Chapter 32 – The Music Happens
When Pete Townshend was growing up in the 50s in a rough part of London, there weren’t a lot of guns around. There was a certain amount of violence, and people he knew got hurt, but it wasn’t the permanent kind of violence from guns that seems more common today in most cities around the world. So he was duly impressed when Gwen showed her gun at lunch the previous day, even if it wasn’t shown in anger. She hadn’t even racked the slide or pointed it at anyone, which are associated actions that raise the level of impression the presence of a gun has on a person. Everyone else in his group seemed to accept this as a rather ordinary luncheon occurrence, so Pete didn’t ask any questions on the boat ride back to the marina. Even Pater, the more sensitive of the Ps, was getting used to Gwen and her antics. Not that he was happy about the outcome of the latest test of wills between Stirg and the Junes, but he had confidence that Gwen and Roger would look out for his interests. If war with a former Nazi hunting, billionaire Russian Jew was what it took to make this ballet happen, then so be it. The Ps are all about ballet.
Townshend wondered a little bit about the woman. She was in her late fifties, and he knew she was an administrator, but basically she was a bean counter, and had spent her life in an office, where it was likely that guns and violence were rare. Maybe some group, like the costume dyerscutters, had been on strike, and maybe they had yelled at her that she was a management tool, a suit, but that likely had been the worst thing she had experienced in her former career. Now the woman, by proxy, was in a conflict with Stirg, and had eaten lunch with a fully functional 40 caliber Glock handgun sitting on the table in front of her. Yet she seemed completely nonplussed. On the boat ride back she chatted it up with the Ps, talking about what tasks they wanted to tackle the next day back at The Hall. Townshend looked over at Gwen, and wondered if she ever messed around. He didn’t think it likely, but even at his age he was susceptible to sexual fantasies. In men, that was the case from cradle to grave. Is it the same for women?
The next day, things were back to normal at The Hall, meaning no guns or confrontations, whether in anger or more benign, but that didn’t mean things were ordinary. They weren’t, and they weren’t because The Whosey got his first taste of Old Igor’s music. Roger went to the bank and got the score from the safety deposit box. He could have printed out a complete copy of the score from the digital file on the computer, but he thought it would make more of an impression on Townshend to see and feel and smell the original thing that Stravinsky had produced ninety-eight years earlier. He was right. Rather ceremoniously, Roger laid it on a table in front of Townshend, saying, be careful. The others watched for a minute, but figured it would take Townshend a good while to absorb the enormity of his challenge, and went back to what they were doing.
Like Paul McCartney, Townshend had dabbled in classical music in recent years, and like McCartney, being a compositional musical genius, he had been able to understand the genre quickly, if not exactly deeply. He could read music, and thus could read the score for small orchestra sitting on the table in front of him. He couldn’t read the story notes, written in Russian, that flooded the spaces on the pages, but Roger told him not to worry about that. Townshend was to spend the morning looking through the music, and after lunch, the team would have a work session at which Roger would present the four stories Stravinsky had conceived, based on the four paintings by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso.
The Whosey didn’t move in his chair or raise his head from the score for two hours. At a perfectly even pace he absorbed the music he was looking at, then turned the page. Study, absorb, turn. Learn, understand, turn. Groove, feel, turn. At each turn the smell of old paper suffused his senses. At each turn, the meaning of the composition leaped off the page. Within minutes he discerned the melodies; within minutes he understood the rhythmic parameters. He saw how these were common across the four acts, melding into a single masterful composition. At the end of two hours he closed the last page of the document and turned it so the cover faced up. Standing, he stretched, but didn’t look at any of the others. Helstof and Gale were looking at photos of costumes on the Internet. Roger, Gwen, and the woman were back in her office, wondering how they were going to find enough world-class dancers on short notice to form the troupe. Selgey and Bart were fooling around together, dancing out in the aisles, waiting for Roger to tell them the four stories. The Ps sat around waiting for someone to need something.
Townshend was oblivious to all this, juggling Stravinsky’s themes and overtures, motifs and melodies, trying to make sense of the thousands of notes floating through his mind, all linked and organized by clefs and measures, bars and notations. He walked to stage left and descended the four steps. He wandered up the side aisle, and down the center aisle. He crossed to stage right and started up that side aisle, unaware that Selgey and Bart were parading down it from the back. At the halfway point the musician and the choreographers collided. Townshend looked at them blankly, even in the face of a warm smile from the beautiful Selgey Landkirk. She knew what was going on with him; he was in the creative zone. He continued up the slope of the aisle and they continued down. Gwen and Roger watched this, wondering if it was a good thing or bad. Was this old rocker goofy?
