Sample text for Simon Silber : works for solo piano / Christopher Miller.
Bibliographic record and links to related information available from the Library of Congress catalog
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Disc One
1. Variations in a Minor 15:55
Little League 2:01 BB Gun 0:55
Monopoly 2:39 Piano Lesson 3:06
The New Puppy 1:58 Fun with Firecrackers 1:43
Popping Wheelies 2:20 Theme 1:13
This charming suite of miniatures composed in "97* is Silber"s witty
answer to Schumann"s Kinderscenen. The range of moods and textures
encompassed by the work is all the more impressive given that all
seven variations are set, for the sake of a pun, in the same key as
the theme (performed for no good reason at the end). The piece is a
perfect gallery of inspired tone paintings — the puppy variation with
its scampering-feet figure punctuated by yapping staccato chords, the
sudden sforzando detonations of the BB gun, the little fugue
(in "Little League") on "Take Me out to the Ball Game." My favorite
variation, though, is "Piano Lesson," technically the most demanding
of the seven, though it depicts a very rudimentary musician. Silber —
himself a prodigiously gifted pianist — liked the idea of forcing
virtuosi to bring all their skills to bear on the task of sounding
comically inept. (Variations in a Minor was, significantly, the last
work composed before the change in Silber"s will forbidding the
recording of his music.)
The only possible objection to the Variations is an extra-
musical one: the all-American boyhood evoked by the subtitles is a
lie. Our composer lived in the same house all his life. After his
death I helped his sister break into his sealed boyhood bedroom (one
of several rooms that over the decades, for various reasons, Silber
had "retired"), and among the dusty clutter we did in fact discover a
red and white Little League uniform and an ancient Monopoly set with
wooden houses and hotels; so presumably these objects played a part
in Silber"s boyhood, unless he"d bought them later on at flea markets
in order to bamboozle his biographer, or in order to compose music
about them, as a photographer might buy such things to take their
pictures. Well and good, but he had always hated firecrackers ("even
in the womb"), and of course there was never a puppy. Silber"s life
was a losing crusade against all noises but his own, and he never
thought of dogs as anything but an especially noxious source of noise
pollution. And then there is the matter of all the ugly secrets
buried — like beloved pets in a suburban yard — in Silber"s real
boyhood, secrets deleted from the idealized past he set to music,
secrets that I will exhume in due course. For the point of this note
is not to decry the disparity here between life and art, but just to
emphasize the necessity of my annotations to anyone even pretending
to listen intelligently to Silber"s profound but also profoundly
personal oeuvre. Listening to his music without first reading my
notes would be like trying to watch a pay-per-view movie on cable
without first agreeing to pay for the privilege: any titillating
glimpses of the truth you may obtain despite the badly scrambled
signal will be few and far between.
2. "Chopsticks" Variations 13:14
This piece, composed on Silber"s eighteenth birthday (October 17,
1976), was in his opinion his first adult composition, and the only
one he ever played in public, as an unrequested encore to an all-
Schumann recital mounted by Silber"s father as a birthday present.
The recording on the disc is a live one made on that occasion by the
elder Silber with a portable battery-powered Radio Shack recorder.
Though all but the last of his recitals were held in Forest
City, Silber"s playing had made him a regional celebrity by the time
of his sudden retirement in 1979. To judge from the old clippings in
his sister"s scrapbook, he"d been famed for his light touch, his
unorthodox tempi, and his habit of wearing bulky red earmuffs while
performing. Twenty years later, his townspeople — those who didn"t
call him "the spaz" or "the psycho" — still referred to him as "the
pianist" or "the ex-pianist," never "the composer." The few I met
who"d even heard of his composing seemed to feel he was trading
illegitimately on his hard-won prestige in another profession, like a
star athlete who ventures a second career as an actor or singer.
A similar sense of Silber"s presumption — subjecting his
audience to his own music when they"d paid for Schumann — may have
contributed to the poor reception of "Chopsticks" Variations at its
premiere. The work is a set of eleven variations on that most
rudimentary of piano pieces, "Chopsticks," and, like most Opus no.
1s, amounts to little more than protracted throat-clearing in
preparation for the greater statements to come. The only notable
feature is the endless eleventh "variation," actually a note-perfect
reprise of the moronic original theme, but taken at such a slow tempo
that there are rests of as much as seven seconds between successive
notes, stretches of scratchy amplified silence during which, despite
the low-fidelity recording, one can distinctly hear nervous laughter,
bursts of eager but premature and reluctantly aborted applause, a
medley of voices saying things like "Pssh!" and "Jesus!" and,
increasingly, the sound of chairs scraping and footsteps retreating.
After the final sonorous chord, there is a hush, and then we hear,
very close to the microphone, the deafening ovation of a single pair
of hands, either because everyone but Silber"s father had already
left the auditorium by that point, or because any other, more
precipitate claqueurs still in attendance believed themselves to have
applauded enough already in the course of the work now finally
concluded. Or maybe they were still waiting, when Mr. Silber turned
off his tape recorder, to make sure that this time the work was
really over, and not about to lunge back to life once again like a
horror-movie monster.
Twenty-two years later, Silber played the piece for me, one
dark and desolate November afternoon, at a bright and lively
coffeehouse so near my modest Forest City lodgings that I"d come to
think of it as my living room, complete with a fireplace, a sofa, and
a bad upright piano. Spurning the bench, Silber stood at the piano
(out of tune, of course, and in even worse condition than the rental
horses at a public riding stable) and played so softly that, although
I stood beside him, I could hear him only during brief and random
intermissions in the crowded house"s din. This time at least no one
walked out in disgust: people went on slurping coffee, rustling
papers, talking politics, and otherwise ignoring Silber.
3. "Babbage" Permutations 1:47
I learned of Silber"s existence by way of an old LP (though not so
old it should have felt entitled to proclaim its stereophony as a
selling point) that I found in "94 in a Tacoma thrift store otherwise
boasting in its record bin only the usual picked-over thrift-store
assortment: Johnny Mathis, Ferrante and Teicher, Herb Alpert and the
Tijuana Brass. The disc was a recording, from 1979, of
Schumann"s "Abegg" Variations, a set of changes rung on a theme
ingeniously derived from the letters of a surname — that of a certain
Fräulein Abegg — treated as musical notes. The label, Argent, was one
I"d never seen before. I had never heard of the performer, Simon
Silber (nor for that matter of "the prestigious Erlenmeyer
Competition" at which he had won a silver medal in 1979), much less
heard him perform during what the liner notes described as
a "brilliant, tragically brief public career." I wondered what the
tragedy had been — nothing as simple as death, evidently, since the
notes (signed only "SS") shifted unexpectedly into the present tense
at the end to announce that, "a composer in his own right, Mr. Silber
lives in Forest City, Oregon." Moreover, a sidebar mentioned Silber"s
ambitious plan of recording Schumann"s complete output for solo
piano. I wondered if he had planned to do so in alphabetical order,
or maybe numerical order, since the "Abegg" Variations — billed as
Silber"s "astounding debut recording" — was Schumann"s Opus 1, just
as if he had planned his oeuvre in alphabetical order. I also
wondered how the pianist had managed to fill both sides of an LP with
a piece of music that as ordinarily performed lasts no longer than
eight minutes. I bought the album only because its cellophane wrapper
was still intact, at a moment in recording history when virgin vinyl
was coming to seem collectible as such, regardless of what noises had
been chiseled into its grooves.
Charles Babbage was a nineteenth-century English inventor
with as much of a claim as anyone to be called the Father of the
Computer. The "Babbage" Permutations, composed in 1980 and patently
inspired by the Schumann work, is simply an exhaustive computer-
generated set of permutations on the sequence "B-A-B-B-A-G-E," played
here in the evenhanded manner of Glenn Gould — whom my friend admired
and resented to the end — with a studied lack of dynamics intended
perhaps to give the impression that we are hearing music not only
composed but performed by a machine. Because the permutations are
exhausted in alphabetical order and the piece — like Silber"s homage
to another Schumann work — is in the key of A minor, Babbage begins
with a run of rising phrases (AABBBEG, AABBBGE . . .), ends with a
run of falling ones, and so has a clear overall shape, more than can
be said for some of the composer"s later, more painstakingly
constructed compositions. Silber claimed that it had taken him "all
of two minutes" to get his computer (a 64K Tandy) to permute those
letters, and that he had never again collaborated with a CPU. Thus,
the piece can be seen as representing in real time the rise and fall
of Silber"s interest in computer-generated beauty.
4. The Music Room 8:20–infinity
The music room was a sound-tight basement room to which, throughout
the first eight years of our composer"s life, all music in his house
was confined. From day one, Mr. Silber took a morbid interest in his
son"s development, devoting much of his own life to the project of
rearing a famous pianist. Wanting absolute control over the
impressionable young musician"s influences — and wanting also to
inspire Simon with a lifelong sense of music as a special thing, a
sacrament, and not just a part of the environment as unavoidable as
salt in processed foods, and as much to be taken for granted — Mr.
Silber had prohibited all music, live or otherwise, except in that
one room, throwing out the TV set, the radios, the stereo, and
keeping all the other rooms with pianos in them locked. Silber used
to call himself the only great pianist to have learned piano
underground (somehow or other his father had gotten a baby-grand
Steinway down there). The composer was eight before he heard a note
of music elsewhere in the house, and thanks to the short leash on
which his father kept him, he"d heard precious few outside the house
either.
In addition to confining music to the music room, Mr. Silber
had ordained that in that room Beethoven"s late quartets should
always play, continuously (he"d made a special tape loop), night and
day, even when no one was down there, even when no one was home, even
when Simon was trying to practice (though his father did turn down
the volume then, but never all the way, and less and less as years
went by), so that music came to seem an attribute of the room, like
the musty smell of the adjacent laundry room or the cool of a walk-in
cooler.
