The Virkkala E-flat

My career as an ethnomusicological technician seemed a long way behind me, so when I was called back to duty, I initially resisted. Don't get me wrong: my five years at the North-Central Institute of Ethnomusicological Technology in Heinola, Minnesota, were mostly great. Well-educated people seemed to need me. Local Finns pointed me out and admiringly whispered my name—"That's Bobby Poylio!" My work was interesting, and I was somehow irreplaceable. Dr. Ernest Koski, himself, blanched and increased my salary from five to six dollars an hour when I threatened to quit one day. Not bad wages for northern Minnesota in the seventies.

The big bucks should have been enough to entice me back, but it's how a job ends that counts the most. My last day working for the institute left me with a fractured skull, a smashed nose, busted teeth, a dislocated jaw, a ruptured testicle, broken toes, and other injuries that plague me thirty years later, especially when Manitoba's bitter temperatures seep southward. Throw in chemical dependency, followed by hard-fought recovery and twenty years of relative peace and sobriety, and you will know why I was hesitant to return to my former job. When I got a note under my door asking me to return, I only had to look into a mirror in order to remind myself of that day when government thugs—which government I did not know—performed cosmetic surgery on me with the butt of a .38.

But that was a long time ago. Those guys are probably in retirement communities now, either by the Black Sea or in Arizona. Take your pick. In hindsight, I realize that both the United States and the Soviet Union instantly turned their eyes toward the institute when Koski and his staff discovered Musical Note Attributes (MNA).

"What is MNA?" you ask. As someone who nearly failed all my high-school science and mathematics classes, I am hardly the person to explain it to you. However, Duane Palomaki, an engineer at the institute, once scribbled out a simplified description of MNA, sans mathématiques, for me on a scrap of paper:

Bobby,

This is for your eyes only. Koski has proven that each musical note consists of semi-matter that, when some of the energy is extracted, collapses into an observable, spheroid form. The extraction process is far too complicated for the layperson to understand, but its technical name is "transmaterialization." Collapsed notes lack matter (as we know it, anyway), but they still can be measured, taxonomized, and evaluated, based on observable attributes such as shape and topography. Through the careful categorization of these attributes, we can take much of the guesswork out of ethnomusicology. That's enough for now. Don't let Koski know I told you this. Duane.

Duane's description didn't help me much. A few days later, I was returning to Heinola from a field-recording session at the annual Farmers Union Accordion Contest at the City Hall in Red Eye, Minnesota, twenty-six miles to the northeast. It was around 10 p.m. and I saw lights on in the institute's brick laboratory, housed in the converted co-op creamery on the west side of town by the water tower. The creamery, general store, and machine shop were all purchased in 1974 by the institute when the Heinola Farmers Co-operative moved to down-sized facilities near their feed mill and fuel and fertilizer facilities on the north side of town.

I drove into the parking lot by the laboratory. It was edged with high snow banks resembling piles of huge cottage cheese curds. Duane's office on the second floor was lit up, and his new Dodge pickup was in the lot. I knew that Koski and his assistant, Willy Kuusinen, were at an ethnomusicology conference in Fargo-Moorhead, so Duane and I wouldn't be overheard. As enjoyable as my first four-and-a-half years at the institute had been, I didn't trust Koski anymore. I never did trust Kuusinen. The two had become conspiratorial in the past six...