Orfeo: A Novel

When I put this book down at the end my first reaction was:

Wow. That was something.

Richard Powers knows how to write expansive, subject-throttling novels. Richard Powers knows how to write beautiful sentences. But most of all, Richard Powers knows how to take a subject (here, music) and dive deeply into it; so deeply, as a matter of opinion, that the subject itself becomes the main character of the novel. Is that a good place for a novel, and you as a reader, to be? I'm not so sure, on both accounts. But this is how the man writes. Beautiful writing layered on top of his top-notch research into a subject layered over characters who serve the purpose of what he means to say. (The only other Richard Powers novel I've read was written the same way. In The Echo Maker the main character was brain damage.)

So. Orfeo tells two stories. Really, though, three stories. We go back and forth in time (Get it? Back and forth. Music. In time.) to follow the story of avant-garde composer Peter Els. Present-day Peter has gotten into trouble over his home bio lab with Homeland Security and hits the road (but it takes half the novel for him to do this). In Past Peter's story we learn how he came to be. The "third story" here is music. As you read you'll want to have your laptop/desktop handy, because this is a Richard Powers novel, and you'll need/want to google some term or some name or some event every other page or so. Or, just go along for the ride. (I find that I tire of googling as I'm reading a Powers novel after about page 300. Especially when the name-dropping becomes carpet bombing. At one point in the text there were at least ten names of modern, avant-garde composers lumped one after the other, and I got tired after looking up the second one. It didn't enrich my reading, it irritated it. And I don't get it because I've given up. Because I'm at the point where I'm not sure it really matters.)

This novel is rich. Rich writing, rich storytelling, rich subject matter. And it's a lovely read. Yet. Yet. For all the life he gives his sentences, his plot and characters seem somehow (a bit) lifeless and used merely to press home his points.

I still very much enjoyed this work, though. It was a pleasure to read, and an engaging read. I've found new great music to enjoy, and another Richard Powers book to recommend. Just know what you're getting yourself into. Get your search engine ready....

Got as far as page 72 when these lines made me finally toss the book aside in disgust:
"When he pulled up to Crystal Brook Park, the predawn sky was beginning to peach. Someone in the throes of early womanhood was already out jogging on the macadam loop. Wildflowers covered the ground, their colors soft in the sentinel light..."

This passage all by itself isn't so terrible, but the book is rife with annoying self-conscious stylistic tricks that distract from the (glacial) plot development and (not credible) characters. Using peach as a verb is the kind of twee choice that earns pats in creative writing workshops. Then there's the overcooked "someone in the throes of early womanhood" instead of simply "a young woman," quickly followed by the vaguely poetic but imprecise "colors soft in the sentinel light." Even "macadam" rankles.

In jazz circles they say, "If you're thinking, you're stinking," meaning too much conscious thought can get in the way of natural playing. On page after page the strain of the author's effort shows through.

OK, so the writing is awkward; what about the story? What I know from as far as I got:

Old white guy, middle class, a musical genius with a penchant for chemistry, which he sees as analogous to the orders of tones and scales (and which extended metaphor gets stretched and teased out for pages), has a musical prodigy dog that dies while the guy is dabbling with DNA or something in his home genetics lab. OK. And then the cops come and we get a sense that complications will arise, but before they do we are treated to loads of flashback exposition which is standard literary fiction formula these days: some historical keynotes to set the mood (Russia tests A-bomb), a childhood trauma set against picturesque backdrop, highly cinematic first sex, angsty heartbreak, etc. Check, check, check.... None of which really adds up to meaningful character development; that hole is attempted to be filled with rambling disquisitions of our hero's ruminations on music, some of which are interesting as grace notes but don't foster any identification with the protagonist.

