Free Orfeo by Richard Powers

quick, clean strokes, the way a child might scribble a crayon moon, a loopy forest, and a gash of campfire, and call it night. There was no time for orchestration. The thing unfolded on the simplest scale, for solo piano and voices. But he heard every line in massed banks of instrumental color. The wayfaring winds, the swelling support of brass, a raft of low strings bearing forward.
    He had the perfect text, the end of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Clara had recited the stanza from memory on a freezing picnic in Cascades Park, during winter’s last hurrah. They’d lain wrapped up together in a cotton sleeping bag, cradling a thermos full of hot tomato soup between them, their lashes dusted with fresh snowfall while she spoke:
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
     
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
     
    He studied the words for days, listening to the sounds contained in them. Then the phonemes and accents led him forward. Note by note, phrase by phrase, he relived that picnic in the snow: the sun low in the sky through the bones of an oak, promising some hidden continuance, and that shivering girl holding a thermos in her mittened cellist’s fingers, challenging him with a few chanted and expanding words, her face hungry, pale, and amused, already knowing what would become of all the young men and daring the old ones to look back. Each measure he wrote changed the ones he’d already written, and he felt them all, already being altered by the unformed noises of the years to come.
    As his pencil spilled lines onto the blank page, all Els had to do was listen and guide each new note to its foreordained place: They are alive and well somewhere . He could write for forever; he could write for no one. He wasn’t choosing: simply detecting, as if he were running a dozen different assays to determine an unknown that, by reactive magic, precipitated out in the bottom of his test tube, solid and weighable.
    The song took shape; he focused the nub of his will to a sharp point. Fear lost all traction, and that current of well-being he’d experienced a few times before in life, listening to the Jupiter or stumbling into Mahler, flooded into him. A cherry-picker taller than a redwood plucked him out of the rubble-filled culvert where he lay and lifted him to the watch room of a lighthouse. The worst that could happen in throwing his life away revealed itself to be a blessing. Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.
    The piece was simplicity itself: a triplet-driven, Phrygian figure in the high voices, while beneath, arpeggios moved in contrary motion, in wide slow waves. Each new entry took the evolving figure into higher registers. The blend strained toward something archaic, a folk tune an ethnographer might find in a remote mountain village of a failing monarchy, to bring back to his studio in the decadent capital and flesh out with volunteer harmonies.
    He stole from Mahler, to be sure: the blurred boundary between major and minor. The shaky key regions that wheeled off, before the end, into wildness. A spinning waltz, a distant brass band. Slow ascent tumbling down in a heartbeat, only to climb again in the reprieve of the next measure. All the individual components had a familiar air. But the thing as a whole had never quite existed before Peter wrote it down.
    Building toward the climax, Peter discovered that he’d laid its foundation well in advance, in the germ material of the opening phrases. A four-note figure, drawn from the original triplets, rose and expanded into a five-note one, which overflowed into the full, rising, seven-note