AWAKE. Jacob sat up in bed and pulled the chain of his reading lamp, swallowing the liquid lead moonlight and casting the room in muted amber. It was a little attic room with a low ceiling and every wall lined with books; books about history, books about science, books about philosophy, books about music, books about books. Next to the bed was a small school desk pushed up to a window with an omniscient view of the university campus, and over at the far end of the room was a piano—an 1831 American William Geib square piano, to be exact—which had been a Christmas gift from the university. This was to be his eleventh year here as head of the music department, and what a fantastic school it was; he loved its ancient stone buildings and long corridors, the giant library in the arts wing with its majestic vaulted ceilings, Bronfman Lecture Hall, his office. He really liked the students too, who were mostly bright and eager to learn. He even liked that batch of students every year who weren’t so eager, a collection of inflated egos, bad attitudes and plain laziness. The way he saw it, these students provided him with a challenge, an opportunity to provide the gift of curiosity.
Jacob was unable to fall back to sleep. His mind was so awake, so aware of everything, so pure and radiant! He felt the need to direct his newfound energy somehow, so he got up out of bed, slipped his naked toes into his cozy wool slippers and sauntered over to the window. Thompson Field was covered with a thin veil of frost, lending a slight sparkle to the grass. Jacob had always loved this time of year, when Old Man Winter tickled the air and whispered his secrets, before the wrath of his anger swept the whole landscape into a crushing saga of snowstorms, darkness, and gloom. Yes, it was a swell time of year. Incidentally, it was usually around this time of year that Jacob tended to rekindle his fondness for practicing contrapuntal music at the piano. But why, he wondered? Why should a fugue be more exciting to him in December than in July? Perhaps it was due to the specific type of process required for that music, he thought. Contrapuntal music such as that of the great Johann Sebastian Bach truly requires a great deal of patience to master. One must learn to calmly enjoy the excruciatingly slow work of absorbing all those voice-crossings and strange finger twists. Any sort of attachment to the idea of an end product tends to create an inner frustration and anxiety, in both the mind and body.
Jacob thought fondly about Christmas vacation last year, when he had just received the Geib piano and began learning the Prelude in A minor, no. 20 from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. He would sit at the instrument with a hot coffee, a cookie, and a pencil, taking the piece apart one measure at a time. First he would select which fingers he would use to play each note, ensuring maximum comfort. Then he would play the section in a way that he could manage—even if it
meant shortening the section—and would repeat this over and over in order to learn the sequence of notes, eventually falling into a completely relaxed way of playing the passage. This was, and continued to be Jacob’s therapy, his meditation, his way of finding meaning in life and warding off the gloom of his own mortality. That Bach prelude had taken a long time to learn, but by letting the music come to him rather than forcing his body to produce the notes, the piece had become a deep part of his existence. Now whenever he played it, the notes poured out of him unconsciously, as though Bach’s spirit were playing the piece himself through Jacob’s limp body and agile fingers. Indeed, a great deal of patience was required for that process, but it was beautiful to be free of desire like that, even just for a few minutes. Gently falling snow must foster that kind of patience. There’s a soft stillness to it, a quiet strength. One can learn a great deal from the snow.
*
“Can anyone tell me what pitch forms the nucleus of our musical notation system?”
3:36 PM on a Friday. Jacob was just beginning his final lecture for the day, a course he had named The Metaphysics of Music. Although lecturing was always enjoyable to Jacob, this course was especially dear to his heart, and god knows it had taken much effort and arguing with the board in order to get the course officially approved. The board had had concerns first and foremost about the materials upon which such a course would be founded, since there wasn’t really a field of knowledge in the world grouped as the “metaphysics of music” per se. There were certainly many ontological forays into the nature of music by true philosophers such as Kant, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche (“without music, life would be a mistake”), and writings by musicians and composers like Wagner, Ives and Busoni on the philosophical nature of their work, but those topics were already being covered by the highbrows over in the philosophy department in their aesthetics courses. Jacob had explained to the board that aesthetics wasn’t at all what he would be talking about, nor was it pure metaphysics. This course wouldn’t be asking questions like “how do we define beauty in music?” or “does music have inherent meaning?” in broad, sweeping generalizations. Rather, it would pose questions that examined the very system of musical nuts and bolts we have come to know: rhythm, tempo, harmony, composition, so on and so forth; a metaphysics that exists not in the world surrounding music but within the actual universe of musical knowledge. If one were to take on teaching this new course, it would require some serious digging into rather shady areas of study and a synthesis of those materials along with a healthy sprinkle of original thought. In the end the board relented with a sardonic “good luck!” and sent him on his way.
