Forget It, Jake - It's Uptown
By Kyle Gann
By the time I got there a crowd had already gathered. There, in the middle, was the body, stretched out with a reel's worth of high-grade tape wrapped around its neck, and still soiled with the muck of the East River. It was a ghastly scene, but nobody seemed particularly upset; in fact, several people were smirking. "If it had been united, it could never have been defeated," somebody chuckled near me. I looked up; it was Fred Rzewski. Alvin Lucier said nothing, but cordoned off the body with a long thin wire that hummed ominously. John Adams pushed his way through the crowd and grabbed my arm. "This is the work of Arab terrorists!" he snarled. That was a kneejerk reaction; he was still bitter about the Klinghoffer episode.
Classical music was dead. And I didn't need to call the American Symphony Orchestra League to know that they were going to want somebody to pin charges on. I needed answers.
When I got to my office, there was a livid message on my machine from Charles Wuorinen. "You know who did it!" he screamed. "Those damn minimalists! They've been out to kill classical music for thirty years!" Charlie's kind of a nut case, but hell, it was a lead. I popped around to Steve Reich's apartment. "Sure, I had a fling with classical music in the '80s," he admitted nervously. "But ever since The Cave, I've been strictly into electronics." "I buy your story, Steve," I crooned to calm him, "but the League's going to want to see proof. You gonna come out to show them?" "Come out to show them?", he repeated. I saw he had gone into one of his phases, so I left him there.
I knew Terry Riley was out of the loop, and Phil Glass had been pretty cozy with classical for the last few years; I made a mental walk-through of his entire output and couldn't find a motive. So I paid a visit to the Big Kahuna, La Monte "Hillbilly" Young. He had an alibi, too. Problem was, it was six hours long. Classical music died a quick death; Young couldn't have pulled off a job like that in under a month.
I waltzed around to Bob "Wolfman" Ashley's digs. I knew he hadn't done it - the guy never touched an orchestra in his life - but he was a big man in the underground, and he seemed to know things other people didn't. When I asked if he'd heard anything, he didn't even look up from his vodka, just moaned, "If I were from the big town, I would be calm and debonair. The big town doesn't let its riff-raff out." That didn't mean anything to me, so I kept mum. When he saw I wasn't going to leave, he drawled over his shoulder, "You ever know classical music to give a woman a fair deal?" I shook my head. "Cherchez le femme," he muttered bitterly. Then, more slowly, "She was a visitor."
Ellen Zwilich's landlady suggested I try her at the Pulitzer Club. After I stiffarmed my way past the bouncer, a blur in white gloves ran out in a hurry, clucking "Oh dear, oh dear! I shall be too late!" I saw enough to recognize David Del Tredici. Once in the street, he disappeared into a manhole. I resisted an impulse to follow, but that was suspicious. When I cornered Zwilich, though, sipping martinis with Joe "Fluttertongue" Schwantner and Jack "Jack" Harbison, the trio looked as morose as piano tuners at a synthesizer trade show. "You think we were involved?" she laughed sardonically. "That's right, we bumped off the goose that laid the golden eggs." Elliott Carter must have gotten wind that I was there, for suddenly two Columbia grad students appeared from behind and gave me an expense-paid whirlwind trip into the back alley.
I dusted my pants off and decided I had barked up the wrong tree anyway. The Pulitzer gang was high on classical music's payola list; as long as they kept their yaps shut, it'd come across with the occasional concerto commission. The only broad big and outside enough to pull a stunt like this was Pauline "Ma" Oliveros. Oh sure, she talked peace and good vibes, but there was something about the way she squeezed that accordion - as if she meant it. But this time I wasn't going direct. I looked up an old connection named Annea "The Torch" Lockwood. I figured any dame who started out her career burning pianos wouldn't scruple to help deep-six an entire genre.
"It was just another random killing," she insisted when I tracked her down at a sleazy East Village gallery. "John Cage is dead, hon," I countered. "Try again." "Look," she stammered, "you're going after small game. Classical music was drowned out, right? You need a louder suspect. Know a schmo named John Zorn?"
Zorn had crossed my mind, but I had seen his victims before: so cut up that you couldn't tell what piece came from which body. This wasn't his style. I thanked her for the tip, though, and headed for the Knitting Factory in search of a joker named Branca. I could hear his electric guitars as far away as Washington Square. Word on the street was that he was calling his pieces "symphonies" even though he didn't use an orchestra. Sounded like a takeover. He had good reasons for wanting classical music out of the way. When I got there, an old guy named Nancarrow was guarding the box office. "Branca may be backstage and he may not," he stated mechanically, in two tempos at once somehow.
As I stepped into the back, the blast of a high-decibel shriek knocked me against the wall, where I got a blow on the back of my head that made me hear Stockhausen's Zyklus and Varese's Ionisation at the same time, with encores. When I came to, a harpy from hell with cavernous eyes and sharp claws was leaning over me. I made a quick grab for my .45 (I never carry a gun, but just for the heck of it I often make a grab for one), when the demon spoke: "Sorry, didn't mean to rattle you, sport."
"Oh, it's you, Diamanda." Nice Greek girl from San Diego. Had a funny thing about makeup, though, and a voice that could bounce your eardrums off each other. "Geez, try not to sneak up on a guy."
"I'm going to save you a lot of trouble," she said, lighting a cig by breathing on it. "Nobody here had anything to do with classical music getting waxed. It was a suicide."
"Suicide?" I coughed, still carressing my noggin.
"Think about it," she urged. "Tried to starve itself to death. A tiny, self-imposed diet of the same German and Russian food over and over. Cholesterol in the high 600s. Didn't want to grow. Refused to eat anything new. Kept trying to pretend the 20th century never happened. Severe personality disorder. It never established any roots here anyway - still obsessed with the old country, and acted so hoity-toity to cover up its insecurity. Suicide was the only way it could save face."
"You're sure of that, huh?"
"Sure I'm sure. I could see it coming. That's why I quit playing Mozart concertos and singing Xenakis fifteen years ago."
Something about the way she said it - in a piercing wail three octaves above middle C - made me think that was the best explanation I was going to get. I went back to my office, and was greeted by another blinking light on the machine. It was Susan McClary; there was no such thing as classical music in the first place, she claimed, it was just a construct invented by white males to subjugate women and minorities. "Let her believe that if it makes her feel better," I thought, clicking her off in mid-sentence. I poured myself an inch or two of cheap whiskey, parked my loafers on the desk, and snapped my fingers to a kickass rendition of 4'33" that the city was playing in the street below.
