19

When Professor Joseph Skizzen walked into his first class at Whittlebauer College—seventeen students had signed up for Trends in Modern Music, and they were all there—his chest could scarcely hold his heart, and he heard its throb as if each beat were being made by menacing native feet for a jungle movie. Your job, he said to himself, is to make them choke on their own snores. He had been an indifferent student himself. The memory was before him like a billboard. Only Mr. Hirk had made his blood come alive in his heart. Others of his teachers had pretended to a passion for Martin Luther or for French or for the early American novel, but they hadn’t any enthusiasm really; they hadn’t any feeling for anything; they just declaimed and paced or intoned and shuffled or mumbled or droned; and they believed they entertained properly by pouring tepid water into tiny cups. As a young newcomer to the faculty he was last in line for perks and had been given an 8:00 a.m. schedule to prove his unimportance. Early morning—what a moment for music. So Joseph assumed his students had sleepwalked from their dorms and zombied into back-row seats where they sat like the seats sat. He vowed. He vowed he would unsettle their sleep at least, but before him was the memory of his own bad attitude, now multiplied seventeen times, yet made odd by being featured in strange faces.

Professor Skizzen … of course he was not a professor yet, but what did they know …? Professor Skizzen—trying to stride—went straight to the piano that sat athwart a front corner of the classroom directly opposite the door. This arrangement permitted him to walk directly to it, looking neither to right nor left, then slide smoothly upon the piano seat and sit with definition the way the piano seat sat, his hand poised without further preamble to play twenty seconds of “The Minute Waltz” (Joseph thought they might recognize that). This is classic, he said, turning slightly around. And this—he touched the few quiet widely separated notes of Bartók’s 1926 sonata—is modern.

A moment later he stood with burning face before the class, his feet, legs, and waist sheltered by his desk, in traditional schoolmasterly position, hoping they would think he was naturally rosy; and with the furniture’s protection he tried to greet the class, to introduce himself and their subject, to get the course going, to commence his first lecture, aware the while that he had blundered badly right from the beginning, for Joseph had meant to play the Minuet in G—that was the classic—la dee dah dee dah dee dah dee dah, la dee dah, lah dee dah, perhaps they would get the joke, if they had seen the right movie—next the Chopin was to follow as … well … the classic romantic—and then, only then, were those lonely notes of Bartók’s to be struck.

Because he had been hired as a specialist in contemporary music, Joseph thought it prudent to find out what his subject took in—from whom to whom was the principal question, since, although the course was called “contemporary,” its composers were obliged to be dead. He had been told to teach two sections of an introduction to music as well, one later in the day, the other on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday mornings, likewise held before reveille’s own notes had died away. His head felt like a fine apple, as crisp as the autumn air as he crossed the quad. In addition, he was to instruct half-a-dozen kids in piano, times that might nibble at the edges of his evenings. Joseph already dreaded the winter; he had felt the wind sweep across the hilltop, and he knew that, throughout the fall, it would rain the entire distance from his mother’s house to the office; the office he shared with someone he hadn’t seen, though they had briefly met, but whose papers covered the only desk, whose books filled the solitary bookcase, whose photo holding a fish crookedly graced the wall, and whose lumber jacket hung on the single hook like another trophy. There were, however, two chairs, the second, Joseph supposed, for a suppliant, as well as an empty corner where the petitioner might stand.

The students’ faces were expectantly directed but uniformly empty. Joseph would discover that throughout the semester the surfaces of these faces would shift mechanically: they would show curiosity yet remain blank, look puzzled though blank, annoyed but blank, and bored and blank. They had probably enrolled because the course was rumored to be easy. Well, it would not be a breeze where he blew. They would like nothing more than an ear-long year of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Well, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern would not be easy. Milhaud would not be easy (he had died just in time to become relevant), though they might have coasted through Debussy and Ravel if Debussy and Ravel had remained contemporary; there were, of course, Holst the programmatic, Delius the soporific, and Elgar the Edward to delight their tastes—Elgar was the Kipling of English music, he’d heard—however, the course could not include Aram Khachaturian, who was hanging on to life, nor Aaron Copland, the American mountaineer and jingoist. Oh yes, Messiaen—the Composer’s Claudel, as he was understood to have been, although Milhaud had given sail to a bark called Christopher Columbus—this radical composer of conservative thoughts would not be easy either. His name had too many vowels.

