Performance Anxiety

“I did.” Tina had a nerve. My first big date with Kurt had been an audition.

The evening after the broom-closet incident, he’d sent an unsigned note to me in the women’s chorus dressing room asking me to wait for him in the lobby of his hotel, and then to follow him up to his room at a distance. I was a bit put out by the cloak-and-dagger stuff but I did what I was told. I watched him get his key at the front desk of the Pan Pacific, then went up a few paces behind him. He left the door of his hotel room ajar, so I went in without knocking. When I came into the room, he was already seated at the piano.

Kurt had an entire suite. His rooms had fruit baskets, fresh-cut flowers, iced champagne, little chocolates on the pillow, pristine perfumed bed linen, Chinese screens, a giant claw-foot tub, a recently tuned Steinway baby grand piano and a spectacular view of Vancouver harbor.

I had to stand for a minute and take in the hotel suite. The best hotel in my hometown of Cold Shanks has lasagna carpeting to hide the spills and a series of black-velvet masterpieces and sad clown faces decorating the flocked bordello wallpaper.

Before he touched or kissed me again, Kurt asked me to sing for him. I was ready for it. In fact, I’d prayed for it to happen. I took some music out of my bag and put it on the piano. First I sang some French songs by Ravel and then some Rossini.

Without a word, Kurt then thrust a part of his song cycle at me and made me sight-sing it cold. I had to concentrate so hard I practically sweated treble clefs. Later, he made me sing it again. I must have impressed him because he was happy enough with my interpretation to promise me that I would be the one to premiere it with the Vancouver Symphony the following March.

But first, I’d have to deal with Madame Klein. She disapproved of young singers doing anything that was slightly beyond them, and Kurt’s music was difficult, even more difficult than Oskar Klein’s music. Oskar had been a composer in the line of Richard Strauss. The avant-garde composers of his time accused Oskar of holding back the progress of music, because his music was harmonic and harked back to romanticism. But it was singable, accessible, moving and beautiful.

As for Kurt’s music, that was something else.

Kurt’s music was all the fault of the composer Arnold Schoenberg and his twelve-tone row.

One day at the beginning of the twentieth century, old Arnie must have woken up, taken a sip of his good strong Viennese coffee, clutched his stomach and yelled, “Mein Gott im Himmel,” as an undiagnosed ulcer started acting up. Maybe if he’d been feeling good about himself and the world, he would have sat down and written some gorgeous postromantic tonal symphony.

Instead, old Arnie had a bone to pick with the world.

You have to picture a short, balding man, whose big bulging eyes were filled with a fanatical gleam as he thought, “Ja. I’ll make all of them suffer, too. I shall invent the twelve-tone row and then they’ll be really sorry.”

So he uses the twelve notes that you find in an octave of black and white piano keys, lines them up in some kind of arbitrary order and calls it a tone row. Then he takes that little sucker of a tone row and sticks it everywhere in his composition, and God help you if you don’t know it’s there because that’s the whole point of the exercise. The new big test for the musical-chic crowd—spot Arnie’s tone row.

It’s also been called serial music, and I can guarantee that at times it’s been serial murder to listen to.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, Arnie had to go and start teaching his new approach and acquiring his disciples, Webern and Berg.

Collectively, they make up the group that I like to call the Bing Bang Bong Boys.

Imagine a cat with a really sophisticated sense of rhythm walking around on the piano. Black keys. White keys. It doesn’t matter. Then imagine scoring that sound for a big orchestra. That’s more or less how atonal music sounds.

I’m not saying this music doesn’t have its uses. Hollywood has gotten great mileage out of it for scoring movies about stalkers, slash murderers, killer vegetables, sharks and a whole galaxy of alien predators.

Schoenberg’s tone row is to music what Finnegan’s Wake is to literature. Do you curl up with Finnegan’s Wake when you want to have a nice relaxing read? Tell the truth now.

Okay. I know. Tonality had to go out the window. For the sake of artistic progress. It was a dirty job and somebody had to do it. And Arnie, Arnie was a guy with a real sense of mission, just the man for the job.

However, when I want a piece of serious music to curl up with, I choose something sweet and harmonic. Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Prokofiev’s First Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs, Mozart’s clarinet concerto. Curling up to Schoenberg and the Bing Bang Bong Boys is like trying to cling to a slippery piece of driftwood in the middle of a desolate stormy ocean.

As for Kurt Hancock’s music, it wasn’t that his pieces didn’t have lush tonal, even pretty, moments. They did. But as soon as you thought those moments were going to blossom into a big phantasmagoric sequence of absolutely gorgeous harmonies, the composition moved into barbed and nerve-jangling Bing Bang Bong.

After I’d sight-sung Kurt’s song cycle for the first time that day at the Pan Pacific, I’d wanted to shake him and yell, “Why can’t you write melodic singable songs, goddammit?” But Kurt was regarded as an important composer, very much in demand, and the Vancouver Symphony had actually commissioned this song cycle to its great expense.

And when I made sneaky references to my feelings on atonal composition, Kurt had said, “What makes you think that listening to music should be an enjoyable experience, Miranda? It can be a significant, historical experience without necessarily being enjoyable.”

Well…gosh…slap me silly.

Maybe, in the future, I could influence Kurt’s music in some way, put a flea in his ear about accessibility.

I’d hoped our relationship would take a little quality leap that day but it didn’t happen. By the time I’d finished singing, we were both late for other commitments. Though I was tentatively delirious to be premiering a Kurt Hancock composition, now that the March date was looming before me, I only had six months to make it perfect. And as I mentioned, I still had to tell Madame Klein and she wouldn’t necessarily be happy about it, at all.

“Miranda…hey, Miranda. Earth to Miranda.”

