Bruck’s First Concert
Art that survived an impossible place deserves an audience equal to the survival.
Bruck || Music || Healing || Beauty
She heard about Bruck’s concert secondhand — through a letter from Hargreaves, who had moved into a private apartment in the city with the assistance of the compensation proceedings that were making their way through the legal system with the slow inevitability of something that has Bruck’s sixty-three-page report behind it and nowhere to hide. Hargreaves had gone to the concert, which had been organized by the musicology department of the city university, whose faculty had read, in the preliminary reports that were now circulating in academic circles, a reference to an eleven-year musicological study conducted under conditions of extreme constraint. The department chair had contacted Bruck. Bruck had gone to meet him. What had emerged from that meeting was an event described, in Hargreaves’s letter, as follows: Bruck performed his harmonic analysis of the third-floor effect. He played it on the piano — he said he had been composing in his head for eleven years but had never had access to an instrument, and so sitting down to a piano was an experience he took forty minutes to describe to me afterward and I will not try to compress into a letter. The composition itself was played to an audience of about sixty people — mostly academics, some students, a journalist, two of the investigators. It lasted twenty-two minutes. There was a long silence when it ended. Then it was discussed for two hours. I have never seen academics discuss anything for two hours without disagreeing with each other, but nobody disagreed about this. She read this letter in her office at St. Anselm’s, where she had returned three weeks after the road cleared, to a caseload that was manageable and colleagues who were, most of them, glad to have her back and curious about where she had been and how it had been, though she had not yet fully described the last part to most of them. She would, eventually. She was taking the description in stages, giving it to the people who most needed to hear it and holding the rest until she was ready, which was a protocol she had developed for patients dealing with overwhelming experience and which she was now applying to herself with the clinical self-awareness of a person who knows when she is the patient and is not ashamed to treat herself accordingly. She read the letter about Bruck’s concert a second time. She thought about eleven years of composition in a room that was not supposed to produce anything. She thought about what it was that people made when they were not supposed to make anything — not just Bruck’s music but Carey’s wall-writing and Hargreaves’s sustained clarity and Irene Marsh’s eighteen years of perfect record and her own green notebook and the report she had filed. People who were supposed to be only the object of someone else’s design kept producing things. Kept refusing to be only material. The refusal was not dramatic — it was the daily, quiet insistence of a self on continuing to exist as a self, on making something rather than only being used. It was, she thought, the most fundamental form of resistance. It was, perhaps, the only form that finally mattered.