More than once I tried to get Silber to talk about how it had
felt, all those years, knowing that those deaf-man"s quartets were
playing down there all the time, over and over and over, even when he
was asleep. I wanted to hear about the dreams in which that room had
figured, wanted to know how such a room would function in dreams. I
wanted a guided tour of Silber"s windowless basement (it had been
sunk at least a yard deeper than ordinary basements, so that none of
it stuck above the surface). Silber, though, would not unlock the
door at the top of the basement stairs, and didn"t like to talk about
the space beyond that door. He did tell me once that the music room
was no longer there: soon after his father"s death in 1980, Silber
had not only pulled the plug on Beethoven, but had had the basement
remodeled, knocking out all the interior walls to abolish the music
room and disperse the eeriness that had accumulated in there over the
years. I could tell that the room had traumatic associations for
Silber even before I learned from his sister that their father had
often compelled him to spend the night down there — all alone in the
dark — as a small child.
Silber was only three when his mother was killed by a hit-and-
run driver. Any grief his father may have felt at the time was not
enough to stop him from enacting — the day of her death, according to
Silber — several policies his spouse had opposed while she lived.
Mrs. Silber had, for instance, vetoed the plan to keep Simon in the
basement night and day — in the soundproof room, a sort of isolation
chamber, that Mr. Silber had furtively readied down there while his
wife was in the maternity ward. She"d even threatened to leave and
take the children with her, and their father had reluctantly backed
down, knowing he"d never win a custody battle. Once his wife was out
of the way, though, Mr. Silber was free to manipulate Simon"s
experience as he saw fit. Luckily for Simon, Mr. Silber had by that
point decided that it wasn"t necessary after all for the young
pianist to spend his whole childhood locked in the basement (a
decision Mr. Silber would later regret, out loud and at length). But
our composer"s father did take to sending him down to the music room
any time the child was exposed to a loud noise: Mr. Silber — who
believed that most musicians in our noisy era are "too habituated to
the hubbub of the humdrum" to hear the music of the great composers
as they heard it — also seemed to think that those quartets would
somehow purge the sonic toxins. At an age when other children are
taught to fear stray dogs, busy intersections, poisonous berries,
strangers with candy, Simon was taught to fear the noises of the
outside world — and not just taught but traumatized. Any time a loud
noise was anticipated — every summer afternoon as the ice-cream truck
approached, all day long on Independence Day — he was sent upstairs
to his soundproof bedroom; and any time he was exposed in spite of
such precautions, he was sent down to the basement, sometimes
overnight, whether or not the exposure was his fault. If it ever
occurred to Mr. Silber that overnight confinement to the basement
might just terrify a three-year-old, he probably considered that a
plus: next time Simon would try twice as hard to avoid forbidden
noises.
Most of this I learned from sources other than Silber
himself. He would talk about the music room only as a model for Day
(the daylong sonata he"d been composing for almost two decades): a
space you"d feel free to leave and enter as you pleased, like the
ocean to a bather, but that while you were in it would inspire you
with awe, when heard at the only appropriate volume, loud. It comes
as a surprise, then, that the medley with which Silber chose in 1981
to commemorate this room (if not to atone for erasing a room —
smashing a vessel brimming with memories) should be so ethereal, less
an ocean than a mist. Soon after I met him, Silber gave me a cassette
he had modified to play the piece over and over, ad infinitum — a
frail avatar of his father"s magnificent tape loop. (Your disc has
been encoded likewise to repeat the track till told to move along.) I
dutifully went home and tried to listen to the tape, but the music —
despite its quotations from Beethoven"s greatest quartets — was so
insubstantial, so easily tuned out, that almost at once I forgot it
was on. After a minute I found myself thinking, I know what I"ll do
now, I"ll listen to a record, and got as far as selecting Carmina
Burana, tipping it out of its sleeve, and walking over to my
turntable before I remembered, on seeing a cassette playing in the
tape deck, that I was already listening to music, and with the volume
up so loud, per the composer"s instructions, that a moment later
Billy, my retarded next-door neighbor, started pounding on the wall.
Shortly before Silber"s sudden bloody death, I saw the
manuscript of The Music Room and discovered that its title had once
been The Waiting Room: evidently our composer had set out to write
the kind of music heard in elevators, waiting rooms, and shopping
malls. His homage to the music room had been an afterthought, like a
gift you buy for X but wind up giving to Z instead. Gazing at the
shamelessly repackaged piece, I laughed and then reflected that I
would never have met Silber if I hadn"t come across a little ad, one
summer day in 1997, as I sat in a dermatologist"s waiting room paging
through a magazine called Author, hoping I wasn"t catching anything
from the last patient to sit in my chair, and wondering whether the
outlandish loudness of the should-be-background music was a cause or
an effect of the receptionist"s deafness.
Biographer Wanted
Exp"d author needed to write biography
of Famous living composer. Contact
P.O. Box 32., Forest City, OR
The ad (rubbing shoulders with others beginning "Top $$$" and "Poems
Needed" and "Self-Publish") intrigued me: I had been thinking of
writing my memoirs — convinced at thirty-seven that my life was over —
but wondering if it wouldn"t be wiser to practice on someone else"s
life first. There was something teasingly familiar, too, about
that "Forest City, OR," and as I waited to show Dr. Fleisch a
mysterious traveling blotch, about the size of a transdermal patch,
that had orbited my torso twice in the year since I"d started to
monitor its progress, I recognized the town as home to "a composer in
his own right, Mr. Silber." Could it be? I waited till no one was
looking and furtively tore out the page with the ad.
At that point I"d been working for almost fifteen years as a
lowly aide in a Tacoma public library and had almost forgotten why I
had opted for such a career. Before I forget altogether: back in 1982
when I headed out into the real world with a B.A. in philosophy, I"d
been sure that I was better than any job I could hope for, and that
the best way to prevent myself and others from identifying me with
some occupation — with whatever I wound up doing to pay the bills —
would be to choose a job so far beneath me that no one could possibly
make that mistake. But others had made the mistake from the start,
and lately I"d been making it myself. Part of the appeal of the
Forest City job was that it sounded — sounded — a little less
demeaning than what I had been doing, and lately I was less and less
convinced that I was better than my job gave others any reason for
supposing.
The day after my visit to the dermatologist, I replied to the
composer"s ad, possibly exaggerating my credentials as an author. (I
was basically an unsuccessful thinker — or rather, though my thoughts
themselves were well worth thinking, I had not succeeded in placing
many printouts in the hands of people who might want to think along.
All I had to show for myself, in fact, were several thousand
unpublished aperçus, a long unpublished poem about epistemology, and
a privately printed collection of assorted aphorisms entitled So I
Gather — a book the reviewers I sent it to had greeted with the sort
of sullen silence a city slicker might encounter entering a small-
town diner. Since its publication, I"d stopped writing altogether,
though I flattered myself that my silence spoke volumes — slender,
exquisite volumes befitting the successful minor poet I might easily
have been, if I hadn"t acquired early on the ruinous habit of
clarity.) I also mentioned my fervent if recent enthusiasm for
such "underrated masterworks and undiscovered gems" (so I put it in
my letter) as Paul Dupin"s The Death of Uncle Gottfried and Jan
Ladislav Dussek"s four-handed piano sonata. Two or three months
earlier, as a means of coming to terms with my own increasingly
manifest destiny as a nonentity, I had stopped listening to anyone
better remembered than Dussek (the fattest composer on record, in
later years bedridden by obesity and apathy), and since then had been
working my way in alphabetical order through the not-so-great
composers, the more-or-less deservedly more-or-less forgotten,
telling myself: You tried the best, now try the rest.
5. Crows 0:04
Silber wrote this piece the day I met him. I witnessed its
composition, and since by that point his methods were highly
unorthodox (though not yet as deranged as they were destined to
become), an anecdote is in order.
In August 1998 — a full year after answering that little ad,
or long enough to have forgotten all about it — I was startled one
hot night at around three a.m. by a phone call from someone who
identified himself as Simon Silber.
Now, I trust it won"t detract from the "credibility" of these
liner notes if their author — an aficionado of coincidences — admits
that at the moment of that fateful phone call, he was standing in
pajamas at the window of his tiny, stuffy, hideous, no-longer-
bearable third-floor apartment, wanting to jump to his death but
afraid that a fall from that height to the pricker bushes below might
only cripple him for life instead. (To mollify those readers who hate
coincidences, I"ll add that it wasn"t the first time that summer I"d
stood at the window and wanted to jump.) After all, biographers are
people too, and our frailties are what enable us to discern the same
defects in the great and would-be great. My reasons, that night, for
wanting to die — aside from the sorrows already alluded to — needn"t
concern anyone: these notes are not about me.
While I tried to remember where I"d heard his name before,
Silber told me all about the book he had in mind. The idea seemed to
be to make him famous by writing about him as if he already were
famous: his fame, when it came, would — like all fame, according to
Silber — be an illusion; in this case, one akin to a back-formation
like burgle, later mistaken for the root of the word it really
derives from.
I asked why he"d taken so long to call and Silber explained
that back when he received my letter, he"d already hired a
biographer — who, however, hadn"t worked out.
"What was the matter with him?"
"Too nosy," Silber said meaningfully, after a meaningful
pause.
He went on to give me a little quiz about classical music. I
remember only one of his questions — "Why is Dussek a better composer
than, oh, Beethoven, for instance?" — to which I aptly retorted, "Why
indeed?"; by that point I"d tired of nonentities like Dussek, and
gone back to listening to entities again. (It occurs to me that if
I"d persisted in listening to also-rans at the rate I"d been doing, I
would"ve been just about up to the S"s at the time of Silber"s phone
call.) In any case, I must have passed the test. Before hanging up,
we agreed that I would drive to Forest City first thing in the
morning. Silber had said he was looking for an author untainted by
the "educated" musical prejudices of the day, and that I sounded like
just the man for the job.* He"d also said I"d be expected to
relocate, but that was fine by me — all I"d be leaving behind in
Tacoma was a studio apartment I rented month to month, an apartment
that wanted me dead.
After hanging up, I got in bed but couldn"t sleep. At last I
got up and found my thrift-store copy of Silber"s Abegg record, which
I had added to my collection without ever listening to the disk
inside, since that would have meant broaching its cellophane wrapper.
