Teju Cole: “The Music Followed Me Home”

     Just a few hours after hearing some Mahler utterly unknown to me on BBC3, I come upon this passage in Teju Cole’s novel Open City, whose protagonist is browsing in the old Tower Records on Broadway uptown:

The next disc they played, though utterly unlike the first, was another I immediately recognized: the opening movement of Mahler’s late symphony Das Lied von der Erde. I returned to my browsing, moving from bin to bin, from reissues of Shostakovich symphonies played by long-forgotten Soviet regional orchestras to Chopin recitals by fresh-faced Van Cliburn competition runners-up, feeling that the price reductions were insufficiently sharp, losing any real interest in shopping, and finally beginning to acclimatize to the music playing overhead and to enter the strange hues of its world.  It happened subliminally, but before long, I was rapt and might have, for all the world, been swaddled in a private darkness.  In this trance, I continued to move from one row of compact discs to another, thumbing through plastic cases, magazines, and printed scores, and listening as one movement of the Viennese chinoiserie succeeded another …

… Then came the final movement, “Der Abschied,” the Farewell, and Mahler, where he would ordinarily indicate the tempo, had marked it “schwer,” difficult.

The birdsong and beauty, the complaints and high-jinks of the preceding movements, had all been supplanted by a different mood.   It was as though the lights had, without warning, come blazing into my eyes.   It simply wasn’t possible to enter the music fully, not in that public place.  I placed the small pile of discs in my hand onto the nearest table and left.  I made it into the uptown train just as the doors were closing.  By this time, the crowds from the marathon were beginning to thin out.  I sat down and leaned back.  The five-note figure from “Der Abschied” continued on from where I was as though I were in the store listening to it.  I sensed the woodsiness of the clarinets, the resin of the violins and violas, the vibrations of the timpani, and the intelligence that held them all together and drew them endlessly along the musical line.  My memory was overwhelmed.  The song followed me home.

That’s the kind of writing about music we need now: writing that recognizes, and foregrounds, the mingling of music and our experience, our public lives and our inner lives alike.    That’s what I had in mind in writing Reinventing Bach, especially the passages having to do with the WKCR Bachfest – and set in the same neighborhoods as Open City.  I wish I’d known of Cole’s writing at the time.

Here’s another piece of mine about his writing.      

• 4 Jun 2015
• 3

• #books#teju cole