With a revulsion that had cost him dearly, Jules had shied away from a theoretical approach to music. Never could he rise in the faculty, because he preferred neither to analyze the miracles within music nor to question its natural flow. He had taught a small corps of great musicians, even if as the classical music audience disappeared none of them had had either the inclination to hire a publicist or the personality to appeal naturally to the public – and thus break through to fame and riches. They labored in obscurity. He was capable of expertly teaching the technicalities. With his long experience these came easily, and as a Ma?tre he was unchallenged. That was not however the essence of what he provided to his students. First he made sure that they played flawlessly, and when he was assured that they did, he bid them disengage. That is, analogously, to close their eyes and take their hands from the wheel or let go of the reins.
“Music,” he told them, countering their education and the ethos of his country, his continent, and the century, “is not made by man. If you know this and surrender to it you’ll allow its deeper powers to run through you. It’s all a question of opening the gates. Of risking your disappearance and accepting it. If you arrive at that state you’ll be effortlessly propelled, seized, and possessed by the music. Paradoxically, your timing will be perfect as time ceases to exist. All matter, and even we, are a construction of energy, and all energy is pulse and proportion. Within the most stolid block of granite, electrons have never ceased to circle and speed. Perhaps if you could see them they’d look like stars. Whether or not they pulse with light, they are animate. In us, animation is body and soul. We move, we sense, we see, all by the organization of irrepressible primal pulses. When music is great, it’s coordinate with those. You can’t engineer this: it’s too fine. You just have to accept it.”
“How,” they would ask, in their expressions.
“Give it everything, work ‘til exhaustion, exceed yourself, risk, and it will come to you. And then, if you’ve done your homework, it will be beautiful.”
Delphine – tall, fine featured, with brown hair pulled back and beautifully braided – was like so many musicians of her sex highly intelligent and always quietly judging. Her violin and bow had been resting on her lap but secure in her hands. Then she straightened, and held out violin and bow slightly to each side, lifting them as in a question. “And what is beautiful?” she challenged.
“I realize,” Jules answered, “that anyone your age has had a relativistic education. I realize as well that Croce produced a thick volume attempting, even if sideways, to arrive at a definition of beauty, and couldn’t. Just because you can’t catch and stuff it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that you can’t see it. And it isn’t in the eye of the beholder but rather that people see differently and some are entirely blind. The keen, the myopic, the color blind, and the blind looking at a mountain range from different angles and in different light would see or not see many different things, but the mountain range would be the same.
“For me, beauty is a hint, a flash, a glimpse of the divine and a promise that the world is good. And in music that spark can be elongated long enough to be a steady light.”
Often they heard what he was saying but couldn’t allow themselves to know it, such was their education. Furthermore, they didn’t think he would actually say what they feared he would say, and what some of them longed for, unless he were pressed and cornered. But they didn’t know him. They didn’t know that he was only the latest of untold generations that had not failed to assert what current generations denied, and that those to whom Jules was heir had done so for thousands of years and at immediate pain of death, which often followed. At the age of four this ancient, stubborn confession had been thrust into his child’s heart as if by cauterizing steel, and neither force nor fashion could turn him from it.
They would think that, out of fear, he would go no further, for in university faculties there is a kind of terror to which they were highly attuned because they were young and still had far to go. But then he would shock and surprise them as much by what would appear to be his tranquility as by what he would say. “Quite simply, and make of it what you will: music is the voice of God.”
They had to reject this, or at least they thought they did, to make their ways in the world. They had to make a living. They had to support families that, though they did not yet exist, would come. How could they own up to such a thing, something that could not be proved but only asserted or, according to Jules Lacour, experienced? So they kept their distance until – if they worked hard enough and were devoted enough, and could, without design, flow through a piece without effort – when they were at home alone or in some cold and drafty practice studio, or on a stage, blindingly lit, their selves would disappear, gravity and time would cease to exist, sound and light would combine, and they would know that their sacrifices had not been in vain, that their poverty had been riches, that the world was not only what it seemed, and that what Jules had said was true.
THUS HE WOULD make clear to his students and to himself time and again that he preferred waves to wave theory, that, in his view, a porpoise understands wave theory better than a physicist. “Look,” he would say, “at home I have a stainless steel drain strainer, which when struck with a spoon produces a perfect, unclouded C with fifteen seconds of sustain. Were I younger I might be able to hear thirty seconds. The quality of beauty is implicit in my kitchen-sink strainer despite its uninspiring form and function – implicit in the steel, implicit in the form, and brought out by what? Accident? Perception? Illusion? Or perhaps by something greater, waiting to spring, that would sound, and sing, forever.”
But then, contradicting himself, he did have a theory about the power of photographs. God knows, he spent enough time looking at photographs and paintings: that is, portraits. Landscapes could be exquisite, but in painting it was the human form that, like music, lent itself to transcendent powers. Facial expression, the way a body was positioned – these were language beyond language that could communicate an infinite variety of messages, coexisting even if contradictory, until their power was intensified beyond what intellect could describe.
His theory of photographs was so simple as almost not to be a theory, which pleased him in that he didn’t want it to be. It stemmed from a movie he had seen. He couldn’t remember which, but in it a detective solved a crime by looking carefully at a photograph and noticing something or someone in the background, that, caught by a shutter speed of hundredths of a second, otherwise would have passed unnoticed.