I'm biased. I like stories about ordinary people placed in exceptional circumstances, whereas the trend now is for stories about exceptional people in ordinary circumstances whose challenges are the result of their own choices and compulsions. I think of Steinbeck and Vonnegut, how their stories relate characters to their cultures to examine how society works for or against individuals. Today's literary fiction offers token splashes of historicity and social context (usually by dropping in some fleeting pop culture references), but the characters exist in bubbles of their own solipsism and obsessions.

I suppose that in itself is a true reflection of the culture at large. Alas.

Nice, pretty, smart use of language, but what university-trained MFA-type writer can't do that nowadays? Pure Emperor's New Clothes here. There's nothing here. Nothing. Let me be clear: No Thing.

In a delightful irony (which the author and his editors missed, otherwise this would never have been published), for all the talk of music here, you can hear none. That's right, just as the protagonist Peter Els spends his life trying (and failing) to make the world hear the music he supposedly hears in his head, the author Powers fails to make the reader hear even one note. There is no music here. This is pretentious crap. A waste of a reader's time. Better to buy a set of Mozart piano concertos (Nos. 17-25, for example) and really listen to music that will move you.

This junk gets published and praised by "intellectual", "literary" critics, simply because of Powers' pedigree, and first novelists with no pedigree but with a rare gem of a story ABOUT SOMETHING can't even get a response from anyone in the "Orfeo-prejudice" publishing industry....now that's some discordant music to my ears, all right, and, like John Cage's junk compositions (and Powers' as well, in words), it's a screeching, unpleasant, ugly sound.

I repeat: Save your money and buy those Mozart piano concertos. Life, even at Els' seventy years, is too short for this kind of meaningless, nihilistic fool's gold.

Even as a very young child, I was moved by music. My parents had commented on more than one occasion about how I would grow quiet and wide-eyed over a song on the car radio (strangely, my sister's response to music was usually indifference). In my teens, since I knew I hadn't experienced a very wide landscape of music at home, I would check out stacks of scratchy LPs from the public library in earnest attempts to know classical music and jazz.

Richard Powers knows this ability of music to plunge us deeply into ourselves or pull us into cosmic mystery. As music engages our minds and emotions, he asks: "How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?" In fact, Powers' intricate knowledge of musical elements, structures, and history along with his expressive powers makes him one of the finest writers on musical experience that I've ever encountered. The section on Messaien's "Quartet for the End of Time" is just phenomenal writing.

Powers has been criticized for a lack of cohesion between the intellectual subjects of his novels and the development of his characters. And yes, in "The Echo Maker" for example, he sometimes drifts into essay mode with a narrative toehold only saved by the beauty of his writing. "Orfeo", in my opinion, finds just the right balance. It's deeply satisfying as a story, wonderfully depicting a man obsessed with the power of music and the strength of his creative talents, as well as being a novel full of ideas about music theory, history, creativity, and science.

There is nothing pedantic about Powers. He's not out to teach as much as to let the excitement of ideas contribute to the complex flavor of the book. I literally learned remarkable things from "Orfeo"while being completely involved with dual plots which gradually move the main character's past to his present. Without question this is one of the best and most enriching books I've read in a long time.

This was my first experience with Powers, and with this book finished I am compelled to take up his latest very soon. Perhaps a bit of a break to a different style, but I will be following this promise up in the near future.

This novel has the bravado of taking us through a significant portion of mid 20th to 21st century US history through a lens of musical theory, as it follows a composer named Els, an avant-garde composer who for the most part rejects a lot of the typical avenues for composers due to his inner demons and his embrace of pure musical ideals as opposed to popularity or salesmanship. We run through the rather standard gamut of historical benchmarks – Cuban missile crisis, JFK assassination, Koresh and of course 911 – as moments intertwine with Els’s own aesthetic development. The novel frames itself towards the end, where Els calls emergency services over the death of his dog and as a result has his amateur chemistry and DNA lab discovered. From there, we take steps backwards as Els deals with his current predicament, and around we go. The deeper motivation for his home made biological research is an easy grasp, so I wasn’t thrilled how long Powers took to finally get to it, but his results make this delay very forgivable.

