The Time of Our Singing

  I’d grown no closer to Celeste in Ghent than we’d been in the airport parking lot the day they picked me up. She and my brother had the rapport that exists only between two people incomprehensible to each other. They chattered all the time, but never about the same thing at once. When the three of us were together, the French blazed past my ability to split the elided syllables. Then Celeste would address me in an English so joyously makeshift, all I could do was nod and pray. At nights, in our ancient row house, I heard them doing each other, three stories below. They hummed to each other, like Penderecki’s threnody, like Reich, Glass, the new minimalists, the latest rage in stylish circles. Their voices ascended in slurred quarter tones, crested in held dissonant intervals, then cooled off by appoggiaturas. They were busy turning themselves into a new species, and for that, they needed a new courtship song.

  So I’d heard Celeste Marin’s singing voice already, before we sang together. This daughter of Caribbean business elites—generations of mixed-race rum magnates—sang with antillais abandon. But I wasn’t prepared for our French fourteenth-century trios. When we three made our first attempt to harmonize, I stopped after eight notes. Her voice was Jonah’s, pitched up into soprano again, before his voice broke forever. Whatever her voice had sounded like in her days at the Paris Conservatory, before she met Jonah, it now sounded more like a female Jonah than Ruth or Mama ever had.

  We tried out a piece—a Solage chanson: “Deceit Holds the World in Its Domain.” We surged to the end on rising delight. The last note died away, dust motes suspended in the light of light. I was beside myself. It had been lifetimes since I’d felt so lifted, so afraid. I couldn’t sleep that night, knowing what we had. Neither, it turned out, could Jonah. I heard him climbing the wooden stairs to my crow’s nest. He came into my room without knocking and sat on the foot of my bed in the dark. “Jesus, Joey. This is it. We’re home free.” I saw him in silhouette punch the air like some teenager finding himself alone with the ball in the end zone. “All my life. All my life, I’ve been waiting for this.” But he couldn’t say what “this” was.

  “What about the others?” Some hunger had caught hold of me. I was ready to cast the others aside, rather than let them slow us down even a beat.

  Jonah laughed in darkness. “You’ll see.”

  I saw, the next week, when all six of Jonah’s hand-selected voices met to sight-read. The others had been singing together in assorted groups for two years, honing their precision sacraments. They’d sprung their combined sounds on audiences in Gothic ghost towns around the Low Countries, France, and Germany. They knew what they might do together, and were having trouble keeping their secret. But five-sixths is as shy of perfection as any fraction. Every new voice starts a group out again, from zero.

  I went into that first rehearsal wrecked by stage fright. These people owned the world that I only glimpsed now from a distance. They’d spent their life singing; I was a recovering pianist. The languages we sang were theirs by birth; I got through them by phonetics and prayer. My brother staked his reputation on me. Everything set up for me to fall neatly on my ambiguous face. All I had was a scrap of prophecy, the days through which I came.

  We read through a chanson by Dufay—“Se la face ay pale”—and then that oldest of parody masses, based on the same tune. It felt like breaking into a tomb that had been sealed for half a millennium. Ten years later, the rage for authenticity would prohibit using women’s voices at all. But for a brief moment, we thought we had the future pegged and the past cleanly identified.

  When the body breaks free of its boundary skin, it rises. How many people, trapped in time’s stream, get to feel, even for an instant, that they’ve climbed up out of the current and onto the banks? Jonah grabbed the tenor and the women lifted, three steps and a leap into weightlessness, scraping the keystone of the highest vault. Their certainty powered me, and the notes rolled off the page into the air without my doing much but spotting them.

  The blend was so tight that each new imitative line sounded like the same voice curling back on itself. I’d stepped in front of a dressing room mirror and splintered into whole societies. Now and then, the released lines collapsed back into the unity that birthed them. The universe, Da once proved to his own satisfaction, could be described by a single electron, traveling back and forth in time along an infinitely knotted path whose resulting connect-the-dots shapes formed all the matter in existence.

