Music For Desks: "How Deep They Lay" by Christopher Santantasio
Etude
“What was any art,” Willa Cather writes in her third novel, The Song of the Lark, “but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.”
In 2009 I was studying music at a small college in the North Country, the nearly vacant pinion of New York state between Lakes Ontario and Champlain. Classical training had taught me that time and well-directed effort was all I needed to move people with music, to unlock Cather’s “shining elusive element,” that expansive quality around which all true art is shaped. I hoped to grace the world’s great concert halls, applause a constant accompaniment to my days and nights. I spent hours holed up in practice rooms. I composed my own music, attended masterclasses, performed solo, with chamber groups, and in large ensembles. I wanted so desperately to ignite in others the thrill and passion that music had brought to my life. Prior to my study of music, hardly anything had moved me.
But life hurried past, and in my last semester I realized I had no talent as a performer; nerves exacerbated my every technical shortcoming. At a professor’s encouragement, I took breaks from my grueling practice sessions to attend concerts and write reviews for the campus newspaper. To satisfy my craving for the stage, I pursued an independent study in conducting. With my back to the audience, I could more easily get out of my own way and just make music. This realization coincided with my discovery of a paperback copy of The Song of the Lark at a thrift store in the basement of the firehouse across the street from the mold-ridden apartment I shared with two other musicians.
My younger self, restless with artistic ambition, ensconced in a remote village far from any major cultural hub, folded easily into Cather’s tale of a musician going to extreme lengths to master her art. The novel’s protagonist Thea Kronborg comes from humble beginnings in fictional Moonstone, Colorado. Thanks to her talents and a series of supportive teachers and benefactors, her abilities develop to the point that not one, but two paths to greatness stretch out before her. She could continue with her first love, the piano, or she could abandon it and focus on developing her voice, which until the middle of the novel is exercised only at funeral services.
The Song of the Lark prompted a revised vision of my musical career—now I would be conducting great orchestras across the world—and caused me to become enamored with Cather’s prose. I detected a musical sensibility in her depictions of both the natural world and the built environment of early 20th Century Chicago and New York, and I wanted to infuse my own writing with that lyricism. I grew bored with concert reviews and tried my hand at writing short stories, tucking most of them away in a binder without sharing them. I wrote about ordinary things: the pressures of school, fumbled attempts at romance, the struggles of life as a closeted gay man in rural upstate New York.
Thea Kronborg taught music lessons to help finance her studies. I knew I’d need to make a living, too, if I hoped to continue developing my artistry. After graduating from music school, I found a job teaching band classes at a middle school in Syracuse. Instead of honing my conducting technique before the bathroom mirror as I had done in college, I spent my evenings and weekends at my laptop. My folder of short stories grew. I wanted more and more to share them.
Passacaglia
Thea learns the basics of pedagogy by observing her first piano teacher, the hard-drinking Wunsch. Embittered by his failure to achieve greatness, he “used to play her some of the compositions of Schumann.” Cather reveals, “When Wunsch was a young man, it was still daring to like Schumann; enthusiasm for his work was an expression of youthful waywardness.”
Robert Schumann’s appearance in The Song of the Lark is striking because, like Cather’s, his body of work resides at the intersection of musical and literary currents. As much as I love his work I can understand the narrator’s claim that many of Schumann’s compositions—effusive, virtuosic, melodramatic at times—find sympathy with the young and capricious. During my first years as a music teacher, I continued to struggle with my identity and ambitions. I sank most of my savings into a trip to Provence the summer of my second year, to play substitute first euphonium in a wind orchestra for no pay. I thought that perhaps my musical dreams weren’t entirely dashed, but by the end of the tour, I could no longer fool myself. I couldn’t ignore the conductor’s furious glances whenever I missed an entrance or played a solo a quarter-step flat.
Nor could I continue to fool anyone else. Having spent most of my downtime in Provence getting to know the other queer musicians in the orchestra, I returned home to the States empowered to come out to my family and more of my friends. I’d been laid off from my job in Syracuse and was living and teaching in Delaware; I signed a lease for an apartment I could barely afford because it was in the nearest city, Wilmington, close to bars and clubs. There, I imagined, I might try building a different kind of musical career, one that would match the new life I planned to lead.
That year, I landed one real piano gig, attended by my mom, my younger brother, and a smattering of walk-ins who had nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon. Frustrated again by my lack of progress toward my artistic goals, I threw myself fully into my teaching responsibilities. I kept so busy I nearly gave up practicing altogether. When Thea leaves Moonstone for Chicago, she must work constantly just to keep a roof over her head. At her most exhausted, she “threw herself upon the bed and lie there in the dark, not thinking, not feeling, but evaporating.”
Impromptu
After my third teaching year—it was the summer of 2013—I was assaulted. A close friend and I were walking home from a bar when a trio of young men accosted us. Two of them grabbed me from behind while the third struck me hard in the face. I was yanked to ground and pummeled. My friend screamed for help. When it was finally over, I had a broken nose, two black eyes, and several bruised ribs. We were just around the corner from my apartment. It was a clear night. Stars winked down at me as I lay in the street, stunned.
In hindsight, I see the event as strange, a random act of violence from which no lesson can be drawn. The detail that sticks with me most vividly isn’t the grinding snap of my septum crushed by a stranger’s fist, nor the sneaker impressions that lingered for days on my cheek and forearms. What I remember most is the silence of my attackers. They didn’t threaten me or demand my wallet or my phone. They beat me silently, methodically. I thought they would kill me. In desperation, I pulled my wallet out of my pocket and tossed it at their feet. Then they were gone.