Jacob sat on the front of his desk and lit his pipe, then shook the match and placed it in the ashtray. With his left arm crossed underneath the right, he grasped the brushed apple-shaped bowl and puffed on the old briar pipe, billows of smoke ascending from his figure.
“It’s not a trick question, trust me.” He was wearing a loose-fitting linen shirt and wool pants, one of his trademark outfits that was slightly too warm for the current weather. He patiently scanned the room. Every seat in Bronfman Hall was occupied. After a few moments, Jacob got up and walked around the desk to the chalkboard wall.
“Alright, well, since none of you plebeians have the balls to give the obvious answer, I'll do it for you. But no freebies next time!” A slight chuckle circulated throughout the room.
The professor picked up the yellow chalk stick and drew the customary grand staff, just as the class had seen him do countless times before. The special music chalkboard was pre-printed with a series of five-line stacks, so that all he had to do was carve out the contours of the treble and bass clef, which he effortlessly executed with a few swift motions of the arm. He then pressed the chalk halfway between the two staves and formed a short horizontal line with a circle on it, a whole note on middle C.
“And I’m willing to bet that this is the answer every single one of you was already thinking.” Another chuckle. Jacob stood still, pensive. “You know, there’s actually something interesting for us to learn there,” he said, extending his index finger up into the air, “I mean, it can be quite easy to fall into the habit of discarding new ideas and convictions out of fear or self-consciousness, but sometimes those ideas are the stuff of greatness, and there is always a good chance that while you're thinking about it, there are other people out there having the exact same revolutionary thoughts. I’m sure that many of you can relate to the feeling of witnessing old, repressed ideas come to fruition by the hands of others. We all have great ideas; the question is, are you willing to truly listen to those ideas and let them live, and then let them die of their own accord? A great man once said: ‘speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost.’” He turned back toward the blackboard.
“Many people in our field tend to take for granted the awesomeness, the grandeur of the musical staff,” the professor said. “Even for people who are interested in the intricacies of this thing, it just keeps coming at us with surprises; I believe that to this day we still haven't even begun to grasp the immensity of its mathematical complexity, and maybe we never will. 'But wait a second,' I can hear you saying, 'how can something invented by humans surpass our own level of understanding?'
“Okay well, first let’s examine some of the staff's hidden surprises, so you can see what I'm talking about. I’d like to draw your attention to the beautiful symmetry contained in the grand staff. Notice the similarity between the two clefs.” He pointed at the bass clef and then drew it upside-down and flipped into the top staff. Then he pointed at the treble clef and drew it reversed and flipped into the bottom staff, so that next to the original clefs was a strange and slightly stylized replica of the original grand staff. “Now notice how the Cs an octave above and below middle C mirror each other, and how everything else is organized around that resulting structure. What we have then is a simple method of organizing pitches that clearly revolves around C, with the staff lines and spaces forming the C major scale, just like the white keys of the piano keyboard... I know, I know, you learned this in grade school. My point is, it would seem that the whole system clearly revolves around a prime nucleus, that of concert middle C, and more broadly the key of C major, so then what happens when we discover, within the same system, another nucleus?”