  When we finished, the silence we’d opened rang like a bell. Peter Chance, who sang like a van Eyck angel but who spoke like an unsexed Anthony Eden, took out a pencil and began making tiny reprimands in his part. “Anyone care to place a modest wager on our prospects?”

  Celeste asked Jonah for a translation. A grinning Marjoleine deGroot supplied it, for Jonah was staring up at the roof beams, exultant. We looked at one another the way musicians do, slant but seeing all, every one of us terrified to try it again. We wanted to put the sheet music down, walk away, and forever protect that moment. Jonah returned to earth and pulled another mass out of his binder. “Shall we have a go at the Victoria?”

  The Victoria sailed up past the Dufay, dropped notes and all. The shower of sound from our initial try gave way to the first feel for how to group-drive this thing. Heaven’s signal bled in and out, like an FM station in a storm. But the message was firm in us. We sprang loose, cut capers, wheeled about. I was their man. My brother had known. When the notes stopped, Hans Lauscher looked down the bridge of his nose and said, “You are hired. How much do you want an hour?” His accent shocked me: the ghost of my father’s.

  Celeste blessed me in profuse island slang. Marjoleine, with the closest thing to glee her native climate permitted, threw her Flemish arm over my shoulder and thumped me as if I’d just put a header in the back of the net in a qualifying match against the Netherlands. “You don’t know how many basses we have already tried! Good voices, too, but just not right with us. Why didn’t you come to us sooner? How much time we would have saved.” I looked at Jonah. He grinned without embarrassment, as pleased with his duplicity as he was with his brilliant hindsight.

  The fusing of six jagged personalities didn’t happen at once. The delicate dance of negotiated tensions obeyed its own musical shorthand. We had our daily doses of nervous outbursts and repaired hysterics. We practiced in a ring of black music stands, everyone but the fastidious Hans in stocking feet. Sometimes we taped ourselves on an old reel-to-reel, and then the six of us lay flat on our backs against the wood floors of our warehouse stage, conducting our prior lives, singing unison encouragements to the fixed fossil record.

  We were a synchronized underwater ballet. Ten hands worked the air, shaping the wayward notes, waving like a Flanders wheat field in the wind. Celeste and Marjoleine especially needed to dance, the arc of the music and the line of their muscles weaving and meeting. Peter Chance, who’d spent his choirboyhood in the chancel of King’s and had stayed on in Cambridge when his voice broke, delighted in the newfound freedom of movement the group allowed him. Hans Lauscher did at least wag his shoulders, which, for a Rhinelander, was almost Swan Lake. Even Jonah, who’d once shamed Mama into keeping still when she sang, and who, during his lieder years, had made unholy drama by standing dead stationary in the crook of the piano, now turned fluid. He crooked his knees and curled forward into the top of his phrase, ready to mount up into empty space and keep on climbing. The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

  When we were hitting on all cylinders, Jonah blessed us. Tied to his omnipotent tenor, we might travel anywhere, run any theft. But when we were off, falling back to earth in a fiery ball like Icarus, his patience grew as thin as a snake’s skin. Then six bruised egos spent hours trying to coax the damn carcass back to life again.

  We were like a commune or an infant church: from each according to her abilities. Hans was our font of Teutonic scholarship, a walking manuscript library on a par with Vienna or Brussels. Peter Chance, who’d read Renaissance
history at King’s, was our source on performance practice. Celeste served as articulation coach, softening, closing, and relaxing our vowels while tightening our intonation and polyphonic textures. Marjoleine was the verbal interpreter, glossing sense and phrasing stress points in any language we sang in. I did the structural analyses, finding how best to juxtapose long note values and rapid passages or bring out the subtle undulations of pulse.

  But Jonah ruled over us all. His face, our focal point, filled with driven will. Our years apart weren’t enough to account for everything he now knew. All I could figure was that he hadn’t learned it. He remembered, resurrecting that dead world as if it had always been his. Through Kampen, he’d acquired a grasp for early idiom. He knew, within a week of reading a piece, how best to find its otherworldly hum. He could get at the universe hidden in any work, find the meter of a line, play the text, harmony, and rhythm off one another, revealing the message that existed only in the tension among them. He led us through a thicket of counterpoint to those moments of convergence that life denied him.