Now, reluctantly, I did just that: the time had come to satisfy my
curiosity (so infinitesimal at first that it had been able to grow
for years before becoming a nuisance) as to how the pianist had made
an eight-minute piece fill an LP. I shook the glossy virgin disk out
of its paper inner sleeve and placed it on my turntable, then turned
off the light and lay back down. By the end of the first measure,
some thirty seconds later, I had an answer to my question. Half
awake, I lay there in the dark with another well-chosen note arriving
every five or ten seconds, or almost long enough for me to drift off
in the meantime — a sort of Oriental torture, but a fun one; I
remember thinking that the theme, as played by Silber, was too
beautiful to bear. At some point I fell asleep — and awakened with a
scream. I got up, turned on the light, and warily got back in bed.
The music had ceased, but according to my clock I hadn"t been asleep
for long; probably what had jarred me awake had been the click of the
tone arm returning automatically to its cradle. Back when I owned a
cat I"d noticed that that incidental click, metaphysically so
different from the music that preceded it, never failed to turn her
head, though she seemed not even to hear the music itself, no matter
how loud it got. As for my scream: in light of later revelations, I
am tempted to claim that already I sensed something sinister about
Silber"s mind; and maybe I did. For me, though, there was always
something uneasy, if not outright unhealthy, about listening to music
as I drifted off to sleep: the music had a way of taking over my
brain and driving me out, so that later when I came back to myself
with a start I would find I wasn"t home. And yet the recording left
me wanting to know more about this stranger who, by lending me his
ears, had enabled me to hear the "Abegg" Variations — which till then
I"d written off as so much peppy juvenilia — as the thing of beauty
that any piece of music, even the tritest of singing commercials,
turns out to have been all along when heard with the ears of a
genius. I fell asleep again looking forward to our appointment.
Forest City was farther away than it had looked on the map,
and though I set out right after lunch, evening was approaching when
at last I located Silber"s red-brick house, half-hidden from the road
by a stand of Douglas firs, in what looked to be the oldest and most
moneyed part of town, where the streets took their time in getting
where they were going and the vast front lawns kept shabby invaders
like me at a distance. As I pulled up in front, an ice-cream truck
approached from the opposite direction and stopped parallel to my car
to feed an appallingly fat little girl who"d just lumbered out of the
big half-timbered house across the street. I hadn"t eaten in six
hours and, late as I was, I paused to buy an ice-cream sandwich from
the ice-cream man, or ice-cream adolescent — an acned crack-voiced
kid who looked too young to drive.
Silber had told me to go to the back door — not (as I thought
at the time) to teach me my place, but because a decade ago,
interrupted once too often in the heat of composition, he had
disconnected his doorbell and plastered over his front door from
inside. I started up the long and needlessly non-Euclidean driveway;
as I stepped out of the waning daylight into the sudden dusk beneath
the firs, a black crow came walking briskly toward me. The bird
swerved in passing to give me a wider berth and continued down the
gravel drive: I was reminded of a man trying to run with his hands in
his pockets. Other birds were crowing raucously, and when I rounded
the corner of the house I saw several dozen on the telephone lines
that ran along the back of Silber"s property. A tall skinny man in a
pale blue tuxedo stood in the yard with his back to me and a rifle in
his hands, not far from a derelict swing set so rusty there was no
telling what color it had been. Other composers might shake their
fists at the heavens, as Beethoven did on his deathbed, but Silber
had a horror of mere empty gestures: he pointed the gun skyward, took
aim, and pulled the trigger. It was a BB gun and not a real rifle,
but real enough for the crow in Silber"s sights. The bird fell
backward off its perch (as the luckier flew off in a rush of
wingbeats) and dropped with a thump to the spotty yellow lawn that
looked like what might live above a leaky toxic landfill. Nothing
else grew in the yard, though there were half a dozen tree stumps.
In the sudden silence, I must have done something audible to
Silber, if not to me. He looked over, frowned, and said, "If you"re
here to read the meter —"
"I"m here to write the memoir."
"Oh!" He glanced at the gun, then at the crow I"d seen him
kill, and, turning his attention to the gun again, he reddened. He
puckered his face for a moment, as if trying hard to place a half-
familiar melody. And then he took a tiny spiral notebook out of his
hip pocket.
"I spoke to you last night," I said. "I"m Norm."
"Simon Silber," Silber said proudly, and recoiled with a
start from my attempt to shake his hand. (Later he would tell me that
he never shook with anyone — a phobia left over from his virtuoso
days — but in the year I knew him I saw him shake hands several
times. What with my powerful build — I used to wrestle, back in
junior high, and am still quite mesomorphic for an introvert — I must
have looked like one of those he-men who like to squeeze.) He did
accept a plastic ballpoint pen a moment later, when his silver
fountain pen failed to write, and after clicking the button in its
base to extrude, retract, and then extrude its tip again, as if till
now he"d never encountered such a gadget, used it to make some marks
in his notebook. Then he handed back the pen and explained that he"d
decided to transcribe those crows as music, the wires as musical
staves, but that first he"d needed to "erase" just one wrong note. He
claimed that his transcription corresponded to the crows" arrangement
on the wires in the fraction of a second between his erasure of the
one and the departure of the others. The same odd sense of right and
wrong that had allowed him to kill the superfluous bird had also
forbidden him simply to omit it from his transcription: in order not
to transcribe it, he had had no choice but to exterminate it first.
"What are you going to do with it?" I asked, nudging the non-
noteworthy crow with my shoe.
Silber thought again, then said: "Guess I"ll throw him away."
He picked up the dead bird by its tail and carried it as nonchalantly
as if it were a dishrag over to a trash can recessed in the cement by
his back door so that only the lid was visible. Stepping on the lever
that made the lid pop up, he dropped the carcass into the secret
garbage can and let the top crash down again.
"And what are all those green spots?"
To its credit, Silber"s sickly yellow lawn was mottled with
frisbee-sized patches of a much lusher, livelier green, patches that
looked so much better fertilized than the surrounding grass that I
was asking about them. Silber shrugged and said that maybe they
marked the spots where a mole had died in its burrow.
6. My House 2:38
This ingenious piece lasts two minutes and thirty-eight seconds
because that is how long it took Silber, one rainy day in 1988 when
he had nothing better to do, to race through his house from attic to
basement, entering each room, touching the far wall, running back out
into the hallway and on to the next room and the next, all the while
panting the particulars of his progress into a tiny tape recorder.
The year before he"d painted every room a different color, and this
project seems to have given him a conceptual grasp of his house that
he hadn"t formerly enjoyed: though he"d lived there all his life,
till then there"d still been rooms he didn"t know the names of, and
that he tended for that reason to avoid, almost as if the power were
out in those rooms, as if they were too dark to use. Now, though, he
could call them by their colors, as he did the day of his "88 stunt.
The following day, he composed a musical tour of his house
corresponding moment by moment to that panted transcript, finding the
perfect chord for each color and sustaining it just as long as he had
spent in the corresponding room, composing a "hallway" theme almost
criminally reminiscent of the "Promenade" from Pictures at an
Exhibition, and using for the stairways a descending whole-tone
scale. Though the uncanny accuracy of his musical portraits, the
magic by which he evokes not just the color but the whole mood of
each room, can of course be gauged only by those of us who have been
inside the house in question, those who haven"t can still form
surprisingly high-resolution images by listening to the music and
letting it conjure up that dwelling room by room.
I want to say that Silber"s house and Silber"s music were so
inextricable that he could discuss the former only by means of the
latter, but that would be untrue: our composer was all too able to
put his thoughts into words. "Well," he"d said, after disposing of
that crow, "I guess if you"re going to write my biography you"ll want
to see inside my house." He sighed. "I guess I could give you a quick
tour."
The house was big, but not as big as readers will assume on
hearing that the tour lasted three hours: Silber always liked to mess
with the tempo, and the day I met him, as if to atone for the
disrespectful speed of his "88 sprint, he must"ve decided to see how
slowly he could show someone his house without once ceasing to babble
about whatever happened to have happened in whatever room we stood
in. I regret to say I didn"t listen to his monologue. Indeed, it took
me two hours to understand that we would be on our feet for the rest
of the evening, that the tour wasn"t just an inane, insanely
protracted, about-to-be-concluded formality before the real business
of the evening, our sitting down to talk. In the year I knew him I
never did see Silber sitting down except in his car. There wasn"t a
single chair in his house — or for that matter a piano bench, though
I saw three pianos. I didn"t get to hear him play that evening, but I
got to watch: one of the first stops on our tour was a yellow room
enshrining a magnificent piano, a Bösendorfer ninety-seven-key
Imperial. Standing at the keyboard, Silber raised his powerful hands
overhead like birds of prey about to swoop, then launched into a
tempestuous performance of what he afterward identified as a Scriabin
etude, but even if I"d known the piece, I wouldn"t have recognized
Silber"s rendition, which was absolutely silent, like a televised
recital with the sound turned off. I did hear the clicking of his
fingernails on the keys and the muted thumping of the hammers on some
non-reverberating surface, but not a single note. When he finished,
Silber explained that he suffered from periodic "episodes" of greater-
than-usual ("even for me, I mean") sensitivity to noise, and that
back in "94, at the height of one such episode, he"d replaced the
Bösendorfer"s strings with rubber pads. Otherwise, he said, the
action was intact, and better than that of his other pianos: this was
still his favorite (not counting the Steinway in his recording
studio), and the one he practiced on, though once a month he"d play
some scales on the concert grand — still strung — in the blue piano
room, just to remind himself, he said, of "what pianos sound like."
As for Silber"s policy of never sitting down, it was central
to his whole aesthetic. He liked to classify the arts according to
the position in which they are characteristically enjoyed — Sedentary
(concerts, movies), Recumbent (novels), Erect (paintings) — and he
hated the ones intended for sedentary consumption. That in fact was
his official reason for having abandoned the concert stage: he
believed that people should listen to music lying down (which was how
he claimed to eat his meals, on a specially built sofa) or better yet
walking around, since there were Ambulatory arts (sculpture,
architecture) too, and these, according to Silber, were the best of
all. He disapproved even more vigorously of the sedentary production
of art, his official reason for composing on walks and urging me,
too, to compose on walks, with the microcassette recorder he gave me
the day we met (since he wanted my book about him to be itself a work
of art). Even in bad weather he spent several hours a day out walking
around, and continued to walk around even after he went back indoors.