*
Jacob sat at the great organ, the majesty of its keys and stops shining brilliantly in the crepuscular rays of the twilight hour. He glanced around the church, not a soul in sight. Then his eyes were drawn up to the broad stained-glass rose window above the front entrance, and the sun shining through its intricate patterns and shapes gave it an intoxicating glow that made all other thoughts in his mind dissolve. Although he knew, of course, that the window was an inanimate object, it gave off such an aura of life and beauty that it might as well have been alive, and as he stared at it for longer and longer, the spokes of the great centerpiece began, almost imperceptibly, to turn.
*
“Just like the grand staff, the piano keyboard displays a clear visual point of symmetry, but it’s not on middle C like you would think.” As he spoke, the professor began to sketch an overhead view of a piano’s keyboard. He took his time drawing a couple of octaves in block-cartoon style, and then drew two vertical lines down through the notes D and Ab.
“If you take a mirror and hold it at either of these two points, you will find that the rest of the keyboard reflects back as if the mirror weren't there. Therein lies a great mystery. It is widely assumed that the design of the keyboard was developed gradually, at one point having only the diatonic 'white' notes, and then over the years adding the other notes in between. If this is true and the ordering of black notes was subservient to the diatonic tuning of the white notes, how did we end up with this perfectly symmetrical layout? And why D and Ab? Is this a happy coincidence? Or is it evidence of a system that is just operating on a whole nother level? In other words, what came first, the raw mathematical phenomenon of the diatonic-chromatic system within nature, or the human invention of its physical manifestation on the staff and on instruments?” Jacob paused for a second and began to pace across the room. A breeze picked up outside, and the leaves of the sycamore tree by the window began to flutter in the blinding afternoon sun.
“So then I would like to posit this: maybe the development of our notation system signifies not the invention of something new by human minds, but rather the uncovering of a mathematically perfect natural phenomenon whose raw nature and potentiality has always existed, but could not always be seen. In this way it would be just like language, mathematics, the sciences, or any other system of rational thought, which use symbols to represent the “real” phenomena that exist out in the world, allowing us to make sense of things that are otherwise beyond our mind’s capacity... that world of symbols is beautiful, as long as you are aware that that’s what it is, just symbols.”
*
The scratch of pencil on urtext broke the silence in Jacob’s office. The glowing blue of winter evening hung placidly at the office window, and every now and then the sound of liberated youth could be heard echoing in the distance. Classes had just ended for Christmas vacation, so between marking papers and exams, the professor had some extra free time which he was using to dive into his own studies. He had just begun tackling the first Contrapunctus from J. S. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge (translated as The Art of Fugue), the set of pieces famously written while the composer was on his deathbed. Contrapuntal music like this always seemed like it was written for a group of singers, for there weren’t really any “chords” in the homogenous sense, and the melodic lines were so independent and conversational. When this kind of music was played by one musician alone, it required them to float above the music in their mind, looking down upon their imaginary singers and treating them each with equal attention.
The Art of Fugue begins with an unaccompanied eleven-note melody, called the subject, which serves as the principal theme for the entire opus. Essentially akin to the main character of a film, it is the constant entity throughout the work that comes in all sorts of permutations and contexts, but always remains recognizable. Sitting at the old Chickering piano in his office, Jacob stared at those first four bars, marveling at their glory. It was like the entirety of this magnum opus and all its eventual conclusions were contained as a microcosm in that tiny four-measure melody. Perhaps even more universal than that; perhaps the entirety of all existence and all the potentiality of life itself was contained in that tiny four-measure melody. It made him think of the “Ouroboros,” the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail, continuity, the infinite contained within one finite object. In fact, the melody even concluded with a downward scale leading back to the starting note again, as if these four bars could have been on a self-sufficient loop for eternity but instead decided against independent immortality in order to join the song and dance of life and death along with all the others; birth by the pen, death by the pen.