Powers structures his book quite well, with factors along the way becoming pertinent to its ultimate development. However, the bravado of this book is what ultimately kept me from embracing it wholeheartedly. Some of the passages on musical theory just become a bear to read, in particular the passages on Olivier Messiaen and Dimitri Shostakovich. Again, stuff that is very pertinent to the general development of the book and of its protagonist, but I must admit to coming across passages where my right hand waved ‘come on, come on,’ and I simply wasn’t eager to get through Powers’s own (quite thorough) knowledge of his subject matter. Almost as though the bar he set for himself for the book was something he just couldn’t live up to throughout, but of course felt compelled to try every step of the way. There were also times where I felt he was similarly boxed in by his own use of language. One passage in particular, I remember thinking how redundant his references to the relationship between the characters got. These particulars are what primarily snapped me out of the dream that is otherwise very confidently drawn up by this author, well enough that as I said before I am eager to try him out again, so in all the book has a lot going for it and I would still recommend it, even though I myself had to skim at moments to keep my interest alive and let him pull it all back together for me by the end.

“Orfeo” is a master class on so non-verbal a subject as listening to classical music of the 20th and 21st centuries. lt's wrapped in a story of a retired music professor/bio-hacker sought be the authorities as a bio-terrorist for attempting to encode musical notation into a genome. Got that? Think theme-and-variation meets genetic mutation. Now stitch it together with Powers’ own interpretation of some landmark 20th Century works complete with a discography at the back of the book. With the assistance of music streaming services, you can listen while you read Powers’ virtuoso analysis. "Orfeo" may not be for everyone, but for me it's everything I want in a novel.

I've never read a book so in tune with what a musician feels, what he or she sees, when playing symbols from a page, contrasting the diaphragm, sounding the notes which would set angels to attention. I've never read a book that says what it means to love music, to be enthralled with every passage of sound in one's life. And never have I read a book that contains in its pages its own soundtrack. But it's here...

I don't think I have to say that any musician will love this book, as the division between someone who simply listens to music while jogging or cruising down the block and the person who hears the music, the notes fill up every corner of the air around him, has never been so aptly described. I have often said that Mozart or Beethoven would weep and render their clothes asunder if they knew that their most famous works are now used as cell phone tones, heard in grocery stores as an irritant, rather than praises to God, or messages to Life, Death, and Time itself. I want to grab the earplugs of the people around me and yank them out, saying, "Listen!! The music is all around you." Would they miss the trumpets of Gabriel for the autotuned babble of One Direction?

But this book contains all this, and a story as well. It is the story of Peter Els, a prodigy child musician (on the Clarinet, no less), and an outcast from the rest of the social order, as he spends his time listening to music and seeing inside of the notes what Kant would have called the Noumenal World. He sees the notes as the pure Forms, outside the cave, that other people can but dance to, shake their hips and gyrate. (No, I see nothing of this person in me at all..............) He sees in mathematics the numerical order of the musical world, and in Chemistry, the underlying tones of the Universe.

But, alas, he is torn to choose between chasing after standing on the mountaintops and gazing out at Paradise and real life, love of a woman, and the constant pressures to understand to his professors' ideas of music theory in the Twentieth Century. The book transitions back and forth between his life story, his past, the events of the 1940's on (reaching the present), and the point where the story begins, where FBI agents raid his home after finding potentially deadly homegrown bacteria.

Els becomes, perhaps, a mirror of Willie Loman, as well as the defiant character found in Faustian legend. All bound together in a work of literature that may not ever get the acclaim it deserves.

I say this because a reader who is not a musician probably will have little patience with the verbal description of long works of music composition. The reader will tire of little plot in the present and too much back story. A reader not familiar with Post-Modern literature will not understand that the journey throughout the book, in time and mind, is the story worth telling.