He wasn’t goofy. After twenty minutes of aisle walking, Townshend looked up and around. He ran down the center aisle and vaulted onto the stage center, no stairs. Over to the synthe, into the chair, power switch on, crackling from the forty speakers, flipping switches. Head down, hands on the keyboard, eyes closed, feeling Igor’s intensions. Then….then…. Stravinsky’s music poured forth, filling the theater, a basic melody coming from his right hand, a basic rhythm coming from his left. Act I, the first story, manifested itself in sound, those present the only ones ever to hear this music other than Stravinsky himself, who heard it from the piano in Russia, as he composed it. Selgey and Bart stopped, knowing this was what they had been waiting for. The music to which they would create the movement of the dance. It flooded them, surrounded them, embedded itself in them, moved them. They held hands and absorbed it.
For the next forty minutes Townshend played. It came in fits and starts, lumps and loads, splayed out from the synthe, through the computer, through the speakers, through the air, into the ears and minds of the team. The woman came out of the back office with Gwen and Roger, and they sat down in a ring of chairs with the Ps, who held hands. As Townshend got in the groove his hands went more and more from the keys to the switches. Each switch controlled a sound, or tone, or echo, or pre-recorded track. As he sorted through the settings, the listeners could begin to discern replicas of different instruments. There was a violin. Here a trumpet. There a cymbal. Here a piano. At first the instruments came out weird, sounding distorted or bent or sour. But as the minutes passed and his hands fiddled with the knobs, the tones became correct. They became true to their nature, to the key of the composition, to each other.
Townshend stopped playing, and sat for moments in silence. Then his hands moved again across the keys, and it wasn’t Stravinsky they heard, but his own music, the melody from his song “They Are All in Love”. He sang:
Where do you fit in, to the zzzzip magazine
Where the past is the hero and the present a queen,
Just tell me right now, where do you fit in
With blood in your eye and a passion for gin.
It was a momentary interlude, a respite from the struggle to understand and play the new music, an element of a ditty, and then he was back at it, playing with the rhythms of the Stravinsky third act. Somewhere in his sub-conscious the entire score had registered; had come to reside; had found a home. There in the synapses and conduits of his brain, there in the intricate wiring, melody and rhythm had become fixed, loaded and ready to be explored and manipulated. With a final andante that skidded out from the speakers, he was done. The mass of sound dissipated into
silence, the switches and knobs were flipped and turned, the power ebbed out of the synthe and back into the walls. Townshend sat back and looked around, a real person again in the theater space, searching for his friends.
They were there. Selgey and Bart sat in the front row, the Ps stood ten feet behind him, and the others sat a semi-circle of chairs. He stood up, said, “Incredible stuff. I think I understand it. The themes, melodies, and rhythms follow through all four acts. I’ll have to practice it, play with it a lot, to really get it, but….it’s in me now. I can feel it. It’s here. This is going to be a wild project. I’m really going like this job.” He paused, then said, “Unless Stirg shows up. Is he going to fuck with us?”
Pater came up behind him, put his hands on The Whosey’s shoulders, said, “Don’t worry. Anybody fuck with us, they face Ms Gwen. Roger. Helstof. You heard what Helstof told Stirg out at the fort.” Townshend thought for a minute, but nothing registered. Pater had forgotten that Helstof had spoken to Stirg in Russian.
Gale said, “You looked at the score for two hours, then you played for forty minutes, and you know it? You know the music? The whole thing? The whole ballet?”
“Well, I don’t know anything about ballet. You all have to teach me that but I know the music now. Not everything. Not the details. I can’t play it yet. But I know it, yes. I know what he was trying to do with it, trying to say with it. I know the main melodies. Those are complicated. The rhythms are nice, not so complicated. It won’t take me long to get them down on tape.”
Gale looked at Helstof, said, “Must be nice to be a genius at something.”
Helstof said, “You’re a genius in your own right, being Charleston fashionista. You got game, babe.”
Roger stood up, motioned for Selgey and Bart to come up on stage. They all sat around in a circle, looking at The Whosey. The music man. Roger said, “So you feel good about the music part? About being able to transcribe it from orchestral score to single performer synthe? Being able to work with Selgey and Bart on the choreography?”
Townshend said, “Yeah, I can do that. There are eighteen orchestral parts, and I see how he put them together. It’ll take me a couple of weeks to sort all that out, get it recorded into the computer, but I can do it. Then we can start on the dancing thing. I don’t know how to do that stuff.”
Roger looked at Gwen, then at the woman. The three organizers. Secretly he breathed a sigh of relief, hearing his man from The Who say he could produce the musical part of the production. He could see his wife and the woman also looking relieved. So he said, “Ok, that’s a wrap for this morning. Let’s take a lunch break, and come back this afternoon for the story part. We have lots to tell about that.”