*
“As creative thinkers, if we are able to look across all systems of symbols, all domains of knowledge, and abstract their similar, equivalent components and contours, we can then begin to see what could be called a universal world of forms. Some would say that this universal world of forms is one step closer to the 'real' world, which is theoretically unknowable to us in its full purity but perhaps available for the viewing. Systems of symbols like language and knowledge are to the real world as flour is to the invisible man; if flour is poured on the invisible man then there is the possibility of seeing his shape and movement, but if you don’t step back far enough then all you will see is the flour. The linking of domains is useful because it allows us to take that step back and see the general contours of the real world that exist beyond knowledge, beyond language. It may also allow us to perceive new possible areas for exploration, or to find hidden solutions to both age-old and current problems. We will be examining the nature of this concept more in depth later this term, but I’m planting the seed in your heads now because I would like to demonstrate how this theory has come to have particular significance in my own research as of late.”
This was nothing new to the students, who were used to Jacob’s highly personal method of teaching, wherein any time he came up with some sort of new idea in his research, he would inject it into his lectures and explain it to the class in its simplest form. For Jacob, these little research updates had proven to be extremely fruitful, for they provided him with an opportunity to bounce his ideas off a crowd of intelligent minds who were in that great phase of being educated but not yet specialists, and often they would respond with either great questions or new thoughts on his ideas that contributed greatly to his work. There was also the added benefit that it showed his students how much they meant to him, that he valued their work and their minds.
Jacob wiped down the chalkboard with the grimy damp towel he brought to all of his classes, erasing the staves and keyboard diagram, and proceeded to scrawl out a list of words from top to bottom. When he got to the base of the chalkboard the professor grinned to himself, tossed the chalk-stick a few feet up in the air, grabbed it again and turned around to the whispering choir of ball-point pens. What the students saw on the board was this:
Blood
Rose
Wine
Cherry
Stop sign
Fire truck
“Alright, bear with me here… what I’ve been exploring is the ways in which symbols can be grouped logically into little lists. What we have here on the chalkboard is a list of items that are related together by a single property that is common to each of the items as individuals - 'redness'. There is no specific order, so you could say it is non-linear, and this list will reach its end once we have used up all the possible words in the english language that we determine to fit the given property. Jacob grabbed the wet towel and wiped the board down again. This time he worked from left to right, inscribing a series of numbers.
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, 48, 96, 192…
“Mathematical sequence. Just like our first list, there is a fixed property here as well. The difference is that in this list, the property does not determine the nature of the items as individuals, but instead determines the relationship of each item to its neighbor. Specifically, 2x=y. A linear sequence theoretically extends to infinity.” Wipe, wipe. Kfff, kfff.
“How about this one?” Jacob said, motioning toward the new list. A few whispers spread around the room, then a hand shot up from somewhere near the back, followed by a few others who were a little more tentative.
“Yes Kayla.” the professor pointed and nodded, excited but not jubilant.
“You changed one letter from each line to the next.”
“Indeed. This list could be seen as a non-linear sequence; just like the number list, the thing that ties it together is the relationship of each item to its immediate neighbor, but this time it isn't predictable. One more.”
Jacob grabbed his towel again and wiped the slate clean, then stood back for a minute. Students later said that in those few moments he appeared to enter into a deep trance, and the room felt quieter than before but simultaneously louder, for even the tiny creak of a seat was magnified to full volume. After a long puff of his pipe, Jacob approached the blackboard and drew a middle C like before and then, slowly but with no hesitation or pauses whatsoever, proceeded to follow it with a vertical list of items that seemed to drip from the tip of the chalk.
C
See
Eye
Horus
Sky
Blue
California
Star
Five
4
Three
Tree
Free
Sea
C
The professor stepped away from the blackboard and left a long pause, waiting for his students to process each of the links in the chain before them. When he spoke again, his voice contained a force that seemed to penetrate time itself, as though he was not simply addressing his audience of undergrads, but speaking through them to every entity that they would ever come in contact with.