Especially at times of inner turmoil, he would pace all night — along
the hallways, up and down the stairways — so that by dawn he"d often
covered the entire house. Back in "89, he"d even had his house
remodeled to create a special pacing lane, lengthening the long third-
story hallway by encroaching on the red guest bedroom at its west
end. He claimed that several years ago, at the height of some
unspecified "crisis," he"d worn a pedometer for a week and found that
he was walking an average of eleven miles a night inside his house.
But back to the quick tour. Because, as I say, I didn"t
understand at first that it was the business of the evening and that
I"d already been given the job and that therefore (or furthermore, or
nonetheless) I would not set foot in his house again so long as he
lived, I was too impatient, waiting for my "interview," really to pay
attention to Silber"s patter, which sounded rehearsed if not till now
recited. Halfway up the stairway to the third floor, Silber noticed
my distraction, wheeled around, and demanded: "You getting all this?"
Though I nodded that I was, I so manifestly wasn"t that he
said, "Wait here," ran back down to the first floor, and returned
with a cassette recorder no bigger than a bar of soap. "Here," he
said. "You can even keep it — I just bought a better one. All you
have to do now is walk around behind me." And I did as I was told.
(Later, I"m ashamed to say, I taped over Silber"s chat without
replaying or transcribing it.)
So my recollections of the tour are few and vague. I do
recall that the vault-like door at the top of the basement stairs was
locked and that my guide didn"t offer to unlock it (just as well:
another level would have meant another hour); that every room was a
different color, and generally the loudest available shade of the
color in question; and that the light fixtures all had rheostats:
whenever Silber turned on a light, he would dial the dimmer switch up
to its brightest setting with a slight but unmistakable gradualness
that seemed to reflect some private theory, no doubt evolutionary,
about the maximum rate at which the human iris should be asked to
constrict. I also remember thinking that as many rooms as Silber
showed me, and as big as some of them were, there weren"t enough
rooms to account for all the space occupied by the house, or indeed
for the long doorless stretches along certain hallways. Finally I
asked my guide where all the rooms had gone, and he explained that
over the years he had "retired" the rooms where something bad had
happened by plastering over their doorways and painting or papering
over the plaster so that a visitor walking down the hallway would
never guess a room had once been there. In one case — what had been
his practice room — he"d gone even further, not only plastering over
its doors (with yet another grand piano still inside), but removing
the windows and bricking up their sockets so meticulously that no
trace of the room was visible from outside the house either. Silber
said that there were other rooms he stayed out of due to bad
associations, but that he no longer resorted to plaster because
lately he"d been having so many nightmares about the rooms he"d
erased: by sealing them off, he"d succeeded only in making his house
even eerier.
"But I am tempted to seal off this one sometimes," he said as
he led me into a Day-Glo orange room on the third floor. In the
center of the room, an old-fashioned safe — the boxy kind that still
falls out of windows in cartoons — sat on the floor below a ceiling-
mounted smoke detector. Silber said the safe contained the manuscript
of Day, and that the room — otherwise bare except for a little red
fire extinguisher just inside the door — was called the dayroom.
It was almost midnight when the tour ended, and my house was
at least five hours away. Silber would have turned me out anyhow, no
doubt, if he hadn"t just made the mistake of identifying the last
room on our tour as "one of the guest bedrooms." I slept surprisingly
well — till six a.m., when I was awakened by piano music. I found my
host downstairs, standing with his back to me in a purple dressing
gown at the concert grand in the blue piano room. He ignored my
greeting and, a little later, my goodbye, utterly engrossed in
transcribing with his left hand the rapid nervous tune he was
performing with his right. When we got around to talking terms by
telephone that evening, Silber repeated that I would have to move to
Forest City. And since, according to him, the housing market was
tight, he thoughtfully offered to find me a suitable place. What he
found, and committed me to for a year (September 1998 through August
1999) by forging my signature on the lease, was a furnished room in a
shabby clapboard house belonging to his sister and zoned (as far as I
could tell) for single men, a much smaller house than Silber"s,
though it had to shelter half a dozen hapless bachelors and not just
a solitary genius too selfish to spare a few square yards for his
biographer. Admittedly, my room was big and sunny and even came with
a kitchenette; it might almost have counted as a studio apartment,
except that due to some fluke in the local plumbing code, there was
no bathroom; I had to use the communal one at the far end of the
hallway, assuming it wasn"t already occupied by one of the other
lodgers. The man in the room above mine also liked classical music,
or at least he liked, and played ad nauseam, the only classical
recording he appeared to own: three favorite Beethoven piano sonatas —
the Moonlight, the Pathétique, and the Appassionata.
On September 1, 1998, I loaded my few belongings into my car
and moved to Forest City. (It took only one trip: just as certain
anorexics make a point of staying slim enough to squeeze into a
favorite pair of pants, I made a point of owning no more stuff than I
could stuff into my car.) From then on, Silber and I met only
outdoors or — when he wanted to play a new piece for me — at the
Bean, the busy coffeehouse with the bad piano: my employer, who hated
his sister, refused to set foot in my dwelling (even though he"d
deemed it good enough for me) and never again invited me into his.
7. Tinkertoy Fugue 3:03
This is one of several Silber compositions that could be called "road
music." Like the other specimens (Route 111, Rainy Night), it
communicates a special urgency heard nowhere else in Silber"s oeuvre,
for nothing else excited him as much as motoring. I"d venture to say
he knew more about cars than the average composer. His mother"s
father had been a mechanic, and for a while Silber himself had wanted
to be one, as a nightingale might want to be a crow. At sixteen, he"d
even gotten a job at the Main Street Garage, though he"d stormed out
after half a day of fetching wrenches, mopping floors, and making
coffee. Over the next few years, he bought, repaired, and resold a
succession of old cars in his own garage — the closest he ever came
to gainful employment. One day when I called to ask about that
chapter of his past, he told me to come over — not to his house but
to his garage. It was a big one, built of the same red brick as the
house, with a carriage house upstairs — complete with a kitchen and
bath — where Silber had lived as a disgruntled adolescent, during his
mechanic phase, and where I should have lived during my year as
Silber"s hireling. (What better place for a salaried biographer than
in the servant"s quarters?) Downstairs there was room enough for at
least four cars, though Silber owned just one, a sporty red
convertible he had received for his twenty-first birthday. Opening
its hood, he told me everything I"d never wanted to know about
reciprocating engines, pointing here and there with a dipstick as he
talked. I tried to follow, but my eyes kept wandering to other parts
of the garage, which for all I knew I"d never see again. In one
corner, an old bicycle — a boy"s green three-speed with red plastic
streamers hanging from the molded plastic handles — rested on its
steadfast kickstand; in another corner stood a tank of banned
insecticide.
But I took in some of Silber"s explanation. I remember my
amazement at how patly the four piston strokes — intake, compression,
power, and exhaust — corresponded (at least for this creator) to the
stages of creation, if one thinks of publication as exhaust. Silber
told me that the engine was itself a work of art — as worthy of
aesthetic contemplation, he insisted, as any sonata — and that
sometimes he went out to the garage and raised the hood just to gaze.
He didn"t seem to care about the body, though; at least, he never
washed it, and had never done anything about a big dent dating from
the night in 1988 when he "accidentally" hit a "deer." (The reason
for those quotation marks will become clear in the course of these
notes.)
Given his lifelong obsession with cars, it"s no surprise that
the composer did his best work on the open road. Roughly once a week,
at midnight, he"d head to a favorite convenience store for a cup of
coffee and a packaged pastry, then drive around for a couple of
hours, slowing down and speeding up according to the interest of the
landscape, or to the rhythm of his own thoughts, and intermittently
humming or singing into a hand-held tape recorder as the caffeine
kicked in and his head teemed with music.
During the year I knew him, Silber let me ride along about a
dozen times. The first night, the week I moved to Forest City, was
warm enough to leave the top down — the first time in my thirty-eight
years that I had ever ridden in an open car, the wind in my hair, the
bugs in my face. I"d had a bookish, underprivileged adolescence, and
the reader can imagine my exhilarated sense, as we sped through the
dark, of making up for lost time. All I needed was a beer and the
blare of rock-and-roll, instead of decaf and the clamor of Silber
singing snatches of potential compositions (most of them atonal) to
his tape recorder. He was so inspired that first night that he ran
out of tape, but afterward I had a hunch that the whole session had
been staged for my sake, or the sake of the biography, like a TV
dramatization of a real event — that Silber hadn"t actually composed
a single note that night, just trotted out something he"d already
written. Probably he"d been drinking decaf too, knowing that with me
along real composition would be impossible, and real — caffeinated —
inspiration thus unwelcome.
Soon he came to see me, though, as a benign distraction, a
nuisance to tune out the better to tune in his music, on nights when
utter solitude wasn"t what he wanted. Roughly once a month he"d phone
at eleven p.m. and say to meet him at the stroke of midnight in front
of the KwikStop on Main Street, three blocks from my rooming house.
Then we"d drive around for two hours — to the minute, boasted Silber,
as if proud of his compulsion, though I never bothered to verify the
claim by clocking one of our excursions. He spent the better part of
each drive crisscrossing Forest City in every direction, sometimes
leaving town but never going more than a mile or two before turning
back, as if fastened to his birthplace by an elastic cord. Sometimes,
like a tour guide to his own past, he would point out sights of
biographical interest: "We went fishing there one time"; "That"s
where my dad took us to get the swing set." After a few rides, I
noticed that his weekly drives all followed a fixed route, the same
one every time, though I never bothered to ask why. I"d decided the
day I met him that Silber was a bundle of meaningless neuroses, and I
had pretty much left it at that. In any case, my rooming house wasn"t
on the route — that was why he always made me meet him in front of
the KwikStop and dropped me off there afterward.
Silber didn"t always compose on these drives. Sometimes we
talked, or rode along in silence. One night when I came aboard, his
radio was playing the first movement of Schubert"s "Unfinished"
Symphony, a work that "wouldn"t be half bad," said Silber grudgingly,
if not for its sudden changes in volume — now murmuring, now
bellowing, "like a bore who notices that you aren"t listening to
him," said Silber, "so he grabs you by the shoulders and yells, "Hey!
