Review of Orfeo by Richard Powers
We don’t fully understand the link with Orfeo (Orpheus) until the end of Richard Powers’ book, when we have to acknowledge Els’ life’s goal in hindsight as the strivings, like Orfeus, of the musical being known for his ability to charm all living things, capable of even moving stones to tears. Like Orfeo, Els dies at the hands of those who cannot hear his divinely-inspired music. The Greek historian Strabo wrote of Orpheus as a mortal suspected of hatching a violent plot by his killers – and this is pretty much what happens to poor Peter Els in the book.
As I began reading Orfeo, it struck me that Peter’s father’s death merited only a quarter of a page, yet the author’s digressions on Kindertotenlieder and his dead dog, Fidelio, and the reminiscences of their attendance of musical funerals (really!) went on for pages. Powers worked a little too hard to sell us the notion that Els was a high-strung music geek – the kind who has a little eight year-old’s erection when he hears dissonant music for the first time. Please. I was really not enjoying the book at first.
But it did eventually get better.
Within short order we learn that Els is obsessed with the notion of creating transcendent music, something good, something unique, something remarkable, something possibly even holy. Unfortunately he cannot seem to find it in a world that filters out so much, that has such a short attention span: a world that generates and treats music like a commodity. Intermixing hints of the godliness of Els’ goals – and hints of a social critique of art in a capitalist society – muddies Powers’ theme.
In the first 70+ pages we find Els persisting in his art, but also taking the occasional shortcut. He experiments with Markov chains – probabilistic state machines that permit new states to be randomly generated. If you’ve heard it – and it exists – Markov chain-generated music is dull and lifeless, even when using many orders of complexity and tweaked by a human hand. It is unsurprising that Els moves on to something more alive – though randomness is at the heart of both his music and his life.
Els is explicitly compared to Faust several times – more muddying. He makes the acquaintance of Richard Bonner, a performance artist and artistic co-conspirator described as “seductive,” and he begins to see the act of making art as not simply bold but subversive. Is Orfeo the story of a Faust’s fatal seductions by a Mephistopheles or is it what happens when artists have impossibly high ambitions and are not understood?
Ultimately, Els’ wife Maddy, once a fringe musician herself but now a responsible wife and mother, begins to appear to him as a “schoolmarm” and his marriage and relationship with daughter Sara founder as he goes his own way and they move to Saint Louis. He lives a somewhat itinerant existence until (by random chance, again) he becomes a lowly adjunct professor in a charity appointment.
Much of the plot of Orfeo is counterposed with events of the Sixties through 9/11. There is the occasional reference to theory of art under capitalism (recalling Adorno and the Frankfurter school). In numerous places music (recounting the experiences of Messaiaen and Shostakovich, for example) is described as subversive to the state, and even Els’ innocent project of producing music with a telephone keypad for his daughter may have had unintended consequences (unwittingly dialing emergency services) that leave him on a Homeland Security watchlist. Creating custom sequences of DNA encoded with music might have seemed like conceptual art to Els, but in post 9/11 Amerika it is an attack on die Heimat, Verrat gegen das Vaterland.
Many reviews of the book seem to peg Orfeo as an exercise in music appreciation, and no doubt Powers adores the composers he describes. However, for “civilians” like me it was also a book about seeking patterns and manipulating them. Many of the obsessions of practitioners of art, music, and literature seem to center on recognition of patterns and concepts, and/or imposing, forcing, shoe-horning, conjuring, or wishing them [just as often inartfully] into some kind of artistic vision. To some degree, everyone in Els’ family is guilty of this offense: his doomed authoritarian father; his brother Paul, a conspiracy theorist; and his sister Susan, living in an ashram in India. Els, either by temperament or choice of collaborators, is looking for meaning in nature and working mightily to convert nature into meaning. Even Els daughter Sara is a data mining whiz – perhaps the ultimate in pattern recognition pursuits. Maybe there’s no avoiding it: it’s just what we humans do.
There is a sequence in the book early on in which Els goes for his morning walk and encounters a Spandex goddess running while listening to her iPod, filtering thousands of melodies by sending them like a concentration camp guard either to the right, where they live for a closer listening later, or to the left, where they meet a certain death. “The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.” We learn that Els has a rule for himself: that he will always listen through to the end of a piece. This flaunts the practices of a society whose teens are drowning in Adderall. After attempting to listen to the hour-long pieces Powers has chosen to describe in the novel, I confess to firmly belonging to the ranks of Adderall philistines. Life is too short to honor or indulge every artist’s notion.