How might Herr Fraudulent Prof survive his second class? These were not merely strange names he was threatening his poor pupils with; they represented his areas of ignorance, too: a vast bleak plain empty of all experience. He could not spell a signature, not to say sing a note, from one of their compositions. He could not crowd them all into the last weeks of the semester and then hope not to get there. Though he had experienced that strategy.

Two students dropped during the first week. Another after the first quiz. Latitudes of this kind were recent. Whittlebauer College had been traumatized during the Vietnam protests of the sixties despite the fact that not a voice had been raised or a placard waved on its campus during society’s confusing hostilities. Its students were the children of Presbyterians, and although the doctrines of the UP were a definite improvement over the frightened sectarianism of Augsburg Community College, the school administration always acted to serve its church and keep its charges in line. After all, the servants of the Word were elected by the laity—in this case those who paid the bills—so its organization was more democratic than most. Nevertheless, a decayed Calvinism lay just under the school’s fluster like a concealed corpse beneath the floor.

Joseph realized that religion went for a liberal education like an assassin for the jugular. If it weren’t for righteous families, with their revered authoritarian ways, and schools like Whittlebauer that kept kids penned within the faith until they graduated, the sect would sicken if not die. However, on account of a declining enrollment, an increasing dropout rate, and the horrid headlines in the newspapers concerning the pot-smoking, free-loving hippies, those violent Students for Democratic Action, Gangs of Gay Bikers, or marauding Black Panthers, uncivil as the banks they robbed and fires they set, as well as the erosions of the war on everybody’s patience, the college relaxed its requirement of regular attendance at church, allowed a student council to be elected, actually to convene, and even permitted it to rule in carefully circumscribed and unimportant circumstances. Three African Americans were captured in an admission’s raid, while an Asian, without solicitation, enrolled. Diversity had been achieved. There were more dances than there had been, though the campus remained dry, and academic standards were so relaxed as to seem asleep. So students could drop a course at any time during the first three weeks. By the end of taste-and-decide time, Joseph had retained ten, one of them a boy … two others maybe were almost men.

How to proceed? His course had no prerequisite. Rock and rollers would naturally want to know what was happening in their world, but neither their minds nor their world were musical, a fact they would not understand, and one that would rile them. It would be like trying to instruct his sister. And, just as it was for his sister, their reality would be filled by a local future—nothing else: the next game, the next party, the next dance, the next dress, the next date, the next hot song, the next new movies, even the next exam. Finally … happy graduation day … money well spent, folks. Then there would be the wedding to think of, the couple’s income to worry about, consequently the next raise, therefore the first house, a kid, soon kids, until their lives would no longer recognize anything novel and have run out of expectations like a keg that foams air; their present tense would slowly turn toward the very past they had once so carefully packed like a hope chest with their youthful future: the old games and their dead great players, the once-upon-a-time BYO parties, dances they had danced, gowns they had worn, the golden oldies, grade school friends, high school chums, and college buddies, first loves, wild drives, frat drunks, make-outs that were now adulteries.

Where to begin? how could he cut into a continuum and honestly say, “From this point on all that was cotton is now silk”? While he had been, as his CV supportively said, a librarian, initially reading at random and with intemperate glee, Joseph had begun to pursue subjects beyond the beauties they publically offered. He was dissatisfied with any account of things that assumed some fresh art or new sound had been spontaneously born and didn’t know or need to acknowledge its parents. He had come to feel, with an ease he almost recognized, that events and their inhabitants had a source from which they’d sprung; and he needed to know how they had become the way they presently were; where their actual causes lay; why turns had been taken and choices made; the true parents of things set at odds, split and gone; so he was now at a loss because he had no beginning he could offer to his students. Even illness had its onset. Yet the modern movement in all the arts, as far as he could see, was partly defined by its hatred of history, by the intemperate rejection of a nineteenth century that had deified history’s explanatory power, its moody course, its laws, its chosen heroes. What did you do when received opinion went so categorically against your own? Back down like the weenie you were? Or remain faithful to your ignorance, curled like a cat in its chair? Or one day, like the mysterious stranger in Western movies, get gone.

