Sweeter Life Tapa blanda - 2003

Extracto

We talk because we are mortal. -- Octavio Paz

And because we aren’t gods,
or close to gods,
we sing.
-- Donald McKay, Another Gravity



Fling the emptiness out from
your arms
into the spaces we breathe: maybe the birds will
feel the thinner air with a more inward flight.
–Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies

( silence )

Imagine the scene in Woodstock, New York, on August 29, 1952. John Cage, that most puzzling of American composers, has come to the Maverick Concert Hall for the first public performance of what will become his most famous, and infamous, work. He is forty years old, with angular features and dark hair and a dazzle of laughter in his eyes. He is pretty much unknown outside a small circle of intellectuals, and, even among that select group, some question the value of his work. His Music of Changes, for example, based on the random toss of coins, created more confusion than pleasure when it debuted the previous year.

But picture him there at the Maverick in a dark checked suit, with a white shirt open at the collar. He stands serenely backstage, tapping neither his fingers nor his foot as the crowd files into the hall.

They have come on this overcast summer evening to support the Benefit Artists Welfare Fund and are prepared for an evening of challenging music. The performances will vary, with works by Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Pierre Boulez. Cage’s newest composition, 4'33", will be the second-last selection on the evening’s program, followed only by The Banshee, written by Henry Cowell. The young pianist David Tudor is the featured performer.

Cage is pleased with the choice of venue. The back of the hall opens on the surrounding forest, and he can feel the humidity of the summer night and hear the occasional breeze sweep through the trees outside. He is so excited by the possibilities that, when the concert begins, he pays little attention. Instead he thinks about sources and directions, where his music has come from and where it is likely to go. He knows he will be asked how he came to write a piece such as 4'33", and he wonders how better to explain that time, not pitch, lies at the heart of music, seeping into our consciousness with every pulse of our mothers’ blood, and that time, the sad half of Einstein’s universe, is what we are born to sing.

When Tudor walks onstage, he is holding Cage’s handwritten score and a small stopwatch. He sits behind the grand piano and arranges his music. Grave and graceful, he lowers the fallboard, the double-hinged cover that protects the keys, then clicks the small button of his timepiece. He sits motionless. He makes no sound. After exactly thirty seconds, he clicks the stopwatch and raises the fallboard to reveal once again the eighty-eight keys. He fills his lungs with air. He takes a moment to compose himself.

The second movement begins in the same way, with the lowering of the keyboard cover. This middle movement is much longer and requires Tudor to turn the pages of the score. He pays no attention to the growing uneasiness of the crowd. Again he makes no sound.

A third movement and still he sits, silent as a mime, dark with concentration. The nervous muttering in the hall grows to a howl of outrage by the end of the piece and Tudor’s departure from the stage after exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. And remember, the audience is comprised of people who cherish the arts, who relish the cutting edge. Even so, they believe, almost without exception, that Cage has gone too far.

The creator hears something quite different that day. Instead of silence, Cage notices the sound of wind in the trees, the complicated rhythms of rain on the roof, the audience chattering like small birds. And he is pleased. It is the embodiment of an idea that came to him a year before.

On a whim, he had dropped by a Harvard lab, their anechoic chamber -- what others referred to as “the dead room.” It was, he’d been told, a scientific marvel, a chamber of utter stillness. In that muffled womb of sculpted foam and baffles, he hoped to experience a silence both perfect and profound. Instead he heard two distinct sounds that day, one high and one low: the thrumming of his nervous system and blood, he was later told, a lesson that would change his music entirely and lead him to 4'33".

Because life knows nothing of silence. Between nerves and blood a song will emerge. Between mind and heart a life will flow. Between words and music a story will unfold.

( words and music )



One

Seagulls huddled in a field, querulous and surreal in the misty morning light. As a tractor approached, they rose into the air in waves, a reluctant cloud of grey and white flecked here and there with yellow beak and black stripe. When they settled moments later on the freshly tilled soil, they knew immediately that something important had passed among them, that the earth beneath their feet had been altered, made new again.