“This is another non-linear sequence, but with a different method of connection. In this list, each word has been expanded into its limitless potential for meaning and connotation, and from this myriad one option has been selected, that which has determined the next word in the list. Its meaning relies on the reader’s knowledge and ability to think abstractly. It is at this point that we begin to see the latent potential of lists within the domain of artistic expression.”
*
Evening had turned to night in the little office on the fourth floor of the Purcell music building. The blue window was now black, and Jacob was buried in his studies. He had made plans to go for drinks with some of the other professors, but that wasn’t until around midnight; many of Jacob’s colleagues led surprisingly rambunctious social lives. The thing people tend to forget is that many professors become professors because they once enjoyed being students, and the thing about students is that… well, they drink. A few of the tenured professors here had even been members of certain special societies back in the day—you know, the ones that uphold drinking alcohol as a ritual of nearly sacramental significance. Jacob thought back to last year around the same time, when he had gone to the Irish pub on Bloor Street with Molly and Derek—English Literature and Sociology professors respectively—with the intention of getting one drink after class; that night they ended up at the Sigma Phi house doing shots on the floor. Oh well, perhaps it was a good idea to let loose every now and then to break up the monotony of routine; semel in anno licet insanire - once in a while one is allowed to go crazy!
*
“Repetition forms the undercurrent of all existence.”
Jacob scratched his head and looked at the class with a scrunched-up face, as if to say: trust me, it gets better. Attention was waning in some of the faces, and he knew that they were all longing to go out and enjoy the sun, the grass, the frisbees, the cold beer. He would end class early today; no sense in keeping them captive for the full time on a Friday when it was so beautiful out.
“Order and chaos are separated by one thing and one thing only; the presence of repetition or the lack thereof. Replication, duplication, copying, recurrence, call it what you like; it is absolutely necessary to the structure of human existence. Look at all the elements of our lives that are cyclical by nature; we follow in the footsteps of our parents and peers, find routines that work and stick to them, recreate ourselves through procreation, and so on. We are only able to reproduce what we already know, or as Mark Twain eloquently put, ‘no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often’. But exact repetition is only possible in theory, not in real life. Instead, what seems to happen is that whenever something is repeated, the newest iteration adjusts itself ever so slightly to best fit its environment, so that over the course of many so-called replications we begin to see overarching patterns of change and transformation. I believe that this forms the essential pattern and structure of all the processes around us.
“So then you may be saying to yourself: 'how can you still call it repetition when it’s not exactly the same from one step to the next? Doesn't that go against the very definition of repetition?' ... but see, repetition is only a word. Moreover, it is a word with vague predicates but, like most other such words, people nonetheless unconsciously think of it as having fixed predicates. Take for example the famous sorites paradox; if a heap were reduced by a single grain at a time, at what exact point would it cease to be considered a heap? There is of course no answer, it simply illustrates the limits of language's function to process, categorize, and classify the matter we come in contact with. There are many things out there that fall in between known human classifications, and that’s where the fun begins. Maybe repetition is a broader category than we thought, and I'm okay with that. I don't know about you folks, but I don't want to live in a world where my only two options are to circulate endlessly in an unchanging loop or jump into the abyss of complete nihilism. Right at the very edge of repetition, that's where the narrow and tottering bridge lies.”
*
Idea! Jacob sat down and tore a page off from a large book of manuscript paper, then grabbed a pen from the holder on his desk. On the first line of the manuscript paper, Jacob copied note-for-note Bach's subject from the beginning of The Art of Fugue. Then he put down his pen and reached for his pipe, lighting up and filling the room with swirls and clouds. Staring through the haze at the black ink on the page, the professor played a little brain-game; he singled out the first note and moved it around in his mind’s eye to all the possible pitches of the chromatic scale, seeing if any of the options caught his attention. He did the same thing with each and every note of the phrase until he came upon something he liked; moving the second note up one semitone from A to B-flat. Yes, he liked that very much, he thought while breathing in the sweet cherry taste of tobacco, and wrote out the new variation on the second line of the page.
