The new difficulty was particularly
exasperating for the reason that,
while the Lesser Accord seemed to be more or less
of one mind, the greater accord had all but ceased
to exist as anything but a name
that a few of us would whisper to each other
from time to time as if to lessen our regret.
When we approached the one who had come forth
to tell the story with the undeniable
fact of blatant, widespread dispersion, he merely
shrugged his shoulders and indicated that,
at least for the time being, he was more concerned
with ingratiating himself with the LA
than with the feeble complaints of a few
malcontents who felt that things hadn’t fallen out
to their best advantage. And to think of the faith
and hope we had placed in this character!
He did, on the other hand, manage to direct
the attention of those few of us who were left
with the wit to contemplate such matters
away from the incipient depredations
of the Lesser Accord and their herb-occluded
hilarity onto some other parts
of our former world that were patiently waiting
to be hauled up from the murky pit of the breach.
While all of us had been preoccupied
with the grim business of jokes, we had forgotten
the similarly distressing predicament
involving our erstwhile tunes. That’s to say,
it was possible for us to hear the old songs
in two alternative, highly distinct manners.
To relate the first: We were fairly sure
of how the melodies had sounded formerly
as, unlike the jokes, they had all been well-preserved
in manuscript, if not indeed in sound.
The difficulty was that when we played them out
they had a rather different effect on us
and presented a largely altered sense
from what we had recalled. Yet there could be small doubt
as to the basic correctness of our playing.
We recalled how the various symbols
were to be interpreted just as clearly as
we could remember that day passes into night,
night into day, so on and so forth.
But our attempts resulted in a confusion
unrelated to such matters as consonance,
dissonance and the old cacophonies
or with whether the sounded rhythms accorded
with the layout of notes, pitches, etc.
A confusion beyond sound, as it were.
When we attempted to play the familiar airs
we found ourselves uncomfortably transported
into an inextricably prolix
webbing of disputable memories, affects
that somewhat distantly resembled sadnesses,
and intimations so disconcerting
we wondered if they were veritably human.
Once we were pulled from our stupor by an abrupt
change in the weather, by an unfriendly
nudge in the ribs from a member of the LA,
or by the silence that invariably fell
upon the double-bar after the long
decrescendo and the last fermata, we were
able to see that what we’d just experienced
may have included remnants or shadows
of the old tunes – though transfigured well beyond sound –
but didn’t resemble what we remembered
of our old enjoyments and certainly
could not be put into words for the benefit
of anyone who was unable to attend.
The other means of accessing our tunes
involved playing back those that were still buoying
up and down on some floating bark of memory
without referring to any printed
material and to have the scribes among us
skilled in the business of song transcribe what we played.
Yet when we tried to match the end results
with the manuscripts that had been rescued from out
of the breach, we found that, apart from the symbols
employed, which evidently had suffered
little corruption, there was no correspondence
with respect to rhythm or tone, key or meter,
pitch or tempo.
As might be expected
from what I have already related, it was
the LA that came to our rescue, having grown
impatient of our wearied, half-hearted
efforts to regain and remaster the old tunes
(and they even condescended to inform us
that our efforts with respect to our jokes
had depleted us of energy in advance
of the manifold tasks that yet awaited us).
The solution that they came to was so
unlike anything we had associated
with the art of melody that for quite a while
many among us refused to admit
that it indeed was song. But what truly enraged
the precious few of us left who had claimed to speak
for the greater accord was that they used
this “new manner” (as they often referred to it)
as a memory aid in the acquisition
and further study of the jokes that we
ourselves had created, no thanks at all to them.
Yes, it was like adding insult to injury.
Just as they were building academies
in which they might persuade members of the greater
accord to be schooled in the interpretation
of jokes that had been of our own making
(and, what was even worse, collect payment for it),
we found that we now were expected to suffer
an entirely new humiliation
when they began submitting these inscrutable
creations of ours to a style of performance
that for us was both raucous and brutal,
although the fashionable opinion for them
to air among themselves was that this, at long last,
was art – bona fide art…an art, that is,
“of the people.” What people? And of what accord?
[Next: The Matter of a Venue]