I"m talking to you! I"m talking to you!"" Rather than changing the
station, though, Silber amused us both by forestalling every dip or
rise in volume with a quick, precisely compensating clock- or
counterclockwise twist of the volume knob, so transforming Schubert"s
breathtaking mountain range into a prairie.
He was, indeed, a consummate knob-twister. One rainy day
in "82, he"d spent several hours out in his garage modifying his
windshield wipers. At first he had planned only to retrofit his car
with the hiccuppy intermittent option he"d begun to notice on more
recent models, but then he"d seen a way (adjustable gearing) of
giving his wipers ten different speeds, from lightning-fast to once-a-
minute, so assuring him, he said, "the perfect rate for any rain."
Not till my last ride, two nights before his death (see Rainy Night),
did I see the wipers in action: though as far as I could tell the
rain was falling steadily, Silber adjusted them half a dozen times in
as many miles.
The final movement of these late-night drives was
interesting. After more than an hour of sticking as close to his
hometown as a timid child to his father, Silber would head north on
Main Street, sometimes pausing at the KwikStop long enough to run in
for another cup of coffee, if he felt himself on the verge of
inspiration ("the same way you might feel on the verge of sneezing,"
he explained once, as if I could hope to understand true inspiration
only by analogy to some bodily function). He"d cross First Avenue and
continue north on Route 28, as Main Street was called outside of city
limits. After a mile he"d turn off 28 onto 111. At that point there
was always a marked change in his mood — marked, for one thing, by
his falling silent, and for another by a sort of straining
excitement, as if he"d waited all his life to go where he was going.
He headed east on 111 for about a dozen miles, to Forest City"s
larger neighbor Lumber, where there was a junior college, a general
hospital, a classical radio station that refused to broadcast
Silber"s compositions, and a big building called Erlenmeyer Hall. We
always came to a stop by a pay phone in back of Erlenmeyer Hall, at
the edge of a vast parking lot deserted at that hour but lit as
bright as day by halogen lamps. We"d sit there for a minute, in a
sober silence I knew better than to interrupt. Sometimes my employer
would get out and use the pay phone to call KDOA (as he referred to
the radio station because of its stale playlist) and, disguising his
voice with an absurd Teutonic accent, ask for one of his own works.
(Once he told me that for years he had called from his home phone,
until one announcer finally granted a request but only after
announcing on the air that he had traced the call to the composer of
the piece in question.) And then we"d turn around and head back the
way we came.
Gradually I realized that what made these late-night drives
so exciting for Silber was the illusion, each time he found himself
eastbound on Route 111, that this time he might just keep going,
might abscond, abandoning his house and all that it contained, most
notably his past. He kept a fat red duffel bag on the passenger seat,
a bag whose purpose the composer refused to explain ("Never mind the
stupid bag"), although I had to hold it in my lap every time I rode
with him, since it was too big to stuff behind the seats (and Silber
said the trunk was filthy). When, on my third or fourth ride, he went
into the ever-open KwikStop for a second cup of coffee, I seized the
opportunity to rummage through the bag. I found a compact road atlas,
a toothbrush, a rolled-up tuxedo, a change of underwear, a portable
alarm clock, a dozen different pill bottles (including both
amphetamines and barbiturates), a water bottle, a travel iron, a
packet of trail mix that had expired more than a decade ago, and an
apparently random assortment of tourist brochures with titles
like "Romantic Cincinnati" and "The Busy Visitor"s Guide to the Twin
Cities." During our next few drives, I noted a certain predictability
in Silber"s moods (outward-bound excitement; homeward-bound
dejection) and a certain pattern to his stray remarks ("One of these
nights you might just have to hitchhike back into town"; "What if I
kept heading east instead of turning back? I"d never have to see
those stupid trees again"). At some point I understood that Silber
had a fantasy as stale as that trail mix, a fantasy of abandoning
Forest City forever, abandoning music, and starting over somewhere
else, as something else, something other than a great composer. The
bag was his travel kit, ready to go. By the time I met him, his
freewheeling fantasy (all the more poignant — or, if you prefer,
idiotic — in light of the phobia I"ll discuss later) was so habitual
that not even the presence of a passenger with no such plans and no
such kit — no toothbrush — could stop Silber from pretending.
No doubt the composer never quite forgot that his fantasy was
just that — a fantasy — and his sense of possibility a mirage, a
highway psychosis, but it revived as often as he hit the open road,
and inspired a special excitement that sometimes resulted, not in a
change of address to be sure, much less a change of vocation, but in
an artistic breakthrough.
It was on one of his drives, for example — a solo jaunt one
luminous September night not long after I moved to Forest City — that
it first occurred to him that the limitations of "old fashioned"
(i.e., written) musical notation were responsible for his failure to
realize some of his more newfangled ideas. There"d been a full moon
that night, and Silber, on a whim, had pulled off the road just to
gaze at his engine by moonlight. After a minute of gazing, he gasped:
he"d just "understood" (his word) that the engine of his car was not
just a work of art but a piece of music. Not the hubbub of the engine
running — that was just an unfortunate static he had to tune out on
these drives to hear the melodies in his head — but "the engine
itself." And not just music "of a sort" or "in a sense," but music
pure and simple. (He seemed to know what he meant.) He"d found a pen
and drawn some hasty staves on the back of an old speeding ticket,
then attempted to transcribe the music in question, but was unable.
He"d also tried to hum the music to his tape recorder, but again he
was unable. And yet as he gaped at his engine in awe, he "literally
heard" the music it embodied — at least until a car of rowdy
teenagers roared by and shouted drunkenly at Silber, drawing his
attention for one crucial instant, since when he looked at the engine
again, he could no longer hear what he had heard. He spent the whole
next day and half the night in his garage, glaring at the engine in
an effort to remember the soundtrack of his big roadside epiphany.
Although he never managed to decode his engine"s musical
notation, the whole experience left him convinced that music could be
represented or embodied by a three-dimensional object, and indeed
that there were musical ideas too manifold to map in two dimensions.
The following night he went for another drive and, on returning,
composed an unusual fugue. He called the next morning to say he"d
just ticked off another opus on his little opus counter, and that he
wanted me to be the first to hear it.
I"m afraid I proved unworthy of the honor when he played the
fugue for me that afternoon — not at the Bean, but in a skylit room
above his garage. Just about the last thing Silber"s father did,
before dying of a broken heart (or so Helen, Silber"s sister,
diagnosed his coronary), was to help his son set up a recording
studio in the carriage house. The studio was little bigger than its
piano, a Steinway concert grand my friend had made his father buy him
at the time, since none of the six pianos they already owned was
worthy of the world-class recording artist he still dreamed of being,
though by that point he no longer played in public. Needless to say,
the dream had not come true: when his Schumann record (pressed just
days after his father"s death) failed to astound the music world,
Silber had lost all interest in other composers; and when, in 1985,
another vanity-pressed record, this time of Silber"s own music, fared
no better than the first (no better than my aphorisms!), he"d
decided — what he still contended — that the world simply wasn"t
ready for him yet. By that point, in any case, he was betting
everything on Day: once he finished it, he"d be a household name, and
his two LPs collector"s items, and all the idiots who hadn"t bought
them when they"d a chance — well, they"d all be sorry.
So I got to hear the fugue on Silber"s best piano, in the
silence of his soundproof studio. (There was a double-glazed
skylight, but the other windows had all been bricked up, either to
keep out neighborhood noises or to keep in Silber"s music, as if each
chord were a sort of trade secret.) But fugues are not for everyone.
Silber was so fond of them, he"d listen to two at once, or to two
identical recordings of the same one staggered to produce a
metafugue. He was proud of being so good at rubbing his belly and
patting his head. He once claimed that he could read two unrelated
stories in adjacent columns of the Forest City Ranger simultaneously —
a boast that struck me as at once implausible and unimpressive. He
spoke of buying nine identical TV sets, stacking them in a three-by-
three array, tuning them to nine different stations, and watching
them all at once, like a bingo addict playing on nine cards — not as
much of a feat, to be sure, as playing blindfold chess on nine boards
at once, but symptomatic of the same unhealthy craving, the need to
have more going on at the same time than most of our pleasures (even
complicated ones like fugue appreciation and chess) are designed to
offer. I myself was spared that morbid craving; if anything, I tended
to feel that there was more than enough to keep track of in even the
simplest pastimes, and always looked for ways to simplify them
further. Lately I"d been stocking up on Music Minus One LPs —
performances of famous works with one important part left out, for
the music student to supply on his own instrument. (One can play
along with any record, I suppose, but when one adds oneself to Music
Minus One, one feels integral and not superfluous.) But I wasn"t a
student musician and didn"t play along or even hum along: I liked to
listen to those understaffed performances just as they were, in order
to relax. Even an ordinary trio, with all three musicians toiling
away at once, could seem too busy for me to enjoy, too much of a
three-ring circus.
So it may say as much about me as about the composer"s new
fugue if I admit that, after the initial statement of the theme
(reminiscent of "Route 66"), all I heard was an excited mob of random
notes. Afterward, when I politely asked to see the score, Silber led
me back downstairs to the dark garage and over to a workbench with a
large dark object on it. When he hit a switch, a spotlight revealed
what looked like a precocious second-grader"s prizewinning science-
fair model of an especially big and complicated molecule.
"Are those Tinkertoys?"
"Yep," said Silber proudly. "The thing I just played is
called Tinkertoy Fugue." He said that "in exactly the same way" the
engine of his car stood for a piece of music (whatever way that might
have been), this Tinkertoy construction stood for one too, for the
one I"d just heard. The music was too various and subtle, he
insisted, to transcribe on paper the old-fashioned way.
It wasn"t the last time our composer found conventional
written notation insufficient for his purposes, even if it had been
good enough for Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. For about a month after
his Tinkertoy epiphany, he continued to tinker with Tinkertoys, and
Lincoln Logs, and Legos. He even fashioned, and spoke of patenting, a
line of hybrid connectors that enabled him to use those disparate
building elements within a single structure. He assembled a series of
objects (each dismantled within a day or so to free up parts for the
next) that stood for works of music he had heard in his mind"s ear,
though the music was so rare and strange (he claimed) that he
couldn"t reproduce it at the keyboard. Tinkertoy Fugue is unique
among his 3-D "compositions" in having a recorded performance to show
for itself. Silber insisted, though, that the fugue on your disc is
no more than a rough translation, a crude approximation, of the
ineffably delicate music he had heard one night on Route 111. That
may explain why, when I later played a tape of the multifarious fugue
for a music teacher (Cletus Pitchford — see Disc Three) at Lumber
Junior College, he described the piece as "a beginner"s effort —
really just a canon on the lines of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat.""
