Rarely does a novel teach you to listen. There is a scene in Richard Powers’s Orfeo in which the protagonist, avante-garde composer Peter Els, presents his final undergraduate composition at a famed music school in rural Indiana to his tutor, Karol Kopacz. The first measure is a “compact chromatic phrase, packed with every one of Western music’s twelve available notes, twice over”.
Kopacz grimaces and commands Els to go to the piano and hit a key, any key. Asked what he hears, Els says: “C”. Kopacz tells him to hit the key again and asks him what else he hears. “C-2”. “What else?” asks Kopacz. This goes on. “His teacher hangs his head and groans for civilization’s sad waste. Just listen, he begs. Stay inside the sound.”
It eventually dawns on Els that every note, if you listen hard enough and long enough, contains within itself every pitch in the chromatic scale.
In this novel we meet Peter Els toward the end of his life, when he is 70, circa 2011. The scene with Kopacz is a memory from 1963 when Els was discovering his genius, about to have his heart broken, and not too far from meeting the woman who would mend it. He would also spend the next decade or more composing music almost no-one would hear while the USA experienced its most revolutionary period of the 20th Century.
Powers’s writing about the creation of these compositions is a more subtle reinforcement of the request to listen, really listen. To listen so fixedly, and for so long, that you get bored, and through boredom discover new layers of sound that dispel the boredom.
There is also Powers’s writing about what the compositions sound like, which could well be unique in its descriptive power while avoiding the trap of technical language only a trained musician would understand.
But Els is also a biologist, or was before he gave it up for music. When we meet him he’s back at it, splicing DNA in bacteria samples in his home laboratory with equipment and bacteria samples all ordered online. He’s working on his last great composition, the one truly no-one will hear; existing in the DNA sequencing of the relatively harmless bacteria living in your shower grout, your drain, the bottom of your shoe.
Except that due to a panicked moment of calling 911 because his beloved dog is dying, the cops pay a visit. In the post 9-11 war on terrorism, alarmed by what they see but do not understand, the feds are called in and before he has time to think about it, he’s on the run.
And thus we have music, biogenetics, American paranoia, and roadtripping skillfully combined in a contiguous story that rolls through the present and Els’s past, including his madcap collaborations with the charismatically frenetic choreographer Richard Bonner, his love, loss, marriage and the dissolution thereof.
In some ways Orfeo is an elegy for a fictional character we come to, if not love, then for whom we at least develop a deep fondness if only for his utterly charming lack of need for recognition. It is also poetic in its sense of poignancy, its joyfully melancholic tone combined with a sense of how easily innocence is lost but also, how it might be regained if only we would take the time to really, truly, listen. And look. And feel.
Orfeo, by Richard Powers, was first published in 2014. It was listed as one of the Huffington Post’s 30 books you have to read that year.