In Joseph’s own mind, music, like Orpheus, looked back, then looked back again, just as every composer wrote with ancestral harmonies in his head; so the contemporary period that was his subject could only be comprehended if the changes brought about by the invention of musical notation were clearly recognized, even though that revolution was centuries ago; and only if the consequences of Music’s First Freedom—won in its dim beginnings—were understood: namely when the dominance of voice and dance was replaced by the rule of the instrument in both composition and performance; for that was when pure music came with pain and exhilaration into being. After all, he would explain, contemporary electronic music was stagnant because it hadn’t discovered how to represent on nicely ruled paper what it was doing. He had read that symbolic logic had been in the same fix, whatever symbolic logic was.

Joseph could accept the overthrow of the voice without a qualm because it was a benevolent coup. He would make his students understand that a music freed from song, like a son who has sailed away a seaman and returned at the head of a fleet, will give back to that most human of all instruments such songs as had hitherto been inaudible: there would be mournful lieder beyond number, bloody operas galore, even majestic masses from devout atheists. Oh, Miss Ankle Jingle, who sits in the first row and widens her thighs to disconcert her teacher, the long line of Les Nuit d’Été will run ardently up your spine; ah, Mr. Moonfaced Boy with the smile you’ve had painted on your head to disconcert your teacher, Heitor Villa-Lobos’s sublime hum will cause your ears to flower; hey there, Mr. Notebook whose cover opens and closes with the measured rhythm of a feeding butterfly so as to disconcert the teacher, the melancholy beauty of Das Lied von der Erde will make your eyes water with relief, and Vier letzte Lieder, a summa without a sum, close them on a heavy sigh.

The entire class will be happy to realize that the music they fill arenas to hear now—the wail, the stomp, the pounded drum, the rhythmic clap, the frantic strum—could be fit company for an ending, as it was in the beginning, even of the world.

Joseph realized, as he faced his task, that he had no mentors to whom he might turn, for he had never taken a course in music much less one allegedly this up-to-date. How others might have taught it—managed this material, ordered its presentation, emphasized Varèse rather than Antheil—was a mystery. What did he know about his teachers anyway? only that he had been greeted by one in a provocative dress amid pillows and the smell of pot. Or was it in a dirndl with a stein of beer? His own history was learning to be hazy.

In the short time since he’d left Augsburg, the Whittlebauer semester had been shortened by a bad barber. A week of reading had been installed just before exams, during which time louts, like the one Joseph had been, might chase the tale of an entire semester and—worn out by all-nighters and cramming—recite it while asleep. Finals swallowed another opportunity. Add the three hourly exams that usually dotted the semester and one more week was gone. Good heavens—he had but thirteen left in which to expose his unfitness. Panic followed him like a jackal waiting for a show of weakness—a slowing limp in his Anton Webern or an out-of-breath Alban Berg.

Students tend to slink to the rear of a classroom and will advance toward the front only when threatened, but the Boy took a first-row seat on the first day, looked at Joseph as if listening to him, not vacant-faced as most were, not nervous like the impassive young woman whose left leg nevertheless wagged rhythmically, jingling her ankle bracelet, and certainly not wearily like the girl who bore to class a backpack bigger than a camel’s hump, or morosely as the guy who was staring down at the closed covers of a notebook embossed with the school’s insignia as if he had been asked to memorize the medallion. How about the sallow fellow who Joseph feared might bite through the temples of his eyeglasses and made his teacher anxious with the expectation? By the time he had become, in truth, Professor Skizzen, he had learned not to look at his students directly. Rather he allowed his gaze to pass swiftly over the tops of their heads, unless, of course, the heavens fell, and someone asked him a question. Then he would fix the presumptuous fellow (as the fellow usually was) with an attention so intense the student often stammered. However, Skizzen also knew how important it was to treat every query with polite and devoted concern, to let his look rise eventually, as if it were seeking a solution in the skies. This upward gaze was not entirely for show, since his answers were often made up and he might well have found them there—immersed in cloud.