The wind gathered strength off the lake, scattering the last tatters of fog and dancing the branches of the willow where red-winged blackbirds sang of springtime and distant travel. Beneath the tree, near the edge of the irrigation pond, Cyrus Owen sat with his Labrador retriever, Blackie, and waited for the sun to clear the top of the corncrib by the barn. That would be the signal to head back to the house.

Cyrus, a nineteen-year-old farm boy, was lean and muscular from his share of chores. His shoulder-length blond hair danced in every gust of wind, his eyes never straying from the tractor as it crossed the field. There was an edginess about him, a youthful intensity that some might call a sense of purpose.

To watch him as he sat there -- really, to see him anywhere, at school, at home -- you would never notice that he was born without a ring finger on his left hand. It was not a big deal for him anymore. He had long ago worked out most of his difficulties, both physical and emotional, and seldom gave it a thought. Even so, as a matter of habit, he tended to stand with his left hand in his pocket, or to sit with his fist stuck between his legs. It wasn’t a conscious thing on his part, but a residual pose from a more insecure time in his life.


From the Hardcover edition.

Reseñas en medios

“Wynveen’s knowledge and love of music infuse his work, but … it is in crafting the story -- of having dreams come true, of failure, of knowing one’s true home -- that Wynveen shows his talent as a writer…. Wynveen has succeeded in writing a lyrical novel about families, dreams and the harsh realities of real life.” -- The Calgary Herald

“Tim Wynveen takes us on the road with a wannabe rock star who lives and finally loses his dream. Sweeter Life is tender and wise, a novel about the trials of creating and performing, but also about discovering the greater music of friendship and love." -- Cynthia Holz

“…a wholly satisfying novel…. Sweeter Life is a fine piece if storytelling, full of memorable characters and the kind of rewards promised by the title.” -- eye magazine

“Wynveen crafts the interactions among his characters as carefully as if he were creating a multi-layered chord…. Wynveen’s greatest accomplishment in this book is his power to make music manifest on the page…. [Wynveen] is unafraid to take narrative risks, to try his hand at increasingly complex structures. This third book should win him the wider readership he deserves.” -- The National Post

“A thoughtful novel about loss, creativity and survival…. A powerful meditation on what it costs to be an artist -- and to love one.” -- Marnie Woodrow, les Ailes

“Wynveen’s themes of overweening ambition and of emotional damage as the price exacted for failure, come together in a harmonious whole…. Sweeter Life marks a new and innovative chapter in Wynveen’s career.” -- The London Free Press

“[Wynveen] lays into his subject the way T-Bone Walker used to lay into a solo, and with the same invigorating results…. Sweeter Life is suffused with heartache, and yet, in the end, sends you out on a contented high, like a good encore. Sweet indeed.” -- The Georgia Straight

“Wynveen is a writer who is stunningly perceptive about life and people…. A major achievement -- a family fully realized, their several worlds created with loving attention to detail, the bittersweet nature of the human condition revealed in all its multifaceted turnings.” -- The Hamilton Spectator

“Think On the Road meets The Guess Who…. The real muscle of this novel lies in the author’s skill when it comes to charting character evolution. He’s equally adept at getting inside the heads and hearts of male and female characters, in spite of the fact that this is a chiefly masculine story of shattered dreams…. The literary equivalent of a slow song, but one worth tuning into, especially if you are (or have loved, or do now love) a musician.” -- The Globe and Mail

“In Sweeter Life, [Wynveen’s] third novel in four years, he turns his writer’s eye on a world he knows intimately, with the result that his obvious skill in shaping characters and events is heightened here by a very personal passion." -- Merilyn Symonds in The Kingston Whig-Standard

“Any one of a dozen characters in Tim Wynveen’s latest novel, The Sweeter Life, is intriguing enough to sustain a book of their own…. Wynveen wins our admiration.” -- Books In Canada

Praise for Tim Wynveen’s work:

“[Angel Falls] re-ignites our faith in love’s power and resilience . . . . [and] lingers with you, like the sour-sweet memory of someone you once loved.” -- The Edmonton Journal


From the Hardcover edition.