  He shaped the group like a Kyrie. He delayed our first appearance. We were ready to sing for months before we actually did. Each singer went on working outside the group. Marjoleine ran three church choirs. Celeste blasted out background vocals in Europop radio anthems. Hans and Peter both sang and taught. Jonah took on assorted gigs, performing early music, especially with Geert Kampen, whose Kampen Ensemble, now veterans, were our North Star. But the six of us, together, held back for a last bar, reluctant to lose this moment when we were the only ones who knew the ring of possibility.

  We sang for Kampen, in the chancel of St. Baafs. The church was deserted except for a few startled tourists. It felt like singing for Josquin himself. When we were done, Mr. Kampen sat in his choir stall, his shock of white hair falling over his forehead. I thought he’d taken offense at some turn in our interpretation. He just sat there, for five whole lento measures, until, behind his tiny granny glasses, the man’s eyes dampened. “Where did you learn this?” he asked Jonah. “Surely not from me.” And over my brother’s horrified objections, he proclaimed, “You must teach me now.”

  Voces Antiquae debuted at the Flanders Festival in Brugge and followed up at the Holland Festival in Utrecht. We made our initial beachhead in the fifteenth century—Ockeghem, Agricola, Mouton, Binchois, a motley mix of regional styles. But our great signature piece was Palestrina’s Mass, Nigra sum sed formosa, a private joke between Jonah and me. It’s a Daley-Strom thing; you wouldn’t understand. Jonah insisted we perform everything from memory. He wanted the danger. Soloists play without music all the time. But if they lose themselves, they can swim up alongside their own fingers, and no one but the fellow in row four with the pocket score is the wiser. With ensembles, each mind’s memory map must be identical. Lose yourself and there’s no return.

  Written music is like nothing in the world—an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it’s almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section. While you do this, you, you, and you do otherwise. The score does not really set down the lines themselves; it writes out the spaces between their moving points. And there’s no way to say just what a particular whole sums to, short of reenacting it. And so our performances rejoined all those countless marriage parties, births, and funerals where this map of moving nows was ever unrolled.

  In the world lines traced out in these scores, Jonah at last came into his own at-one-ment. His six voices cartwheeled around one another in unleashed synchrony, each creating the others by supplying their missing spaces. We sang the Palestrina, a piece that, by the kind of rough estimate Da loved, had been performed on the order of a hundred thousand times. Or we brought to life the Mouton manuscript Hans Lauscher discovered, which hadn’t sounded a peep since its first performance five hundred years ago. In both cases, we slipped alongside every performance that had happened or was still to come.

  That’s why Jonah insisted that we surrender the safety of the page. We lived, ate, and breathed the printed instructions until they vanished, until we composed the written-out invention afresh, in the moment of our repeat performance. He wanted us to stand onstage, open our mouths, and have the notes just there, like a medium possessed by the soul she channels. He had us walk out from as many entrances as possible, in our daily clothes, as if we’d just bumped into one another on the street. This was still the era of black-tie concert dress. Jonah had donned monkey suits for years. The biggest shock available to him was the ordinary. We just appeared, as impromptu as the gift of tongues. We stood, scattered across the floorboards, as far from one another as we could get, like some multiple-body physics problem. That gave us maximum voice separation, the fullest possible depth. It made blending, precision attacks, and releases that much harder to pull off, and it left us, each night, courting disaster. But that space turned us into six soloists who just happened to align into a single crystal.

  The sound we made glinted like the best hedge against all debased currencies. Jonah wanted every interval redeemed. Every resolved suspension shone out like tragedy averted; every false relation was the drift of a soul in agony; every tierce de Picardie delivered a life beyond this one. A reviewer in De Morgen, still reeling from the effect, expressed the strongest reservation leveled against us: “If anything, the sonority suffers from relentless divinity. Too many peaks; not enough valleys.”

