’s most annoying is that black people are barely in the book at all. Mac goes to Mexico, so there are Mexicans in the book, but there’s not a single black character, not even a minor one. How can you write a novel about the U.S.A. in the twentieth century and not include black people?”
“Oh, great, I can’t wait to read the rest of it,” Gabe says, frowning.
“I guess it’s a good reminder of how ingrained racism is in this country,” I say. “Even among supposedly progressive lefties. The book takes place during the first two decades of the twentieth century, when even a supposedly liberal President like Woodrow Wilson was a blatant racist. And Jim Crow was the law of the land, or just about.”
“It’s a historical novel, so he’s writing about what was happening at the time, the labor movement, the Wobblies,” Sofía says. “And the beginnings of the suffragist movement. There are some strong, independent women characters in the second half. But I don’t think there was much of a civil rights movement in the early 1900s, right?”
“Nothing Dos Passos would have been aware of,” Angelica says.
The conversation stalls, which happens now every time the subject of race comes up, as if the white students in the group are tired of it, but none dare change the subject.
Finally, I say, “I was interested in how the book depicts historical events from a personal point of view, like Mr. Coleman said. All these characters are just trying to get through the world the best they can and they’re oblivious to these big, historic events happening around them, some of which affect them and some of which don’t. But they’re completely unaware of it all, except when something affects them personally, like when Mac has to go to Mexico to find work as a printer because he’s been blacklisted for working for a socialist newspaper. It makes me wonder how history will depict our time, what the historical verdict will be on Vietnam or Watergate. How we’re just living our lives, some of us affected by political events and others oblivious to them, and whether anyone will even remember Watergate in fifty years.”
“I guess that depends on what happens with Nixon,” Angelica says. “If he just gets a slap on the wrist, then yeah, most people won’t know anything about Watergate fifty years from now.”