That night, on my friend’s couch, I couldn’t sleep. I spent some quantity of time studying my bruises and the novel angle of my already prominent nose in the mirror. My mother’s nose. Then I sat and stared at the wall. Whenever I closed my eyes, the fist, the sneakers, and the pavement returned to me in flashes. There was a spiral-bound notebook on the coffee table, and I set it on my knee. I found a pen.
Life hurried past. About six months after the attack, I met a man who treated me tenderly, and we moved in together. I wrote furiously, sending out my stories to magazines long before I should have. Someone found my wallet and mailed it back to me, sans credit card and six dollars. I took a distance-learning class at the local community college and started sharing my work with others. The next summer, nearly two years to the day after the assault, I was crashing in a different friend’s apartment, this time in New York City. I had been called off the waitlist for a writing workshop hosted by a Brooklyn-based literary magazine. I met my first fiction writing mentor. On the train back to Wilmington, I decided I couldn’t keep teaching music full time. By this time, however, I had grown into my role as an educator for students with special learning needs. They gave my career a purpose, and I wasn’t yet certain how I could give that up.
Intermezzo
Cather’s characters bleed. They battle their demons and they do not emerge unscathed, if they emerge at all. Thea’s first love is killed in a railroad accident. Wunsch succumbs to alcoholism. Her next teacher, the selfless Harsanyi, cuts Thea off from his tutelage just as she is hitting her stride as a pianist. He is the one who tells her that her future lies not with the piano, but with the instrument she was born with: her voice.
With each broken connection, Thea is pushed closer to a decision from which there will be no turning back. I faced just such a moment when returning from that writing workshop. I had a knack for writing fiction, but I wasn’t at all certain I could develop whatever talent I had on my own. Years of trying to hone both my writing and my musicianship in my spare time had taught me that incremental progress feels, more often than not, like no progress at all. My workshop facilitator strongly encouraged me to pursue a graduate degree in creative writing. It would, if nothing else, provide me time for my fiction, expediting my transition from teacher to writer.
The months that followed were some of the most infuriating of my life. Still uncertain about my decision to quit a stable job during a period of stalled economic recovery, I poured my meager savings into more than a dozen grad school applications, nearly all of which were rejected outright. The two programs that accepted me couldn’t promise funding. I wasn’t at all certain that I had it in me to try again—if I could even afford to. I had quit my teaching job with the hope of finding more time to write, but I was forced to hustle jobs that allowed me to just get by. I swept floors at a small theatre, wrote vapid celebrity bios for a Bulgaria-based fan site, wrote grants for small nonprofits. I went back, grudgingly, to teaching music lessons.
But life continued to hurry past. In the spring of 2016, a musician friend asked if I would be interested in stepping in to conduct the after-school youth orchestra he had helped build. I agreed. The very first piece I was asked to conduct was Gustav Holst’s First Suite for Military Band, arranged for orchestra. It seemed like fate: This was the first piece of serious music I had performed in my youth, just before starting music school. I had studied the score extensively for my independent study in conducting and memorized every nuance of Frederick Fennell’s 1978 recording with the Cleveland Symphonic Winds: the morendo into the second phrase, the inner clarinets swelling and receding the way water laps against its confines.
For the next year, I conducted two to three youth orchestra rehearsals each week, and about a dozen performances. I also started a workshop that met weekly in the basement of the West Philly townhouse I shared with my partner and two friends, so I was able to write. I reapplied to graduate school. This time, I was accepted to a program and offered a stipend with full tuition remission, which were absolute necessities.
Thea Kronborg traversed an ocean to continue her vocal studies in Germany. To study writing, I boarded a Greyhound bus bound for Columbus, Ohio.
Ballade
During the peak of her self-doubt, about halfway through The Song of the Lark, Thea reflects on what it was all for. Of all the girls in Moonstone, why is she the one who gets to study piano with the great Harsanyi? Why is she her mother’s favorite child? Why does she feel such a deep connection to Spanish Johnny, the unreliable handyman who embodies musical joy whenever he takes up a mandolin? During a long train ride when she can do little but reflect, Thea reaches the conclusion that it isn’t really Thea Kronborg they believe in. Rather, it is her “second self,” the one truly responsible for her musical gifts. When she makes music, she is addressing the second selves of her audience. “How deep they lay, these second persons, and how little one knew about them, except to guard them fiercely. It was to music, more than to anything else, that these hidden things in people responded.” She decides to give up the piano and dedicate her life to developing her voice. She sets her sights on Wagner’s great operatic soprano roles: Elsa, Sieglinde, Isolde. She sets sail for Europe.
Music is a language, Cather reveals, and native speakers of it reside inside us all. It behooves us all to learn at least a few key phrases. Throughout my years of musical study, I found that only with the help of music can I engage with my full self; only recently did I discover the living current between music and prose. Revisiting Cather after all these years has deepened my understanding of the art I love. My best stories are my most musical. When my characters make music, when I appeal to the reader’s inner ear, I give myself a chance to access some of the expressive capabilities of both of my creative modes, homing in a bit nearer to Cather’s “shining, elusive element.”
Now I keep my piano and my writing desk side by side. I spend most of my working life hopping from chair to bench, bench to chair, but I often long for the certainty of that night in Wilmington, when the wounded version of myself recognized that writing was urgent and necessary in ways that music alone never was. The man I was after the assault, my bruised and bloodied second self, stayed up all night refashioning brutality into something honest and tender. When the sun came up, he knew he could make a life of it.
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Christopher Santantasio is a writer and musician living in Columbus, Ohio. His work has most recently appeared in One Story, Storm Cellar, and Smokelong Quarterly, where he also served as a guest editor. New work is forthcoming in DIAGRAM. He won the 2018 Tara Kroger Short Story Award from The Ohio State University and was a finalist for both the 2020 Janus Prize and the 2021 Iowa Review Fiction Award. He is at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.