  Even that barb was laced with gratitude. Everywhere, for an instant, people wanted to be saved. Our sudden popularity surprised everyone except Jonah. Within a year, every festival in Europe with an arts subsidy wanted us. In that most select of dying worlds, we were the flavor of the hour. Our recording of the Palestrina Masses on EMI—a label that could have bought and sold a hundred Harmondials—won a pair of awards and sold enough copies to pay the rent on Brandstraat through the next century.

  A thousand years of neglected music came of age everywhere at once in a dozen countries. Not just our group: Kampen, Deller, Harnoncourt, Herreweghe, Hillier: an avalanche intent on remaking the past. Curators had championed dead music for decades, each with their own new versions of annihilated history to promote. And all that time, audiences had never treated these revivals as anything more than exotic wallpaper. Our new generation of performers was more razor-fine and aura-wrapped, more underwritten by scholarship. But that alone couldn’t explain why, for a few years, the Creator Spiritus had the nearest thing to a resuscitation it would ever get.

  “I have a theory,” Hans Lauscher said in a hotel in Zurich.

  “Careful,” Marjoleine warned. “A German with a theory.”

  Jonah waved like a referee. “Easy, folks. Switzerland. We’re on neutral territory.”

  Hans flashed the theory of a smile. “Why this rage for a deceased musical style that can mean nothing to anyone? I am blaming the recording industry. Capitalist exhaustion through the flooding of consumer markets. How many more Mozart Requiems can you make? How many Schubert Unfinisheds? The more we feed our appetites, the more appetite we have. We must give the buyers something new.”

  “Even if it’s ancient,” Peter Chance said.

  “All music is contemporary,” Jonah said. And that’s how he wanted us to sing: as if the world would never abandon this instant.

  I remember the six of us, after a concert at the Castello di San Giorgio in Mantua, well after midnight in a warm May. The lights of the city threw the castle and Ducal Palace into enchanted outline. We stepped into a town square unchanged since the Gonzaga court stumbled upon the madrigal. We moved through the intact fantasy as through a stage set. “It’s a vein!” Celeste exclaimed. “We have a total vein!”

  “Indeed,” Peter Chance echoed. “We’re supremely jammy.” As always, I was the only one struggling with English.

  “How did we get here?” Marjoleine asked. “I trained for opera. Until a few years ago, I knew nothing before Lully.” She looked at Hans, our man
uscript scholar.

  He held up both hands. “I am a Lutheran. My parents would die all over again if they knew I was singing Latin Masses. You!” he said, fencing my brother with a finger. “You are the one who has corrupted us.”

  Jonah gazed around the square, by the light of the Gonzaga moon, whose inconstancy he’d just that evening invoked in song. “Not my fault. I’m just a poor black Harlem boy.”

  Peter Chance let slip a sound, half titter, half censor’s whistle. He gave his head a circumspect shake toward Celeste in the moonlight, decodable to everyone. Jonah returned the Cambridge chorister’s incredulity with his own, in American dialect. And there in the moon-muted Piazza Sordello, the penny dropped, in five different currencies.

  “Are you having us on?” Chance sounded more Oxbridge than I’d ever heard him. “You can’t be serious!”

  “You didn’t know? You didn’t know!” Some hybrid of amused and crestfallen.

  “Well, I knew there was some … some ancestry, of course. But … you’re not black, for heaven’s sake.”

  “No?”

  “Well, not like, say …”

  “We have counted up the numbers,” Celeste bragged. “We believe I may have as many—Comment dit-on?—arrière-grands-parents blancs as these men here.”

  Peter inspected me: I, too, was turning on him. “And how many white great-grandparents, exactly?”

  Jonah snickered. “Well, that’s being black, you see. Hard to say, exactly. But more white than black.”

  “That’s just my point. How can you call yourself … looking the way you … ?”

  “Welcome to the United States.”

  “But we’re not in the damn United …” Peter Chance tumbled headlong down the hill we’d made him. At the bottom, he sat in a dazed heap. “Are you sure?”

  “Are we sure, Joseph?” Jonah’s smile was a calm Sargasso.

  I turned toward a lost night, the last night I saw my grandfather. “That’s what it says on our birth certificates.”