I've told my own story about singing, about belting notes in my car, where no one could hear, of singing Art Garfunkel's "Skywriter" in the grocery store parking lot, late at night (and this was before the days of iPods and mp3 players, where every bagger is totally deaf to anything going on around them because they're too busy listening to the rot in their brains.) I've told why, even though, to my parents, I had a great voice, but never used it. And I feel a kinship with Peter Els. The last thing he wanted to do was to actually publish a work, and he hated every time he did it. To face the criticism of the expression of the Music of the Spheres as Peter heard them, I wouldn't want to publish them either, but rather hold them close to my chest and hear the notes late at night, rotating around my room, illuminated by the lamp post outside.

I read Orfeo over the summer and felt as if I had feasted on caviar. Vintage Powers: an epic horizon, a tangle of crisscrossing, zeitgeisty story lines, and in recounting a composer’s life the most perceptive writing on music imaginable.

I had to give it a rest before I could pen my thoughts into a review. And then I happened to take on Hallelujah Junction, the autobiography of America’s best known living composer, John Adams (published in 2008). The two books echoed of each other. Powers has referred to multiple sources in writing Orfeo but not too Adams’ autobiography. Still, I’m convinced that Powers read it and used it as the scaffolding for his novel. Here I’ve uncoiled Orfeo’s fractured narrative, synchronized its protagonist’s life with the biography of John Adams and filled in some music history gaps.

Orfeo’s main character is Peter Clement Els, born in 1941, who lived through a chequered career as a modernist composer. Adams’ and Els’ biographies throw up superficial symmetries: both start their musical journey by studying the clarinet, both marry and divorce before their artistic maturity, an avant garde theatre director has an important influence on their artistic development (Peter Sellars for Adams, Richard Bonner for Els).

More important is the parallelism in the vectors of their composing lives. To appreciate that we need to reiterate the complicated predicament faced by post-war composers. Els puts it like this: „ … an eight-year old who heard Schumann’s Scenes of Childhood in the year it was published could, at seventy-five, have attended the premiere of Mahler’s Songs on the Death of Children. From the spring of Romanticism to Modernist winter in one life. That was the curse of literacy: Once you started to write music down, the game was half over. Notation touched off a rush to uncover every trick hiding out in the rules of harmony. Ten short centuries had burned through all available innovations, each more fleeting than the last. The accelerating vehicle would one day have to hit the wall, and it was Els’s luck to be alive at the moment of the smash-up.”

Roughly in the middle of that seventy-five year time interval 1838-1904 there was the earthquake of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (1865). The famous Tristan chord, unstable and vagrant, started to dig the grave of the functional harmony that underpinned four hundred years of Western music. Harmony’s ability to sustain large scale musical structures unravelled and the quest was on to find something, anything that could usurp that architectural role.

Another momentous occasion in that same period was the invention of the phonograph, in 1877. The device captured and replayed sounds and noises of all sorts, thereby expanding the sonic field for aesthetic appreciation. It also naturalized voice and music, revealing them simply as vibrations that could be rendered by a machine.

The result of these developments was a process of increasing musical abstraction, both towards the super-representational (pure form) and the sub-representational (pure sensory experience).

The modernist winter didn’t by any means end with Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Within five years Schoenberg wrote a piece as Klangfarbenmelodie and Bartok was first to employ a group of twelve notes consciously for a structural purpose. Eventually the twelve-tone technique would replace the structural force of tonality by the ordering power of increased motivic coherence. It led to the serialist orthodoxy of the post-war avant-garde. Composers gathered in a stern, isolated brotherhood that seemed to have as its only purpose to chase audiences out of concert halls. John Cage didn’t buy into the serialist credo, but developed an activist practice of music composition and performance in worship of chance and pure sound.

Even today most people wouldn’t recognize what emerged from these arcane compositional strategies as music. That was the ‚smash up’, the aporia evoked by Peter Els: the frantic rush of modernist experimentation had reduced the space for novel compositional strategies to nil. There was nothing left to discover. Concurrently it led many protagonists to doubt whether this flight forward into abstraction and emotional deficit would ever provide a long-term future for music.