Tina then pinched my arm. She persisted, “I said I never thought of you as the type to audition flat on her back.” But she was smiling as she said it.

“Jeez, Tina. You could have as many gigs as you want if you only spent a little more time on yours.”

“Yeah, maybe.” She grinned.

I went on, “If Kurt’s still with his wife when I’m over there, fine. I’ll be staying with my father anyway and we’ll have a lot of catching up to do. If Kurt’s not with his wife, we’ll spend some time together. But he says they’re on the rocks and that they’re definitely breaking up. I told him I was hoping to get the audition and he said if I did, we should see each other in London, because he’d be home over Christmas. He has no engagements. They’re not even spending Christmas together. That says it all.”

“Ooookaay. Normally, if it were me, that is, I’d ask the guy to show me the documentation. This isn’t exactly a new one, but shit, it’s Kurt Hancock, so I guess I have to believe his story. I mean, would a guy with a million Deutsche Grammophon recordings to his name string you that kind of crap? I guess these things happen in life, but jeez, Miranda, why couldn’t you find a man who gets right to the point?”

“I know, I know. Listen, he’s going to be at the dinner party tomorrow night. He promised he’d come. But this all has to stay between you and me. If he finds out I’ve told you about us, he’ll be mad. Typical temperamental-artist type, right?”

Tina smirked. “I’ll be checking you two out at the party tomorrow. For an afterglow.”

“Or a really pissed-off expression.”

“I’m dying to hear what happens. I bet he’s hot. You can tell by the way he conducts. You lucky bitch. I’m so jealous.”

I’d been keeping the whole Kurt thing to myself for too long. Now that I’d let it leak to Tina, I felt a little less anxious. “I’ll tell you tomorrow at the party. But don’t get too excited. You never know what could happen.”

Chapter 4

Tina Browning and I both come from the same cow town in the interior of B.C. Cold Shanks. I’m not kidding, that’s its name. There used to be a big slaughterhouse there before the war. After all the cattle were butchered, a lot of the meat was put in the big icehouse before being shipped out, but the best cuts always went out first and the shanks were left over. Tons and tons of them. Hence, Cold Shanks. The icehouse, full of shanks, is gone now but the cowboys and heifers are still there.

Tina Browning came from the main trailer park, the one down by the river, and I came from a suburb that thought it was a lot better than the trailer park. Tina’s last name helped her overcome the pall that hung over a lot of the trailer-park people. The teachers got it into their heads that she was a distant relation to Robert Browning, as in Elizabeth Barrett, and Tina did nothing to dissuade them.

Tina and I hated each other’s guts when we were at school. By the time we had reached the age of thirteen, it was total warfare. We were always pitted against each other in the solo-voice category at every music festival. It was a take-no-hostages situation, the two of us glaring thunderbolts at each other across our parents and the audience in the Kiwanis Hall just before we each took our turn trilling out “When I Am Laid” by Mr. Henry Purcell or the “Habanera” from Bizet’s Carmen. I always thought my clothes would give me the edge, but despite Tina’s trailer-trash dresses and my mother’s hand-sewn masterpieces, Tina often took first prize. Sometimes we tied though, which left us both furious.

We were a couple of unlikely prodigies, coming as we did from families where a musical background meant being able to sing along to our parents’ antique record collections; the Rolling Stones or the complete opus of Dolly Parton. Tina had been named after Tina Turner if that gives you any idea where her mother was coming from. Not that Dolly, or the Stones or Tina were such bad examples. Not at all. The real trouble was, Cold Shanks just didn’t have enough room for two Charlotte Church-style divas.

But then, when we both ended up by accident in the only big city we could afford to move to, Vancouver, and in the same university music department, we realized that we were very small insignificant fish in a great big pond. Everybody was so much better than us and more sophisticated and so completely at home, that we were pushed into each other’s company out of pure shame.

First, it was the all-night bus ride home that got Tina and I talking to each other. Nobody ever slept on those trips. It was too uncomfortable. Going home for Christmases, Easters and half-term breaks we were often on the same 11:00 p.m. Greyhound headed into the interior. It was impossible for us to avoid each other, two mezzo-sopranos both being tortured by the same bunch of singing teachers and coaches, both being put through the wringer by the same theory and composition professors.

Tina got me on her side definitively one day in the singing master class at the U when roles were being assigned. They’d given Tina a juicy gutbuster of a role, Azucena in Il Trovatore, and all through the auditorium, I could see the other mezzos visibly radiating hatred and envy in her direction. Tina stood up there on that stage in front of the entire singing department and the conductor of the orchestra, as if she didn’t give a damn, and said, “I just want to know one thing. Does this Azucena chick get to screw the tenor before the final curtain?”

Second, Tina and I shared one big fundamental problem. Music theory. They had it. We didn’t. When the guilty party, the only floating elementary-school music teacher in the town of Cold Shanks, discovered early in our lives that we had voices, she’d done her best to bang the notes into us any old way she could, so we’d done all our learning by ear. Written music had no more meaning than mouse prints on train tracks for us. We had a lot of lost time to make up for when we arrived at university. But we had something huge in our favor:

We loved music.

I loved music so much that when I was a little kid, I used to grab other little kids on the playground, kids I knew who were getting more music lessons than me, and tell them, “Sing or I’ll hit you.” I never stopped until I’d bullied their whole repertoire out of them.

Tina and I missed Cold Shanks badly those first years. We would swap stories over beer and junk food and wax nostalgic about cowboys, big hair and big steaks. Together we worked on self-improvement. We practiced talking like high-brow musical prodigies and peed ourselves laughing. The other singers in the department were so smart-ass and vegetarian. And they were always going on about their biorhythms. I thought a biorhythm was a new kind of beat from the Bayou.