Society’s brutal winnowing principle is not just for the products of art but for artists as well. Society surrounds “dangerous” art and artists like macrophages attacking pathogens – a principle reflected in the paranoia overtaking our nation. “The race now bunkered down behind the barricades, surrounded by illegals and sleeper cells of every imaginable strain.” Once Els goes on the run, someone discovers an old composition of his and “mines” the lyrics for dangerous and subversive references. Society is clearly afraid of challenge and provocation – if nowhere else than in the citizenry’s pointy little heads.
Els is painfully aware that his artistic search is not bringing him any pleasure, nor does it seem to bring anyone else much. In England after a traffic-direction miscalculation has killed his mother while vacationing there, Els goes to a pub and sees happy publicans singing to crude tunes: “People at pushed-together tables sang club football songs, swaying to more communal pleasure in three minutes than Peter’s music had created in thirty years.” How easy it is for artists to doubt themselves. And sometimes with inexplicably good reason.
Our protagonist lives in an age in which randomness, chaos, and lack of control are what truly set the world in motion. And why should his art not reflect this reality? Watching the Arab Spring unfold, we see it through Els’ eyes: “As in every large production Els had ever worked on, chaos called the tune.” Thus, we can imagine, his interest in musical DNA was hatched.
Still in England, Els visits his first love, Clara, who has set him on his artistic trajectory. They have dinner and she takes him upstairs to her bedroom, telling him everything is on the table, anything is possible – and he flees from her. It seems tragic to the reader but Els senses the same danger in Clara that society senses in him – and he does not have the courage to live life on these terms. He really doesn’t know in which world he belongs. On the one hand, he is Sara’s father (“make something good, daddy”) and on the other a subversive wannabe. This is the tragedy of the book. He cannot be a god.
Els eventually writes an opera entitled “City of God.” It is a Reformation tragedy based on actual events in Münster, Germany. A group of Protestant religious fanatics who have become polygamists believe the earthly world must end before a heavenly kingdom replaces it. Bonner is a collaborator in the production, but it is threatened by oddly similar events unfolding in real time in Waco, Texas. We learn that Els is not in the enterprise solely for fame, since he pulls away from his own opera when Waco hits the news. Something else motivates him (l’art pour l’art)? Somehow we start taking his music more seriously, seeing him as more artistically principled, but simultaneously as more timid.
Els, based on positive reviews of his opera, is then offered a job as an adjunct music professor and one of his students comes for musical advice, showing him a complex composition it turns out was written by software called “Sibelius” – a “program that turns an average tunesmith into Orpheus.” Shortcuts call out to Els again. Is he himself an average tunesmith who needs a lab full of DNA to make him another Orpheus. The answer is: yes.
After concocting his test-tube music and being investigated after his dog’s death, the seventy-one year-old Els goes on the run, first visiting a therapist with whom he once had an affair, his ex-wife, Bonner (now in an Arizona care facility for Alzheimer’s patients), and finally his daughter. By now we have learned that Els has tinnitus, brain lesions which have affected his musical sensibilities, and Bonner has convinced him that, as long as he is considered a terrorist, he might as well engender a little terror – by leaving a trail of vaguely incriminating Tweets. As Els navigates to his daughter’s house in a borrowed car with “the Voice” app on a borrowed cellphone, he notices the marks of tramps and vagrants on the highway, recalling a composer who memorialized them. To a consummate pattern-seeker like Els there are signs and wonders everywhere. His frame of reference has always been musical, but ultimately all of life is just random noise.
Finally Els arrives at his daughter’s house. He notices she has a piano and has not, apparently, rejected everything musically important to him. But, having sufficiently alarmed Homeland Security, Els is now surrounded by a SWAT team. With his musical powers gone and seeing his life as one huge mistake, Els decides to “arm” himself with a thin flower vase – art as a weapon – all too easily confused with a beaker of pathogens. We know how this sad story is going to end – and in the tragic end the novel is ultimately focused on society’s fear of art and the difficult path to it by artists of any stripe – not solely as a music appreciation project by Powers, the failed composer.
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