The predicament faced by the young post-war composer has been fittingly captured by the British musician and musicologist Thurston Dart: „The eighteenth century musician was taught to see the whole of musical history as a hill rising gently and undulatingly out of darkness, with the music of his own time standing on the sunlit summit; the modern musician is encouraged to view it as a rather alarming slope, studded like Eastern Island with titanic heads, far larger than life. And he may have an uneasy suspicion that the slope is a downward one, and that the noisy and polemical modernists who lead the way are, like the maiden in one of Ernest Bramah’s incomparable stories, uttering loud and continuous cries to conceal the direction of their flight.”

John Adams’ autobiography Hallelujah Junction is an eloquent evocation of a personal struggle to find his own voice in this tangle. Initially he surrendered to a youthful infatuation with avant-garde experiment, particularly inspired by Cage and very often involving electronically generated sounds. The work challenged him intellectually but left him emotionally starved.

Peter Els in Powers’ Orfeo faces a similar quandary: „Art was combat, an exhausting struggle. And it was impossible to stay fit for long. Music wasn’t about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war of taste.” Much of Els’ early years are spent waging this battle, driving him into ever more arcane corners of the sonic universe.

Eventually it is love that pulls both composers, the real and the imagined, back into tonality’s gravitational field. Adams’ epiphany came in 1976 driving his car through the foothills of the Sierras whilst listening to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. That day it dawned on him that he had to embrace the power of tonal harmony if he wanted to build expressive, large scale musical structures. He tells the story as follows: „ … this music, especially the quiet opening bars of Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey, with its graceful leaps of sixths and sevenths and soft cushions of string chords, spoke to me. I said out loud, almost without thinking, „He cares.” I was puzzled by my own statement. Who „cares”? Evidently Wagner. „What does he care about?” That was harder to answer. I was experiencing an intuition not so much about Wagner as about myself and the nature of my relationship to music.”

In Orfeo this caring reflex is played out in a different register. It’s the love for his five-year old daughter Sara that sets Peter Els on a course back to old tonal pleasures. „In the wilds of stay-at-home fatherhood, music changes.” A new style of composing makes itself felt, „a middle path between romantic indulgence and sterile algorithms, between the grip of the past and the cult of progress.” Obviously we can’t listen to Els’ piece for piano, clarinet, theremin, and soprano to words from Kafka’s The Great Wall of China, but Powers describes it as consisting of regions of mutating rhythmic fragments dominated by fixed intervals, constantly cycled and transposed.” A description that seems to add up to the Minimalism initially adopted by John Adams in his re-appropriation of the pleasure principle in music.

As Els grapples with his own voice as a composer his life falls apart. Eventually he withdraws to a New Hampshire cabin where he continues to compose whilst living simply and earning a little money as a handyman. His music „abandoned all pretense of system. He fell back on a diversity that bordered on plagiarism. (…) Minimalist, with maximal yearnings. He layered ecstatic melodies over driving syncopations, as if something unparalleled were coming right around the corner.” We can imagine Els writing the kind of „virtuoso kitsch” - no disrespect intended - that has emerged over the last decades from John Adams’ studio (think Grand Pianolo Music, the Chamber Symphony, or The Dharma at Big Sur for that matter).

Iconoclast Bonner, with a commission for a grand opera in his pocket, smokes Els out of his reclusive life. This will be the protagonist’s magnum opus: an epic tale about a late medieval city that proclaims itself city of God and perishes in that fateful search for transcendence, backed up by a score of 170 minutes of ecstatic music. Powers’ scene by scene description of this imaginary masterpiece is jaw dropping and rivals Adrian Leverkühn’s fabulated oeuvre in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (and the latter had Adorno at his side to take care of the musical technicalities). But just as Els’ opera is about to go live, April 1993, hundreds of American law enforcement agents move to end the 2-month siege of the Mount Carmel Center near Waco, Texas. 76 Branch Davidians, including two dozen children, do not leave the compound alive. Peter Els’ „three-hour exercise in transcendence got dragged into the shit-storm of human events.” The eery synchronicity between the Waco tragedy and the premiere of his opera shakes Els to the bone. After an initial round of performances he withdraws the work and ceases composing.