The professor sat like that all night churning out lines of music, transforming the Bach subject into completely new and unrecognizable phrases, getting further and further away from the original with each line he wrote. At first it had taken a long process of deliberation in order to produce each new line, but after a few pages like this he began to notice himself running through the permutations and selecting them faster, and a natural flow took over. Jacob had completely forgotten about his social plans, and by 5 o’clock into the next morning the professor was so exhausted that his head drooped down smoothly onto his arm and he fell into a deep sleep.
*
“One of the very few visual artists ever to use transformative repetition in their work was the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, whose visits to the Alhambra in Spain inspired experiments with tessellation and the discovery that such repetitious patterns could be manipulated and transformed over a stretch of space. This seemingly simple innovation is a bigger deal than most artists think; Escher took a concept that was thought to be static by nature and displayed that it was capable of immense dynamicity, representing a new dimension within the picture plane akin to Filipo Bruneleschi’s introduction of linear perspective in the 15th century.
“So too can we find little hints of this concept within the history of music. The process music of composers such as Elliott Carter, Steve Reich, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Terry Riley were fundamental in bringing to light the concept of sounds manipulating themselves within a composition. Steve Reich’s experiments with phasing, for example “It’s Gonna Rain” from 1965, employed single linear transformations from beginning to end using length or tempo as the prime source of metamorphosis, and showed how music can display a similar effect to Escher’s tessellations, namely a new spatial dimension that shows its contour over the course of many repetitions.
“A more recent example of a similar linear approach is William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, which employ short repeated pieces of material that degrade slightly in quality upon each repetition, eventually ending up mutilated and, well... disintegrated. Reich's work in this domain seems more calculated and unnatural than Basinski's, but of course Reich was creating his phasing pieces in a time when the language of short loops hadn't really come into mainstream society yet. By the time Basinski released The Disintegration Loops, the world had already absorbed the sound of the short loop through hip-hop among other genres, so it was a natural play on our familiarities... and that's just a general truism; attaining a high level of manipulation and artistic freedom with any set of materials first requires those materials to be heavily integrated into the unconscious. We can only work with the materials we have grown accustomed to, and we can only manipulate the materials we have ceased to be aware of. The medium of the musical loop has finally gotten to a point now where it has become unconscious in the mainstream, and I predict that we are now entering an era in which manipulation of the loop will take on unprecedented levels.
“One way of looking at the development of western music in the 20th and 21st centuries is by tracking the progressive shortening of the song cycle, from the 32-bar repeating forms of the American Songbook all the way to the one-bar loops of modern electronic music and hip-hop. Unlike most of my colleagues, I do not see this trend as a degradation in quality or sophistication, because as those cycles get shorter, the level of manipulation and ingenuity with which they can be combined gets progressively enhanced. It’s a beautiful meeting of opposing forces that jazz musicians have been tapping into for decades when they improvise on formal structures... not without its challenges of course.” Jacob looked out the window and let out a little laugh.
“See, when a jazz musician plays a standard tune, they are confronted by a highly structured, demarcated sequence of chords, rhythms, and melodies. This restrictive structure, along with the tropes and clichés of the tradition, provide the musician with years of work just to get to the point where they can uphold those structures and make it sound like ‘Jazz’. But this side of the music alone, unmet with the cry of the rebel, only represents chains, incarceration... and I’ve seen many great young musicians fall into existential despair from this type of unbalance. Many people forget that jazz isn't just about virtuosity, intellect and sophistication; nor is it about pure emotion; other musics have those things. Jazz is about the triumph of freedom over oppression, and the true challenge of the jazz musician is to be aware of the static patterns but confront them, transcend them to create a self-sufficient experience that screams ‘NOW!’ and brings the whole room together in collective celebration of the dynamic quality of life.