8. From Day: 4:55–5:00 p.m. 5:00
This is a small fraction of a composition at which Silber labored for
almost twenty years: a daylong piano sonata. (He insisted on calling
it a "sonata," though only two of the seventeen movements he
completed were in sonata form.) To be exact, your excerpt represents
1/288 of Day"s projected length. The work was still unfinished at the
time of Silber"s death, and no wonder: he"d set out to score a real
day — from midnight to midnight — in real time; the finished product,
when performed at the only possible tempo ("that of reality itself,"
insisted Silber), was going to last exactly twenty-four hours; but
when I met him, Silber had been stuck for years at five p.m.
The frenetic five-minute excerpt on your disc is the end of a
rather obsessive (not to say repetitive) hour-long crescendo of
excitement — one that will remind some of Ravel"s Boléro —
culminating in an earsplitting blast from a real factory whistle.
After trying in vain to get his piano to whistle, Silber decided to
cheat and supplement his instrument with a real whistle, at this one
point in the composition, so much importance did he attach to the
corresponding time of day.
Silber had gotten the idea for a daylong sonata on June 2.,
1980. In what sounded almost like a mystical experience, he
had "realized" something so obvious as to be vacuous: that the day is
the basic unit of human consciousness, the standard building block —
the Lego — of which lifetimes are compounded. It followed that there
could be no loftier subject for a magnum opus, and Silber had just
decided that the time had come for him to embark on his. Indeed, he"d
been so eager to get started that he"d chosen that same day as the
one to set to music, a choice whose hasty nature he"d have time to
regret later. He said his main reason for choosing a specific day was
so he could "do" sunrise and sunset, phenomena as irresistible to our
composer as to any landscape painter. He"d even consulted a Farmer"s
Almanac to establish to the minute the sun"s whereabouts (relative to
Forest City) on June 2., 1980.
Otherwise, he said, Day was a day in the abstract: there was
no minute-to-minute correspondence between the daylong sonata and the
real day it represented (most of whose minutes, anyhow, Silber had
long ago forgotten). He wanted his sonata to have universal
relevance — to say something timeless about ten a.m. in general, not
just to set one certain ten a.m. to music. And ten a.m. had been a
snap; but for years now, as I say, my friend had been mired at five,
maybe because he thought of the nine-to-five workday as a fundamental
fact of the human condition, albeit one from which his wealth
exempted him. More than once I recommended that he get a job himself,
for a week or two at least, but Silber only snorted and told me that
the job of the true artist was to contemplate life from afar, sitting
out as much of it as possible — to paint the sweaty peasants from a
respectful distance (ideally upwind) and a picturesque perspective,
not to help them sow and reap. Well, as the young say
nowadays, "whatever." Maybe Silber was afraid that hands-on
experience with the workday would force him to go back and rewrite
the whole sonata, undoing two decades of work. Or maybe he just
couldn"t face the prospect of a job even for the sake of his magnum
opus.
I was never sure if Silber"s awe of five p.m. was a cause or
an effect of his composer"s block, but he always spoke of that
indifferent hour with a wide-eyed earnestness that seemed almost
religious. I"d learned not to bother him between four and six p.m.:
every afternoon he spent an hour thinking himself into a
phenomenological frenzy, trying frantically to focus all his
faculties on the time of day — on "time itself," he said — in hopes
of catching whatever it was that happens at five. And then he spent
another hour fuming at his failure. He knew there had to be a
whistle, but for the life of him he couldn"t think what to put next.
"Tell me how it feels, Norm," he implored me more than once
in the year I knew him, "tell me how it feels when the whistle blows
at quitting time." And I did my best to tell him, though I wasn"t
sure that even factories still used whistles, and in any case I"d
never had a factory job. In fact, I"d never had a nine-to-five of any
kind. As I say, I"d majored in philosophy in college, and still
called myself a Philosopher, though the U.S. Department of Labor"s
great Dictionary of Occupational Titles — an otherwise exhaustive
list that recognizes such improbable professions as "Sock
Examiner," "Animal Impersonator," "Worm Sorter," "Bedspread Folder,"
and "Mirror Inspector" — jumps unaccountably from "Philologist"
to "Phlebotomist." No wonder, then, that I"d never succeeded in
getting the world at large to acknowledge my vocation, much less to
remunerate me for it.
It didn"t help that I"d decided in my early twenties to walk
away from academia — that haven for the elsewhere unemployable —
despite a fast start as a scholar. My father was an eminent professor
of aesthetics, and for a while there I planned to follow in his
footsteps. But then I suddenly grew up (a trauma I"ll recount in
another note), and after twenty-two years of wanting to be just like
him, I wanted more than anything not to be like him, even if that
meant forgoing all the good things he had beaten me to: an adoring
wife and son, an academic sinecure, and — as far as the arts were
concerned — a complacent taste for the tried-and-true.
So I"d stormed out of the classroom and into the workforce.
During the next year, I held a dozen different part-time jobs, from
telephone solicitor to busboy in an all-night pancake house to
stockboy in a house-and-garden store. None of the jobs lasted more
than a month. Though as I say I made a point of seeking work that was
beneath me, I was unable to hide my contempt for my duties, my
coworkers, my employers, or the public. I"d probably have ended up
sleeping under bridges and eating out of dumpsters if not for
nepotism: in 1983, eager for a change of scene, I moved to Tacoma to
work as an aide in a suburban public library run by my aunt Lucy, who
took me on — and kept me on, year after year, even when patrons
complained about me — as a favor to her favorite sister. I worked at
that library, part-time, for fifteen years, first at the circulation
desk, then at the reference desk, and finally (when I was deemed
too "abrasive" to deal with callers too stupid or lazy to look up the
capital of Portugal themselves) behind a door marked authorized
personnel only, sorting just-returned bestsellers prior to
reshelving, flipping through picture books looking for crayon marks,
rewinding videos whose viewers hadn"t bothered to. Though the money
wasn"t much, I managed to scrape by. For years I told myself I was
only biding my time until my ship came in. Not that I ever hoped to
get rich with my aphorisms, but I really had believed, year after
year, that it wouldn"t be long before the world at large recognized
me as a thinker to reckon with, one who also happened to sort books
for a living, as Spinoza happened to grind lenses. In December "96, I
borrowed money from my mother to subsidize the publication of a book
of aphorisms, since it hadn"t interested the other kind of
publishers, the kind that pay you. Naive, I"d expected deafening
applause. The silence that ensued instead was still resounding in my
ears when, in August "97, I read Silber"s ad while waiting for my
dermatologist. By that point, I had lost my conviction of imminent
glory, the delusion that had allowed me to live for so long on so
little.
In December "97, my aunt died and was replaced by a hardliner
named Martha. In April "98, Martha fired me for being "arrogant,
contemptuous, grumpy, haughty, pompous, rude, self-deluded, surly,
touchy, unreliable, and vain" (as she put it in her parting
comments). I started reading want ads instead of aphorisms — though
for all their brevity the ads had more in common with a fortune-
teller"s auguries: "Successful candidate will be hardworking go-
getter with three years experience in retail . . ." But I am not a go-
getter, and was still unemployed when Silber called a few months
later. He entered my life at a juncture when I badly needed
something, and though he wasn"t really what I needed, my need itself
was so urgent that — like a starving child eating dirt — I seized on
him.
But enough about me. I mention my own sorrows only because
Silber, at the time I met him, was undergoing something similar, or
as similar as a rich man could. (Part of my sorrow was the stigma of
my poverty, the scorn of philistines who"d never deluded themselves
that they were destined to do more than get and spend, and who"d
always hated me for thinking I was. If all the gold I"d thought I was
amassing in my notebooks was only fool"s gold, then all the dolts
who"d spent their youths amassing real gold instead — and who now of
course had much more gold than I did — were only right to consider me
a fool.) When I started working for him, Silber hadn"t added a second
to Day in four years. In general, those had been barren years for
him: aside from the daily chord in his chord-a-day diary, he"d
managed only Variations in a Minor. For a while there he"d been
convinced he"d lost his talent and would never write another note,
but his dry spell ended the very day we met (see Crows), and ended
with a vengeance: it was my good luck to know him during the last and
most prolific year of his life, though maybe it wasn"t just luck. Or
maybe I was his good luck, since I can"t help thinking that I was to
thank for that creative burst, if only as a sort of talent scout from
a posterity whose interest the composer had perhaps begun to doubt.
9. My Face 10:09
This piece was composed as the soundtrack to a remarkable short film
begun by Silber"s father and completed by the composer. I wanted very
much to include the film itself in your boxed set, on a disc of its
own, now that such things are possible, but Silber"s sister vetoed
that proposal and indeed asked me not to mention the movie at all in
my notes, so I"ll content myself with describing it at length. Silber
himself considered the film so important that he sought me out to
give me a copy — the first time he ever came looking for me.
Silber"s birthday, though I didn"t know it at the time, was
October 17. I spent the morning of the eighteenth at the Bean,
working on the "Eccentricities" section of Silber"s biography, while
outside it rained relentlessly. My employer, for whom the number
twelve and its multiples were magic, had told me to divide the book
into twelve chapters ("You can decide how to organize my life, just
so long as it divides by twelve") and to finish one a month, since I
had a one-year lease; but to his dismay I proved unable to adhere to
such a schedule. He didn"t mind that I"d chosen to arrange the book
by topic and not by epoch, but he hated my way of working on all
twelve at once, jumping around as my mood dictated (as Prokofiev is
said to have done with the twelve movements of his three "War
Sonatas," though admittedly I didn"t have the excuse of a war for my
scatterbrained approach) rather than finishing each before proceeding
to the next. He was understandably anxious to see regular
installments of the book he was paying me to write, but the first few
months all I was able to give him, when the end of the month rolled
around, were a dozen rubber-banded stacks of index cards — three-by-
five-inch cards of the kind I also used to enter sweepstakes without
purchasing the sponsor"s product — representing my scribbled
additions to each of the subtopics into which I"d divided my subject.