The uneasy intersection between opera and traumatic real life events provides another fascinating parallel here with John Adams’ life story. Late in the 1980s Peter Sellars approached Adams with an idea to write an opera on the 1985 hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front. One of the passengers, wheelchair-bound Jewish-American Leon Klinghoffer, perished into the Mediterranean. To this very day The Death of Klinghoffer has remained a contentious piece because of its alleged anti-semitism. Since the 9/11 attacks the controversy has only deepened.

Now Els’ and Adams’ stories begin to fundamentally diverge. John Adams continues to compose, straight through all the artistic and existential turmoil, refining and deepening his artistic ethos. For Els, however, there is a long hiatus. He retreats into the sustainable oblivion of a teaching life. The crushing routine of assistant professorship purges him of any artistic ambition. It suits him well. Occasionally he enjoys the insouciance with which the most gifted and zealous of his students colonize the sonic universe. For two years Els listens to nothing but Bach. Meanwhile he ponders the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?

The creative stasis is a prelude to an esoteric yet familiar coda in his life’s home key. In the fall of 2009 the mute composer has a quiet epiphany whilst walking his dog Fidelio: „Els watched a wet oak leaf fly through the air and stick to his windbreaker. He peeled it free, studied its surface, and saw rhythms inscribed in the branching veins. He sat down, a little dazed, on a boulder at the side of the path. His hand grazed the rock’s surface, and the pits played pitches like a piano roll on his skin. He looked up: music floated across the sky in cloud banks, and songs skittered in twigs down the staggered shingles of a nearby roof. All around him, a massive, secret chorus written in extended alternate notation lay ripe for transcribing. His own music had no corner on obscurity. Almost every tune that the world had to offer would forever be heard by almost no one. And that fact gladdened him more than anything else he’d ever written.”

Two things come into play here: the abundance of potential isomorphisms between the natural world and the universe of sound, and because of that abundance, the futility of the act of transcription of one into the other. Els is struck by the fragile beauty of this „music for forever and for no one …” And so the idea is born to compose his own Song of the Earth in a weird experiment of reverse engineering. Rather than to transcribe what nature offers aplenty, Els comes to think of writing into the fabric of life a composition of his own. Turn the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale into DNA’s four letter alphabet of nucleotides, inscribe this sequence into the genome of a bacterium and that’s that. „No storage medium longer-lasting than life. (…) You’d have to allow for the slow drift of mutation that reworked every genome. But that endless change in musical message would be more like a feature than a bug … he might send a tune abroad again, into the very distant future, unheard, unknown, everywhere. Music for the end of time.” Here the faustian hubris of the innovator meets the humility of the wizened master hand.

And then, just as the project is taking flight: a door ajar, a peek of two police officers in the composer’s home laboratory sets, a frantic hunt across America for the „Bioterrorist Bach”.

Problem is I just don't like this author's writing. Not one bit.

After reading Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance and hating it, the friend who gave me that gave me this book (figuring that I would like it better than the other because it's got 'terrorism' in it.)

Music and bio terrorism. What a unique blend. Actually a ludicrous blend, but it makes the book post-modernist I guess.

I find Powers' style condescending, his aim seems to be to impress you with his amazing grasp of diverse subjects. In Three Farmers, history and American culture. In this one, music and biology.
He should be a contestant on Jeopardy.

Powers' erudition is usually out of my league. But the stories are always riveting anyway. Here's what I got from this one: a character notes that people often ask what a musical piece is "about," and the reply is, "Music isn't ABOUT anything. Music IS a thing." I think that's right.