Orfeo

I did what they say I tried to do. Guilty as charged.

Orfeo is my first Richard Powers book, so I can't add to the conversation about whether this was actually (as some claim) an attempt to bring his (apparently arcane) ideas about art and science to the masses in a more accessible form than previously, but as a stand-alone reading experience, I found it to be intriguing and enlightening and touching.

Peter Els is a 70-year-old avant-garde composer, retired adjunct professor of music, self-taught geneticist, and lonely old man. When his dog Fidelio dies and Els panics and dials 911, the responding officers take one look at the beakers and petri dishes in his house and alert Homeland Security to the potential biothreat (this is loosely based on the real life nightmare of artist Steve Kurtz). When Els sees the hazmatted authorities swarming his house, he goes on the run, revisiting important places and people, and recalling his life; as the tabloid-driven media makes him story number one; dubbing him the "Bioterrorist Bach".

To Els, music and chemistry were each other’s long-lost twins: mixtures and modulations, spectral harmonies and harmonic spectroscopy. The structures of long polymers reminded him of intricate Webern variations. The outlandish probability fields of atomic orbitals -- barbells, donuts, spheres -- felt like the units of an avant-garde notation. The formulas of physical chemistry struck him as intricate and divine compositions.

As the story dips and dives between the present and the past, one thing is easy to see: Peter Els, although passionate and likely a genius, is remarkably weak-willed: as a boy, he took up the clarinet to please his father; although his musical tastes led him to Mozart, his first girlfriend was able to convert him to her favourite composer, the more modern Mahler; he wanted to study music at college but took chemistry to please his family, and then switched back to composition in grad school at the urging of the woman he would eventually marry; although he had always loved conventionally beautiful music, that was trained out of him by his ultra-modern professors (think Yoko Ono); and at several key points in his life, Els allowed his best friend -- a manic performance art choreographer -- to spiritually kidnap him and influence (even hijack) his work and life. The life-long struggle to create -- or to discover -- music of lasting impact led Els to attempt to implant a musical passage into the DNA of a common bacteria, and this final act of free will might prove why he was better not left to his own devices.

Orfeo is more the story of music than of science (and not actually a thriller, even if it's marketed that way), and as someone without any training in music theory, I appreciated that it was neither dumbed down for me or completely over my head. I could follow this and found it lovely:

Voices unfold above the driving vibes. Their intervals cycle through clashing dissonance. The collisions start to sound like a requiem for the millenium-long search for novel harmonies, a search now done. The sounds could be an elegy for those scant ten centuries when chant became melody, melody blossomed into harmony, and harmony pushed outward in ever more daring border raids on the forbidden. This innovative phasing piece, collapsing back into ars antiqua. Organum again: the sound of possibility, after the map of the possible is all filled in.

And Orfeo is also a social commentary, relating the stories of Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” (written and performed in a German POW camp) and Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (the subversive response to Stalin’s criticism). In mid-career, Els wrote an opera (The Fowler’s Snare, about the 1534 siege of Münster) which eerily presaged the ATF's siege of the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, and as security fears grew in America after the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11, as Els ran, he now found himself the modern target of such a government siege; knowing that every cellphone call or CC videocamera spotting could tighten the noose around his own neck. It's interesting that the same computers that can run a program like Sibelius -- that score and play compositions -- can also be used to run a home laboratory: the distance between art and science is narrowed as both disciplines are put into the hands of amateurs. (And isn't it wonderful that these same computers can put us instantly in touch with the unfamiliar works of the cited composers?)

To call any music subversive, to say that a set of pitches and rhythms could pose a threat to real power…ludicrous. And yet, from Plato to Pyongyang, that endless need to legislate sounds. To police the harmonic possibilities as if there were no limit to music's threat.

Despite the long passages about the history and mechanics of music, Orfeo is at its core a very human story: after a long life spent in the pursuit of his craft -- after a career spent composing songs that no one wanted to hear -- Els learns too late that art is not more important than love. This is a much more friendly read than some of the other meditations on art that made it to this year's Man Booker Prize longlist, and I refuse to think of that as a failing.

I was after the kind of music that reminds the brain what it felt like, back when we lived forever.

I wanted a piece that would say what this place would sound like long after we're gone.

I'm sure I'm just a philistine but the only place this book lost me was when Els abandoned his own musical visions and embraced the experimental. I've been listening to some John Cage, and while it's interesting and unfamiliar, even Cage doesn't go as far as the composers written about in Orfeo -- this is really more Yoko Ono, with 12 hour long performances that have random people banging on pipes and improvising with found instruments, and is this music (this isn't like Stomp but totally random)? If Els mentions that mathematics is the music of the spheres, doesn't that mean that music should follow some rules? I understand the pleasurable frission that the listener gets from minor chords and unexpected harmonies, but if true dissonance is the goal of a composition, isn't that the same as saying that 2+2=7 and declaring it art?

There's a place Els has been to, a few times in this life. A place free of the dream of security, where the soul beats to everything of a rhythm. And every one of his few visits there has reminded him: We're entitled to nothing, and soon to inherit. We're free to be lost, free to shine, free to cut loose, free to drown. But part of a harmony beyond the ear, and able, for a moment, to move.

I also need to mention that, perhaps, the DIY geneticist is a bioterrorist -- I don't think Els was a freedom fighter so much as a hubris-filled man tinkering in the domain of the gods; and maybe that's just because the tabloid-fueled media has Ebola front of mind right now (but, really, isn't it scary to think of all the unabombers out there custom-ordering genetic sequences over the internet?).

I'll need to read some more Richard Powers (forewarned that he's usually more dense than this); what a pity that Orfeo hadn't made it to the Booker shortlist.