auditorium alongside four hundred other chemistry students while the lecturer scribbled down blackboards full of spirit writing from the world inside this one. The labs—titrating, precipitating, isolating—were like learning to play a wayward but splendid new instrument. Matter was thick with infolded mysteries waiting to be discovered. Coming from the lab, stinking of camphor, fish, malt, mint, musk, sperm, sweat, and urine, Els smelled the heady scent of his own future.
He still studied clarinet. In his second semester, he bested a dozen performance majors for a chair in the top undergraduate orchestra. The other woodwinds refused to believe he was wasting himself on test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks. Clara just shrugged at his perversity. She glanced at him sometimes from across the orchestra, at her stand in the cellos, her patient smile waiting for him to discover what she already knew .
To Els, music and chemistry were each other’s long-lost twins: mixtures and modulations, spectral harmonies and harmonic spectroscopy. The structures of long polymers reminded him of intricate Webern variations. The outlandish probability fields of atomic orbitals—barbells, donuts, spheres—felt like the units of an avant-garde notation. The formulas of physical chemistry struck him as intricate and divine compositions.
Alongside courses in structure and analysis, he sneaked in an elective in music composition. Harmonizing chorales and realizing figured bass felt a bit like algebra. He wrote minuets in the style of Haydn and imitation Bach da capo arias. For Clara’s twentieth, he scored “Happy Birthday” à la late Beethoven. For New Year’s Eve 1961, he gave her his most elaborate trinket yet: a Brahms intermezzo treatment of “How About You?” Clara read through the gift, shaking her head and laughing at a thing so obvious to everyone but its maker.
Oh, Peter. For a bright boy, you’re so clueless. Come on. Let’s play through it.
He tried to explain the plan to Clara. He could graduate with a guaranteed bench job in industry while still making all the music body and soul needed. But she looked away with her maddening sextant look, out to the horizon and over the curve of the Earth, at a future that she could see and he could not.
They spent their every spare minute together. Clara got them reviewing music for the Daily Student. Under the anagram byline Entresols, they championed dozens of new recordings as if they were Adam and Eve naming the animals. Their friends—those who didn’t throw up their hands in disgust at that breakaway state of two—called them the Zygote. While the best and brightest headed for civil rights sit-ins, Peter and Clara camped out in the music library listening room, following along in the score of Strauss’s Four Last Songs while Schwarzkopf sang “Im Abendrot”: We’ve gone through need and sorrow, hand in hand . . .
Clara ran point in their discoveries, reconnoitering. She brought Els prizes for dinner: crazy Gesualdo madrigals or brilliant horn passages from late nineteenth century tone poems. And even as Peter scrambled to master her expanding repertoire, Clara blew on ahead of him and found more.
They sang up close, right into each other’s mouths, bending pitches into near-miss dissonance. The grate of those beats sawed straight into their brains. They had not yet seen each other naked. But that shared resonance in the plates of their skulls was as intimate as any sex.
Clara knew her destiny and never wavered. She studied with the demanding Starker, and although the man made her weep almost every week, he led her to tricks of the mind and the wrist that left her playing like an angel.
Music alone, for Clara, had the power to peel away the lie of daily life. She wasn’t sure who Adenauer was, and she didn’t understand why Glenn deserved a ticker tape parade. But a few measures of the Grosse Fuge held more raw truth than a month’s worth of headlines. The force of
He still studied clarinet. In his second semester, he bested a dozen performance majors for a chair in the top undergraduate orchestra. The other woodwinds refused to believe he was wasting himself on test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks. Clara just shrugged at his perversity. She glanced at him sometimes from across the orchestra, at her stand in the cellos, her patient smile waiting for him to discover what she already knew .
To Els, music and chemistry were each other’s long-lost twins: mixtures and modulations, spectral harmonies and harmonic spectroscopy. The structures of long polymers reminded him of intricate Webern variations. The outlandish probability fields of atomic orbitals—barbells, donuts, spheres—felt like the units of an avant-garde notation. The formulas of physical chemistry struck him as intricate and divine compositions.
Alongside courses in structure and analysis, he sneaked in an elective in music composition. Harmonizing chorales and realizing figured bass felt a bit like algebra. He wrote minuets in the style of Haydn and imitation Bach da capo arias. For Clara’s twentieth, he scored “Happy Birthday” à la late Beethoven. For New Year’s Eve 1961, he gave her his most elaborate trinket yet: a Brahms intermezzo treatment of “How About You?” Clara read through the gift, shaking her head and laughing at a thing so obvious to everyone but its maker.
Oh, Peter. For a bright boy, you’re so clueless. Come on. Let’s play through it.
He tried to explain the plan to Clara. He could graduate with a guaranteed bench job in industry while still making all the music body and soul needed. But she looked away with her maddening sextant look, out to the horizon and over the curve of the Earth, at a future that she could see and he could not.
They spent their every spare minute together. Clara got them reviewing music for the Daily Student. Under the anagram byline Entresols, they championed dozens of new recordings as if they were Adam and Eve naming the animals. Their friends—those who didn’t throw up their hands in disgust at that breakaway state of two—called them the Zygote. While the best and brightest headed for civil rights sit-ins, Peter and Clara camped out in the music library listening room, following along in the score of Strauss’s Four Last Songs while Schwarzkopf sang “Im Abendrot”: We’ve gone through need and sorrow, hand in hand . . .
Clara ran point in their discoveries, reconnoitering. She brought Els prizes for dinner: crazy Gesualdo madrigals or brilliant horn passages from late nineteenth century tone poems. And even as Peter scrambled to master her expanding repertoire, Clara blew on ahead of him and found more.
They sang up close, right into each other’s mouths, bending pitches into near-miss dissonance. The grate of those beats sawed straight into their brains. They had not yet seen each other naked. But that shared resonance in the plates of their skulls was as intimate as any sex.
Clara knew her destiny and never wavered. She studied with the demanding Starker, and although the man made her weep almost every week, he led her to tricks of the mind and the wrist that left her playing like an angel.
Music alone, for Clara, had the power to peel away the lie of daily life. She wasn’t sure who Adenauer was, and she didn’t understand why Glenn deserved a ticker tape parade. But a few measures of the Grosse Fuge held more raw truth than a month’s worth of headlines. The force of
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