“Many jazz musicians today make incredible art pushing the boundaries of how independent and flexible they can be on old song forms; others have abandoned form entirely, preferring to play with no set structure in place; still others write fresh new tunes with fresh new forms that never repeat once from beginning to end. But there are only a select few instances I can think of where jazz musicians have taken a looping form and made a permanent adjustment to the very structure of it in real time during a performance. You know who is doing that though? DJs. Many of them have even managed to tear down the very notion that musical form is necessarily linear, instead presenting a micro loop as an isolated object in the present tense, sculpting and adjusting it for hours at a time. DJs, of course, have the advantage of being able to float above entire albums and eras of music, all at the tips of their fingers... but maybe musicians could do the same thing, just in their minds. Maybe the world has entered a whole new dimension of music making, and maybe this new dimension will be music's linear perspective. But this does not mean that we have even begun to exhaust the mysteries and potentialities of middle C.” Jacob smiled and grabbed the dirty old towel from his shoulder as he walked over to the blackboard; that was enough for today.
“Alright get outta here you hooligans, there's fun out there to be had! Next week we're getting into rhythmic illusion, and we'll be discussing your in-class writing prompts from last week.”
*
Jacob sat in front of the great organ, just barely able to make out the majesty of its keys and stops. It must be late, he thought. He glanced around the blackened church, not a soul in sight. His eyes were drawn up to the large stained-glass rose window above the front entrance, the moon shining through its intricate patterns and shapes. Although he knew, of course, that the window was an inanimate object, it gave off such an aura of life and beauty that it might as well have been alive. And as he stared at it for longer and longer, the spokes of the great centerpiece began, almost imperceptibly, to turn.
His gaze wandered back to the organ and he was surprised to see that his hands were resting on the keys, ready to play. Jacob observed the position of his fingers. F-C-G in the left hand, D-A-E in the right, all fifths from bottom to top. This was a chord that Jacob had come across before in his research, one often alluded to in ancient alchemical texts... The Brazen Harmony, said to pulsate in its overtone beats and conjure up voices. He drew in a meditative breath and let go, fingers sinking down through the instrument to coax out its heavenly sound. But no sound came; instead, a white dot of light appeared directly in the center of his vision, making everything around it blurry and indistinct. He tried to remove his hands from the keys of the organ but he couldn't, they were frozen in place. He closed his eyes but the glowing dot was still there, brighter. And although Jacob had never before in his life been so terrified as in that moment sitting in front of the organ with the white-hot sun burning in his own brain, he was also profoundly moved and became strangely relaxed, watching as the tension in his muscles dissolved like butter in a hot frying pan. A tingling sensation flowed through his legs and they became mobile... hmm. With both hands still firmly glued to the instrument, Jacob began testing the waters of his peculiar situation. With his left foot, he struck the Bb pedal, extending the stack of fifths he was holding on the keys from six notes to seven, and immediately the white light responded: it grew and began to turn clockwise, textures appearing on its surface like flowing water. One after another, Jacob stomped down on different pedals with his feet, each one changing the glowing light in various subtle ways—some in color, some in shape, some in size. With each musical adjustment he was drawn further and further into the light until he was no longer aware of anything else, just the furious maelstrom of blinding rapids spinning and transforming itself around him. And when Jacob could no longer feel where his body ended and his surroundings began, that’s when he began to see into the far depths of the vortex. He channelled all his visual focus directly into the eye of the great whirl, and it responded by drawing him still further into its embrace, and the sheer expansiveness of the whirl became clear, and the rotation of its form slowed to a quiet hum. Just then, he felt his foot slip off the pedal and everything went black.
*
AWAKE. Jacob could barely open his eyes his office was so bright, coated in a layer of solid gold glinting in the midday sun. He raised his head from the desk, and...oh! A pain shot from his shoulder up through the side of his neck—it had been a long time since the professor had last fallen asleep in his office, for good reason. He looked down at the scattered stack of manuscript paper before him and remembered his discovery from the night before. Pages and pages of ink lay before him, the first few hundred bars of an infinite journey into the unknown.
Duval Timothy’s latest is a collection of deft and delicate piano compositions, alternately mournful and freewheeling. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 14, 2017
