Performance Anxiety. Betsy Burke
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tone row is to music what Finnegan’s Wake is to literature. Do you curl up with Finnegan’s Wake when you want to have a nice relaxing read? Tell the truth now.
Okay. I know. Tonality had to go out the window. For the sake of artistic progress. It was a dirty job and somebody had to do it. And Arnie, Arnie was a guy with a real sense of mission, just the man for the job.
However, when I want a piece of serious music to curl up with, I choose something sweet and harmonic. Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Prokofiev’s First Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs, Mozart’s clarinet concerto. Curling up to Schoenberg and the Bing Bang Bong Boys is like trying to cling to a slippery piece of driftwood in the middle of a desolate stormy ocean.
As for Kurt Hancock’s music, it wasn’t that his pieces didn’t have lush tonal, even pretty, moments. They did. But as soon as you thought those moments were going to blossom into a big phantasmagoric sequence of absolutely gorgeous harmonies, the composition moved into barbed and nerve-jangling Bing Bang Bong.
After I’d sight-sung Kurt’s song cycle for the first time that day at the Pan Pacific, I’d wanted to shake him and yell, “Why can’t you write melodic singable songs, goddammit?” But Kurt was regarded as an important composer, very much in demand, and the Vancouver Symphony had actually commissioned this song cycle to its great expense.
And when I made sneaky references to my feelings on atonal composition, Kurt had said, “What makes you think that listening to music should be an enjoyable experience, Miranda? It can be a significant, historical experience without necessarily being enjoyable.”
Well…gosh…slap me silly.
Maybe, in the future, I could influence Kurt’s music in some way, put a flea in his ear about accessibility.
I’d hoped our relationship would take a little quality leap that day but it didn’t happen. By the time I’d finished singing, we were both late for other commitments. Though I was tentatively delirious to be premiering a Kurt Hancock composition, now that the March date was looming before me, I only had six months to make it perfect. And as I mentioned, I still had to tell Madame Klein and she wouldn’t necessarily be happy about it, at all.
“Miranda…hey, Miranda. Earth to Miranda.”
Tina then pinched my arm. She persisted, “I said I never thought of you as the type to audition flat on her back.” But she was smiling as she said it.
“Jeez, Tina. You could have as many gigs as you want if you only spent a little more time on yours.”
“Yeah, maybe.” She grinned.
I went on, “If Kurt’s still with his wife when I’m over there, fine. I’ll be staying with my father anyway and we’ll have a lot of catching up to do. If Kurt’s not with his wife, we’ll spend some time together. But he says they’re on the rocks and that they’re definitely breaking up. I told him I was hoping to get the audition and he said if I did, we should see each other in London, because he’d be home over Christmas. He has no engagements. They’re not even spending Christmas together. That says it all.”
“Ooookaay. Normally, if it were me, that is, I’d ask the guy to show me the documentation. This isn’t exactly a new one, but shit, it’s Kurt Hancock, so I guess I have to believe his story. I mean, would a guy with a million Deutsche Grammophon recordings to his name string you that kind of crap? I guess these things happen in life, but jeez, Miranda, why couldn’t you find a man who gets right to the point?”
“I know, I know. Listen, he’s going to be at the dinner party tomorrow night. He promised he’d come. But this all has to stay between you and me. If he finds out I’ve told you about us, he’ll be mad. Typical temperamental-artist type, right?”
Tina smirked. “I’ll be checking you two out at the party tomorrow. For an afterglow.”
“Or a really pissed-off expression.”
“I’m dying to hear what happens. I bet he’s hot. You can tell by the way he conducts. You lucky bitch. I’m so jealous.”
I’d been keeping the whole Kurt thing to myself for too long. Now that I’d let it leak to Tina, I felt a little less anxious. “I’ll tell you tomorrow at the party. But don’t get too excited. You never know what could happen.”
Chapter 4
Tina Browning and I both come from the same cow town in the interior of B.C. Cold Shanks. I’m not kidding, that’s its name. There used to be a big slaughterhouse there before the war. After all the cattle were butchered, a lot of the meat was put in the big icehouse before being shipped out, but the best cuts always went out first and the shanks were left over. Tons and tons of them. Hence, Cold Shanks. The icehouse, full of shanks, is gone now but the cowboys and heifers are still there.
Tina Browning came from the main trailer park, the one down by the river, and I came from a suburb that thought it was a lot better than the trailer park. Tina’s last name helped her overcome the pall that hung over a lot of the trailer-park people. The teachers got it into their heads that she was a distant relation to Robert Browning, as in Elizabeth Barrett, and Tina did nothing to dissuade them.
Tina and I hated each other’s guts when we were at school. By the time we had reached the age of thirteen, it was total warfare. We were always pitted against each other in the solo-voice category at every music festival. It was a take-no-hostages situation, the two of us glaring thunderbolts at each other across our parents and the audience in the Kiwanis Hall just before we each took our turn trilling out “When I Am Laid” by Mr. Henry Purcell or the “Habanera” from Bizet’s Carmen. I always thought my clothes would give me the edge, but despite Tina’s trailer-trash dresses and my mother’s hand-sewn masterpieces, Tina often took first prize. Sometimes we tied though, which left us both furious.
We were a couple of unlikely prodigies, coming as we did from families where a musical background meant being able to sing along to our parents’ antique record collections; the Rolling Stones or the complete opus of Dolly Parton. Tina had been named after Tina Turner if that gives you any idea where her mother was coming from. Not that Dolly, or the Stones or Tina were such bad examples. Not at all. The real trouble was, Cold Shanks just didn’t have enough room for two Charlotte Church-style divas.
But then, when we both ended up by accident in the only big city we could afford to move to, Vancouver, and in the same university music department, we realized that we were very small insignificant fish in a great big pond. Everybody was so much better than us and more sophisticated and so completely at home, that we were pushed into each other’s company out of pure shame.
First, it was the all-night bus ride home that got Tina and I talking to each other. Nobody ever slept on those trips. It was too uncomfortable. Going home for Christmases, Easters and half-term breaks we were often on the same 11:00 p.m. Greyhound headed into the interior. It was impossible for us to avoid each other, two mezzo-sopranos both being tortured by the same bunch of singing teachers and coaches, both being put through the wringer by the same theory and composition professors.
Tina got me on her side definitively one day in the singing master class at the U when roles were being assigned. They’d given Tina a juicy gutbuster of a role, Azucena in Il Trovatore, and all through the auditorium, I could see the other mezzos visibly radiating hatred and envy in her direction. Tina stood up there on that stage in front of the entire singing department and the conductor of the orchestra, as if she didn’t give a damn, and said, “I just want to know one thing. Does this Azucena chick get to screw the tenor before the final curtain?”
Second, Tina and I shared one big fundamental problem. Music theory. They had it. We didn’t. When the guilty party, the only floating elementary-school music teacher in the town of Cold Shanks, discovered early in our lives that we had voices, she’d done her best to bang the notes into us any old way she could, so we’d done all our learning by ear. Written music had no more meaning than mouse prints on train tracks for us. We had a lot of lost time to make up for when