Nonetheless he paid me once a month, on the last day of the month, or
just in time to cover my rent, which was due on the first. Meeting
him at the Bean, I"d hand over a manila envelope and he"d hand me a
check whose signature, he once predicted, would one day be worth more
than what I"d get by cashing it. The next time I saw him, he"d return
the index cards, now in thirteen bundles, of which the fattest was
always the stack of cards he"d crossed out in red — facts about
himself I was forbidden to use. He was after a certain chiaroscuro;
he knew exactly which parts of his past he wanted spotlit, and which
relegated to darkness. To his credit, he had sense enough to defer to
me on matters of syntax and grammar, and never queried specific word
choices (unless with a view to reducing an already flattering half-
truth to some even more flattering fraction). The contempt implicit
in this policy did not escape me: my employer let me take care of the
words the way he let his cleaning lady decide which furniture polish
to buy; he didn"t stoop to know about such things himself.
That morning, anyhow, I felt like writing about Silber"s
eccentricities, insofar as I felt like writing about him at all. At
noon I bought a piece of cheesecake as incentive to continue and
then, seeing that the rain had stopped, moved outdoors, to one of the
white plastic tables on the sidewalk. After wiping off my chair and
table with brown paper napkins, I sat down and took a bite of
cheesecake, then reluctantly set down my fork, picked up my pen, and,
labeling a fresh card "eccentricities," wrote: "Like so many
geniuses, Silber —" I put down the pen and picked up the fork again,
not ambidextrous enough to write and eat at the same time. Was he a
genius, or just a nut? Even as I asked myself, I saw him coming up
the street, carefully choosing his steps according to some private
rule that made it look as if he were crossing a minefield. As always,
he wore a tuxedo; today"s — it looked like one left over from his
stint as a concert pianist — was gray. In one hand he carried the
battered violin case he liked to use on long walks as a lunchbox.
(Some of my employer"s eccentricities were plainly affectations,
though I wasn"t ever sure about their motive. By that point I no
longer assumed that he was just behaving the way he thought a genius
should; now I suspected that the idea was to embarrass his sister —
of whom, alas, more soon. Later I would realize that Silber"s
harmless quirks were actually a smoke screen to conceal aberrations
of a more sinister kind, the way a serial rapist might affect good-
natured gruffness.)
In his other hand, he held a red umbrella, still open, though
the rain had stopped. He must not have noticed, unless he was using
the umbrella as a parasol. Spotting me, he cocked it to one side in
greeting and — from a distance of maybe thirty feet — shouted, "Happy
birthday!"
"Thanks," I said, when he was close enough to hear me. It
wasn"t my birthday or even my birth month, but by that point I"d
understood that Silber was not only a "surrealist composer" — as he
liked to call himself — but a surrealist talker.
"My birthday," he explained a moment later.
"Your birthday? When?"
"Yesterday, biographer."
I felt myself blushing as I apologized. I had of course
determined Silber"s date of birth the day I started his biography,
but since at the time I hadn"t foreseen that we"d become friends, I
hadn"t forwarded a carbon copy of the date to the part of my brain
responsible for remembering red-letter days. And anyhow —
"Don"t worry about it," said Silber, with a dismissive wave
of his umbrella. "Here — I got you something." Turning his back, he
set his violin case on the sidewalk, opened it, and rummaged around.
(His paternal grandfather had been a talented amateur violinist and —
though this came out only posthumously — all four members of the
reclusive Silber Quartet, an ensemble that in the mid-fifties had
acquired, by means of its recordings and despite its refusal to give
live performances, a small but ardent following drawn by what one
critic termed the group"s "uncanny unity of tone and purpose."
Insanity would seem to run in Silber"s family — just as it is said to
run in mine, though I trust that I"ve been spared.) Finally he
straightened up and turned to me with a package wrapped in Sunday
funnies from the Forest City Ranger. "Happy birthday," he repeated,
and went on to explain, before letting go of the package, that people
should give presents on their birthdays, to thank their friends and
families for putting up with them for another year. (Silber, of
course, believed nothing of the sort.)
"Thanks," I said again, unwrapping what I glumly took to be
another book, as if I didn"t have enough of those already. But no, it
was a videocassette in a book-shaped plastic case, with a typewritten
label on the spine: My Face: The First Forty Years. "Huh," I
said. "What is it?"
"You"ll find out."
That autumn, like most autumns, was a lonely time for me, and
to fill the evenings I had bought a big TV set with a built-in VCR.
Silber, who knew next to nothing else about me, knew about my VCR:
he"d bumped into me one day as I emerged with a pair of new releases
from a nearby shop with an embarrassing name — T&A Video — though it
stocked a small selection of non-pornographic titles too. As a matter
of fact I"d been planning to visit T&A that afternoon, and Silber"s
gift was not enough to change my plans: to judge by the narrow band
of black videotape visible through the clear plastic window, the
birthday cartridge would be good for only ten or fifteen minutes"
worth of entertainment.
That evening, after viewing, re-viewing, and rewinding my
rental, I stuck Silber"s tape in the player. When I hit play, I heard
a piano and saw the face of a baby I identified at once as my
employer. At first glance I assumed the baby was a newborn, though
the longer the camera dwelled on his face, the less certain I became.
After maybe twenty seconds of waiting for something to happen, I was
about to fast-forward when I realized that something was happening:
the baby was growing visibly older as I watched. Within a minute, he
was no longer a baby at all, but a preschooler. A couple of minutes
later he was an adolescent, though by that point he"d undergone an
even more traumatic transformation, suddenly changing (at around the
age of ten) from black and white to color. I watched the young
composer experimenting briefly with a ridiculous toothbrush mustache,
noted a new grimness as he hit adulthood, watched his eyes grow more
and more inscrutable as he passed through his twenties and into his
thirties, and at the end saw the Silber I knew; before giving way to
static, the last few frames even displayed (I reviewed them frame by
frame) the pustule then in full bloom just outside his right nostril.
It wasn"t a dream: it was nothing less than a time-lapse film
of Silber"s face and its vicissitudes over the course of a lifetime.
He explained the logistics to me the following evening when I
intercepted his after-dinner walk. Once a day, every day, from the
day my friend was born, his father had sat his son in front of the
same baby blue backdrop, humored or browbeaten him into the same
neutral expression, adjusted his head like a barber to the same
forthright angle (the one favored in graduation portraits to suggest
that the graduate is facing boldly his or her future), and squeezed
the bulb. Skillful editing had done the rest.
Silber, who"d continued the ritual himself for almost twenty
years after his father"s death, had finally abandoned the film — or
decided it was finished — the day he turned forty: that, he said, had
been his birthday present to himself (one of the forbearing people,
after all, who"d put up with him for another year). He said he was
tired of the daily photo shoot, and also that he didn"t like what was
happening to his face. ("I"m not talking about aging, either.")
In the background of each shot, in the upper left-hand
corner, is a legible tear-away calendar. At twenty-four frames per
second, the calendar"s date advances too fast to be more than a blur
(like time itself, when you scan the past too quickly), but by
viewing the movie frame by frame, it is possible, for anybody with
nothing better to do, to find the image corresponding to a given day —
to find Silber, for example, as he looked (relieved) on the day his
father died, or to ascertain (to the week if not the day) the point
where he grew up, if "growing up" is understood to mean setting your
jaw, once and for all, and resolving to endure a life you no longer
expect to enjoy.
Viewed at twenty-four frames per second, the film is just
over ten minutes long. As for the soundtrack on your disc, the piece
contains no chords, only individual notes, one for each day in
Silber"s life up to age forty, or 14,610 in all, minus about a dozen
days on which, for one reason or another, he didn"t sit for a
photograph. Those days are represented by rests, but extremely brief
ones, since in order to keep pace with the images, Silber had to
perform a phenomenal twenty-four notes per second.
Judging from old clippings in a scrapbook Helen showed me,
her brother had started out as a slow-tempo pianist. After one
particular concert given when Silber was seventeen — an hour-long
performance of Chopin"s "Minute" waltz — a critic for the Forest City
Ranger had suggested that the performer lacked the technique to play
any faster, and even went so far as to call him "the pianistic
equivalent of a hunt-and-peck typist." Such insinuations must have
incensed our composer, to judge by a no-less-bewildered review of his
next recital, at which he raced through Beethoven"s last five
sonatas — more than two hours of music at the hands of most pianists —
in less than an hour. At subsequent recitals, he set speed records
that still stand for Bach"s French Suites and Liszt"s Sonata in B
Minor.
Even so, Silber admitted that not even he could have
performed My Face live at soundtrack speed — the speed at which it is
heard on your disc, thanks to the magic of the recording studio.
Although the piece may sound like just another frantic perpetuum
mobile, a crowd-pleasing series of scales and runs, the composer
claimed (and is borne out by the score) that the distance between
successive notes was determined not — as usual in virtuoso pieces —
by considerations of fingering, but solely by the emotional distance
traversed by Silber between the days in question, as measured by the
corresponding photographs. And not even Silber could move his hands
up and down the keyboard fast enough to plot his change of moods,
from one day to the next, at a rate of twenty-four per second. What
matter are the intervals between the notes, however, and not the
notes themselves, so we must discount Silber"s claim that the time-
lapse film, with its moment-for-moment correlation between image and
sound, would serve future musicologists as a Rosetta stone to his
music. For such a key to the composer"s private language — a key
that, if it doesn"t open the door, at any rate fits in the lock — one
must consult his musical diary, as in due time we will.
