The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers

Author:Richard Powers [Powers, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780374704636
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

My Brother as Loge

I listen to Jonah’s recording, and the year comes back intact. Comes back , as if that year had hurtled off somewhere while I stood still. The needle has only to touch down onto that circle of black vinyl and he’s standing in front of me. Aside from the scratches and pops, the scattered flyspecks in amber that accumulate over years of listening, we’re back on that day we laid the tracks down, two boys on the verge of the big time, the night before Watts exploded.

Da liked to say you can send a message “down into time.” But you can’t send one back up. He never explained to me how you could send any message, in any direction, and expect it to reach its mark. For even if the message arrives intact, everything it speaks about will have already changed.

My brother’s debut recording, Lifted Voice —a title he hated—was released, to several favorable and even a few excited reviews. Purists found the recital miscellany more suited to a midcareer singer than to a first-timer. Some reviewers called the sampler approach “light,” saying Jonah should have done a whole lieder cycle or a single-composer collection. This boy’s attempt to show he could sing anything somehow overreached. Yet for most reviewers, the reach took hold.

The record jacket showed a late brooding landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. The back of the jacket had our black-and-white head shots and a midrange shot of Jonah onstage in concert dress. A silver medallion on the front bore a quote from Howard Silverman’s Times review of the Town Hall recital:

“This young man’s sound has something deeper and more useful in it than mere perfection… His every note rings with exhilarating freedom.”

The disk sold quietly. Harmondial was pleased, banking on long-term return on investment. They considered Jonah a buy and hold. We two were stunned that anyone bothered to listen to the thing.

“Jesus, Joey! Thousands of people have added us to their record collections, and we don’t even know them. My picture could be pressing up against Geraldine Farrar’s kisser somewhere, even as we speak.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“One of her early pub photos. A nice little Cho-Cho-San.”

“And somewhere else, you’re pressing up against the tip of Kirsten Flagstad’s spear point.”

Jonah imagined that, having made a good recording, we had only to sit back and wait for the jobs to pour in. Mr. Weisman did book us more regularly into bigger cities, and we could just about live now on what we made. But week to week, our life was still the same university concert series and festival-dredging it had been before the record appeared.

I drop the needle onto the first track—Schubert’s “Erl-King,” a Marian Anderson standard—and I circle back into that closed loop. The record spins; the piano gallop resumes. Jonah and I send out the song’s surging message, unchanged. But the people to whom we thought to send it are gone.

The same president who passed the Civil Rights Act forced through Congress a blank check for widening the war in Asia.

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