My name is Joseph Skizzen. I have written my office hours on the board. He looked at the board. I should say I’ve printed. He smiled into a silence wholly empty of affect. I mean I’ve lettered my name there where you see it. I encourage you to come to me about any relevant concerns. If you can’t speak to me after class, make an appointment. He stood in a puddle of silence as though he had wet his pants. Oh my, that was an additional worry. By now everybody should have a copy of the syllabus. There is one at just those seats I want you to occupy. Up front. I shall wait while you resettle yourselves … The game is called “musical chairs.” In … He had made another big mistake. They were not used to this. It also defeated the democracy of the classroom.

[Pause whilst everyone repositions.]

During this semester we shall be following the course of contemporary music, by which I mean those composers who flourished from, roughly, the turn of the century to this one’s belly-button, which, if you haven’t forgotten, is halfway.

Someone tittered. Good. Who? it wasn’t the youngster with the pageboy haircut; it wasn’t the medallion examiner; and ankle bracelet hadn’t missed a jink. He had committed a stupid bit of high school humor. It was a measure of his nervousness.

He suddenly recalled a ramshackle London classroom where everyone sat in all kinds of chairs the teacher had collected, each with a name pasted on it. Why had he not remembered this experience earlier, when he was contemplating the installation of a similar kindergarten regimen?

Those who like to christen schools of literature, art, and music often overlook differences in order to hang their chosen clothes in the same closet, but we shall pay particular attention to them. To differences, I mean. Not only do many streams feed our river, it, in turn, forks as often as you do at dinner. From the Boy a smile—beatific. Joseph was so lacking in confidence by this time, small gratuities were gratefully received.

Where had the clothes and the closet come from? Joseph thought he had worried about every eventuality, but lecturing had dangers he had not anticipated. You might fail for words or lose the thread or express yourself poorly. Now he knew that you might also run on, revealing yourself not your subject as you rambled. Because, when a house had been found for Miriam and Deborah, he had wanted his clothes to hang in the same closet as his sister’s and had a tantrum when his wish was laughingly denied.

He proceeded to explain the mechanics of the course and hand out a sheet on which texts and assignments, as well as points of examination, were listed. Then he realized that he had already placed one on each chair’s swollen arm. To signify where he wanted them to sit. So he waved his extras as if at a gnat. Of particular concern were the pieces he expected the students to listen (even attend) to. These were listed beneath each reading and were starred: essential, three, suggested, two, additional, one. By asterisks. Find them? … the asterisks? His tongue was as furry as a sheep is … furry. Okay.

Occasionally, a particular recording was insisted upon, though he could not guarantee its availability. Did they find that information? Also asterisked … Okay. His hands were trembling, so he placed them on the lectern from which his own copy of the assignment sheet was … flackering to the floor near the ankle bracelet. Thus irretrievable.

He saw it. He tried not to see it. He moved. He tried not to move. Never clear your throat at any time that can be given significance. Miss Jangle knew what to do. She crossed her legs.

When Joseph had the second interview for his present position, he had shocked the committee by insisting that a satisfactory selection of contemporary compositions should be available for individual student or classroom listening. The committee didn’t know the state the record library was in (nor did he), but they assured him funds would be forthcoming to remedy gaps as he discovered them. Once on the scene, Joseph saw more holes than cheese, so he made his requests, along with those promises politely remembered. Money was no more forthcoming than the committee, which failed to take the problem up, forgot its former assurances, and neglected to reply when opportuned. Nevertheless, its members had been impressed in spite of themselves by his demands and even more by his forceful follow-ups (rare in this atmosphere), so his little bit of youthful arrogance had helped his case to begin with, and his diligence brought to his otherwise out-of-joint nose a whiff of esteem.

Thank God this rinky-dink college behaved like a high school: classes were ended through the din of a buzzer, books were gathered up by eager arms in the single unified deed of the day, and bottoms began to rise before ears could rid themselves of the bell. So Joseph never had to hunt for an ending. Still he would always want to add a word … just a word … only one. But the annoyance that crossed those faces as their rumps reluctantly returned to zero convinced him of the unwisdom of any additions, and he learned to snap his jaw shut like a parsimonious purse. Let them wonder what that word would have been. Though they wouldn’t. Wonder. Ever. When the room was empty of them, he picked up the errant assignment sheet. One corner had a gray shoeprint on it.