.0. Ode to the West Wind 11:11
I first heard this piece, one windy night, in circumstances worth
recounting here. On November 2., 1998, I went to bed, as always, at
11:59 p.m., but found myself awake again a little after 1:00,
listening to faint piano music. I glared at the ceiling: sometimes I
suspected my upstairs neighbor — a certain Mr. Stickney, according to
his mailbox — of playing his Beethoven solely to annoy me. If I
returned from the library, say, entering our rooming house on tiptoe
and closing doors as stealthily as possible, I might hear, from
above, when I got to my room, the thousand strings of the Longines
Symphonette, but as soon as I unwittingly alerted Mr. Stickney to my
presence by coughing or turning on my TV set or programming my
microwave to heat a frozen dinner, he"d promptly switch to the
Moonlight Sonata, sometimes turning up the volume too, for an effect
more solar than lunar. I had complained to our landlady — Silber"s
sister, Helen — but she wasn"t sympathetic: as long as Mr. Stickney
didn"t play his music late at night, she said, I had no right to
silence him. Who was I, she wondered, to act as an arbiter of musical
taste? Most people, she reminded me, happen to like the Moonlight
Sonata. I hung up with the sense that she was friends, or friendly,
anyhow, with Mr. Stickney, who"d probably lived there forever. For a
while I fantasized about beating him up: I"d seen him at the
mailboxes once or twice, and he was shorter than I am.
Although I could put a name and a face to the music, I"d yet
to speak to their owner. So far the only fellow lodger I had been
unable to evade a conversation with was my next-door neighbor Billy,
who lived on pop and snack cakes, laughed aloud at sitcoms, and
sported a bicycle helmet indoors and out, though as far as I could
tell he didn"t own a bike. According to him, Mr. Stickney was a
substitute teacher at the local junior high, though they must not
have used him much, since even in the daytime he was almost always
home and listening to music.
I, too, played my music whenever I was home, but that was
mainly to mask other noises, especially Mr. Stickney"s. Deep down I
knew that silence would"ve been better to work by, if only I could
afford it. Sometimes I"d notice a sudden surge in my writing when a
record ended, like the surge in water pressure at the bathroom sink
when the toilet tank finishes refilling, as if the music — even if
I"d ceased to hear it — had been diverting a substantial fraction of
my attention. As if my neighbor (and his predecessors in half a dozen
other thin-walled rooming houses and barely partitioned apartments)
were the real reason for my failure.
Several times in recent weeks I"d been on the point of going
upstairs to complain about the Beethoven, but so far I hadn"t, for
the same reason that so many people hesitate to confront a noisy
neighbor: I was afraid to personalize the nuisance, since if the
person behind it proved to be rude or unreasonable, the noise I"d
somehow borne till now would thenceforth be unbearable. Till now,
though, my neighbor had always called it a night by eleven p.m. This
time he had crossed the line. The music wasn"t loud — it was barely
audible — but that I could hear it at all, at this hour, meant it was
too loud to tolerate. And I was about to stomp upstairs, pound on the
door, and complain — to insist on my right, at that hour ("It"s
1:17!"), to absolute silence, when, at 1:17 by my clock radio, I
realized that it was my own radio I was hearing: hours ago I"d turned
the volume down during a talk break, and then forgotten that the
thing was on. Happy to have been, for once, my own worst enemy, I
turned off the radio, then turned it back on and back up, wondering
how I could have mistaken this series of random notes (all falling
within the same octave, C to c_) in sudden clumsy fits, or fitful
clumps, for Beethoven at his best-loved.
A minute later the music stopped and the suave announcer
identified the work as "our own Simon Silber"s answer to the famous
Shelley poem "Ode to the West Wind."" According to legend (continued
the announcer), Silber had composed his ode, on five successive
nights in November "91, by transcribing his next-door neighbor"s wind
chimes. The announcer added that exactly seven years ago, days after
the piece was completed, its composer had been convicted of stealing
the chimes in question "so that he wouldn"t have to listen to them
anymore."
I"d heard that rumor before but had always dismissed it,
though Silber made no secret of hating wind chimes. More than once in
the course of our walks I"d seen him wince and glare at some
neighbor"s tinkling porch. Back in "91, it seems, the discount store
on Main Street had sold these chimes — chrome-plated tubes cut to
eight different lengths — for 97 cents a set, and for a while there
every other house in town had sported them, to Silber"s dismay:
according to him, the tubes were each a sixteenth of an inch too
long, and in consequence all the notes were flat. (The recording of
Ode on your disc was performed on a carefully de-tuned, or re-tuned,
piano.) That, insisted Silber, was "obviously" why the 97-Cent Store
had sold the chimes so cheap, though in fact only someone with
perfect pitch, like Silber himself, could have heard the defect
without a pitch pipe. Though he was usually able, on walks, to tune
out the ill-tempered chimes together with everything else, sometimes
on windy nights he found the noise so nerve-racking that he had to
stay indoors.
I mentioned the broadcast to Silber the next day when I ran
into him on Main Street on my way to the supermarket — an errand I
didn"t complete because Silber happened to be headed in the opposite
direction. (Some days I got rerouted like that more than once, since
Forest City was a small town and Silber the town"s most visible
pedestrian. Unable to think except on the move, he spent more time
walking around than anyone else I"d ever met; he taught me everything
I know about walking, aside from the rudiments of course. Well, I
wouldn"t have been writing a book about him in the first place if I
hadn"t been a tagalong at heart.) Did he know he"d been on the radio
last night? Silber sighed and said that for twenty years now he"d
submitted a tape of each new work to KDOA, but that except for his
Ode, which they played every year, and Crows, which they had recently
given its broadcast premiere, they refused to air his music. (It will
be noted that Silber"s method in Ode and in Crows is identical; in
both cases, the artistic results are of less interest to this
listener than the psychological compulsion that led the composer
again and again to take as his raw material the very noises that
annoyed him — have I mentioned that he hated birdsong even more than
wind chimes? — to the point of madness.)
When I asked Silber why KDOA played Ode — why that one work —
he shrugged. I mentioned the rumor the station was propagating.
"I don"t want to talk about that."
"But —"
But he had started humming something from Kreisleriana. One
of the more exasperating aspects of my job was that, though only too
happy to talk about himself, Silber decided which parts of that self
and its past were discussed. As soon as word got out that I was
writing his biography, his townspeople began to bombard me with
rumors — in the silent-study room at the public library, in the
checkout line at Food Town — but Silber would not comment on those
rumors. When asked a question that he hadn"t wanted to be asked, he
would fall silent, or rather stop talking and start humming. Had he
been arrested, years ago, for stealing wind chimes? Had he once been
in a mental institution? Had he been — was he still? — under
suspicion of arson? Why did the kids on his block all fear and
mythologize him, and what kernel of truth had inspired their wild
mistruths, assuming he didn"t eat cats and dogs, say, or hoard his
own feces in mason jars, labeled and dated, down in the basement? The
closer I felt myself drawing to any interesting truth about Silber,
the less he talked and the louder he hummed, and far from
illuminating some dark secret, I had to content myself, time after
time, with inferring its existence the same way astronomers infer a
black hole from the misbehavior of light in its vicinity.
The next morning, anyhow, I headed over to the library, where
I"d been doing most of my writing, and where I"d discovered that back
issues of the Forest City Ranger were preserved on microfilm. I found
the reel for the week of November 17 to November 24, 1991, and
threaded it into the viewer. Sure enough, the top story for November
23 was headlined "Local "Composer" Convicted of Theft." The
defendant, pronounced guilty of stealing wind chimes from his next-
door neighbor"s porch and from the front porches of seven other
houses along the route of his after-dinner walk, had been ordered to
return and rehang the stolen goods. He"d also been sentenced to a
semester of community service: teaching an ear-training class at the
elementary school.
Armed with a white-on-black photocopy of the article, I
ambushed my employer that evening at 8:07 at the corner of Thirteenth
and Tree. He"d forbidden me the day he hired me to set foot on his
property (lest I disrupt him at a crucial moment, like the
acquaintance who dropped in on Coleridge as the poet was
composing "Kubla Khan,"), and since he"d also rigged his answering
machine to intercept incoming calls in silence — and since he"d then
forget for days on end to check his messages — the best way to reach
him, when I really needed to, was to intercept his nightly walk,
which like his weekly drive had a fixed route. Since he also followed
a rigid schedule, a block-by-block timetable, I always knew exactly
where to find him, rain or shine, at 8:07, 8:18, or 8:54 p.m.
Silber scanned the flimsy photocopy, scowled, and abruptly
crumpled it into a ball.
"But I"m your biographer!"
"The only reason you"re working for me," he said slowly, as
if talking to a retarded person, "is that my first biographer kept
sniffing around like that." He nodded back over his shoulder, where
he"d tossed the wadded sheet.
"I"m sorry." On agreeing to write a book about him three
months earlier, I"d asked Silber about Tom, the first biographer, but
Silber said, "Never mind him." I"d asked to see Tom"s manuscript
(since that manuscript, like mine, was presumably its subject"s
property), but Silber had refused, not wanting me to build on Tom"s
foundation but to start again from scratch, excavating my own hole
without unearthing too much dirt. But it wasn"t always easy to
predict which parts of his past he would object to my unearthing. He
often made fun of his sister"s obsession with respectability, and
once said he didn"t mind appearing — to his townspeople and to
posterity — as a mad genius à la Schumann, but that he didn"t want to
look like "just another two-bit lunatic." I"m still not certain I get
the distinction, but my sense was that in the case of the wind-chime
episode, he was less ashamed of the crime itself than of the
punishment he"d acquiesced to. The news item I"d shown him was in
three columns, and it wasn"t till he"d reached the top of the third,
where it described his humiliating "sentence," that Silber had gotten
upset.
"So no more microfilm," he concluded.
I apologized again but secretly resolved thenceforth to keep
two books, like a dishonest businessman: sure, I"d write the insipid
hagiography I was being paid to write, but I"d also find out the
truth about Silber, and tell it in a thoroughly unauthorized
biography. I had been saving the censored index cards, and that night
I sorted them back into their original twelve topics and filed them
in a shoebox I labeled "The Thirteenth Stack" — my working title for
the unauthorized biography. From then on, any censored cards went in
that box, so I can say that Silber himself selected the contents of
the shadow biography: everything he cut from the official version,
and only what he cut (or would"ve cut, in the case of cards I knew
better than to show him in the first place), was guaranteed a place
in the unofficial by virtue of his very desire to suppress it. The
second, secret portrait would be a sort of photographic negative of
the official publicity shot, reversing the distribution of light and
shadow. It didn"t take a genius to guess which one would sell better.
Copyright © 2001 by Christopher Miller. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company.
Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: Composers Fiction, Fathers and sons Fiction