from Perfect Pitch

Listen: music is born from the human mind, but it also appears naturally, like the smell of malt, like the taste of celery. Humans desperately try to prevent it from slipping through their fingers. They fasten it to the score, to instruments, to commentaries, to theory books, to records . . . And yet music goes beyond all that; it lasts like nothing else lasts, and grows on its own. Music soaks it in; it’s an autonomous mind. It just needs to be remembered in order to live . . . Thinking of these issues brought peace to my mind . . . In any case . . . In any case, when we say music, music as a whole, we’re not only talking about the fabulous melody that dawned in the mind of so-and-so (just as in the mind of others, less lucky, might dawn the idea of buying a pair of pants), we’re also talking about . . . well, tonal structures, right? I descried that tonal structures operate like feelings. In Bruckner’s Fourth, in a quintet by Boccherini, there’s a je ne sais quoi that grows, recedes, comes and goes, is stored, fragments into parts that clash and reconcile; there’s daring, fervor, calm, spite, and appeasement, and even fog. Hah! Just like human feelings. . . Odd, eh? . . . But careful now, don’t think that every musical piece says a well-known emotion, that a serenade by Mozart is an impish prank, and a Webern quintet a somber fatality. That’s just a trifle, fodder for the scatterbrained . . . What’s actually true is that the drive behind music, its invisible breath, is of the same stuff as the breath of feelings. Correspondences . . . what I believe a piece is saying . . . are a mole, a symptom, a signpost. The essential organ, I thought, is on the other side, below, in the center, nobody knows where, and it continually makes new moles, new signs appear, all entirely different. There are a zillion music pieces, suites by Debussy and motets by Palestrina, serial symphonies and contradances, and to reach the basic mold, you have to approach it from each piece, from one phrase, from one note, just as it’s true that only from the shimmer of a drop can we approach the idea of light . . . And I would say to myself, Pay attention to that aria by Monteverdi, Lotario; rummage in it, gnaw it, dig, eat it. Until you’re completely distracted . . . That’s what I’d say to myself. . . As distracted as when you’re sitting on the edge of a pond staring at the clouds for hours, and suddenly you don’t even notice that you dipped your hand in the water and bang, you’ve caught a trout . . . It’s just a way of speaking, yes, but that makes sense . . . That’s a personality—in the end, that full instant is me, I imagined, I said to myself. I have no grace, no birth certificate, no miraculous window, I don’t know my wife or my daughter very well, I have no country. But I’m a . . . manifestation of something, right? Just like that aria by Monteverdi is a manifestation of something, I’d say to myself. And, I swear, the uneasiness started receding . . . Perhaps I, too, harbored a key. After all, any Tom, Dick, or Harry had to . . . ”

He stopped to replenish his provision of air. That thick, purplish nose swelled up in front of his pumice-stone countenance. Clumsily, perhaps, but not without premeditation, I told him that music might grant relief, yes, but it didn’t change anything; that after listening to a Mozart symphony you still felt the same way about things.

“Lino,” said Clarisa, and her voice was coming from somewhere else, “Won’t you let him go on?”

Caught in a dizzy spell, Lotario clung to the table as if scared of levitating. From the Enclosure, it seemed to me, came a clanging mitigated by the vegetation on the hillocks. Closer, the Sibelius symphony, threads of alfalfa and remains of a ravaged park, was being rebuilt in glimmers heading toward an overpowering theme.

“I...