Us Conductors by Sean Michaels Read Free Book Online Page A

Then the frog turned one of its large, painted eyes around in its head, and it stared at me. Then it said, very loudly,
“Kva-kva.”
    My eyebrows jutted up in surprise.
    “They have some kind of loudspeaker in there,” Schillinger said.
    “Remarkable.”
    He nodded.
    I looked at the item in his other hand. “What’s that?”
    He put it down beside the frog. “A truffle mushroom.”
    “For cooking?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “For whatever you like.”
    Schillinger became one of my first students in America. He joined Alexandra Stepanoff, a former soprano; and Rosemary Ilova, a former mezzo-soprano; and Anna Freeman, the daughter of Hoagy Freeman, who raced horses. Alexandra was dark, Rosemary was red-haired, and Anna was blonde. All had curls to the napes of their necks.
    Schillinger arrived to lessons late, unapologetic, and always in a different outfit: a black jacket with black trousers and black slip-ons; a tan jacket with tan trousers and tan wing-tips; a brown jacket with black trousers and tan rain boots. Once, Frances, his wife, confided that he owned two hundred pairs of socks and alternated them according to a calculus of weather and season. She said he kept an almanac under the bed; crack the code and you could tell the date and the precise temperature from his sartorial permutation. She said this with a smile, a curl of hair at her lips. With the back of my fingers, I brushed it aside.
    Later, I asked him. “Schillinger,” I said, “is there an arithmetic to your fashion?”
    And he said: “In sum, I try to look good.”
    So he arrived late, accidentally perhaps, but more likely it was deliberate. In the years to follow, when Schillinger taught classes at the studio—“New Forms in Musical Composition,” “A Quantitative Analysis of Song”—he was always prompt. I thinkthat in those early days he was simply being a gentleman, making sure that there was time for Alexandra, Rosemary and Anna to receive private instruction.
    Schillinger took to the theremin with terrific speed. He was a composer, a scholar. He needed to hear something only once to be able to recall it at will. This was not true for the things he read: the
hearing
was important. Schillinger had learned English, French, Italian and German by ear, in conversation. His Hebrew—learned from a book—was apparently much worse. He was an amateur table tennis champion. He was a pacifist. He believed in a system of physical aesthetics, that music and art are governed by natural laws.
    I said: “There is a formula for beauty?”
    He answered: “More than one.”

    IN THOSE DAYS I HAD two main projects: building upon the commercial potential of the theremin and prototyping new devices. For the first, classes and demonstrations were the principal means. Show the businessmen the wonder of the “ether music” and the contracts should follow; sign the contracts and appease Pash, satisfy his employers, serve my state.
    At the same time, I devised new schemas for the theremin’s circuitry: lighter, simpler, cheaper. These were the adjectives that made RCA’s and Wurlitzer’s engineers’ eyes light up. The marketing people, stocky men with fashionable eyeglasses, preferred a different word:
easy
. So Pash and I told them it was easy, my theremin: easy as apple pie. We showed them my students, lovely white arms in the air.
    As the weeks passed, I began to fall for New York. I wandered through the Met, caught a foul ball at a Yankees game. I bicycledthrough green, green Central Park, past chasing dogs, past rhododendrons, past the lonely Indian chief in headdress, whom the city had paid to paddle around in a canoe. I bought yellow French’s mustard and developed a taste for salted potato chips. In a jazz club, in a cellar, I listened to a man play a drum solo. My life’s first drum solo. The whole world seemed in the process of being rebuilt.
    There seemed to be money everywhere. Pash’s midnight visits brought proposals, contracts,