Read Richard Powers for Free Online Page A

birth to Early Music, she and a few other narrow voices in a wide-vibrato sea began insisting that, for music before 1750, precision came before “warmth.” At that time, big was the vogue in everything. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, still mounted its annual zeppelin-sized, cast-of-thousands performances of the Bach Passions, devotional music in the atomic age, where mass released a lumbering spiritual energy. Miss Helmer, in contrast, felt that, with complex polyphony, God might actually like to hear the pitches. The sparer the line, the greater the lift. For energy was also proportionate to lightness squared.
    All her life, she’d wanted to take that brilliant duet from Cantata 78 out for a test spin, proof that small was beautiful and light was all. But she’d never found a woman soprano whose vibrato warbled less than a quarter tone. Then she heard the ethereal boy, maybe the first since Bach’s Thomasschule in Leipzig able to do justice to the euphoria. She approached Mr. Peirson, the choir director, a bloodless respecter of andante who thought he could reach the calmer patches of Lutheran purgatory if he only respected all the dynamics and offended no listener. Mr. Peirson balked, capitulating only when Lois Helmer threatened to remove her assets to the Episcopalians. Mr. Peirson surrendered the podium for the occasion, and Lois Helmer lost no time hunting up a skilled cellist to hold down the springing Violone line.
    Miss Helmer had another wild idea: music and its words ought to agree. Schweitzer had been onto this for decades, pushing for word painting in Bach as early as the year that Einstein—the violinist who bent my brother’s life—dismantled universal time. But in practice, Bach’s music, no matter the text, stood coated in that same caramel glow that masked old master paintings, the golden dusk that museumgoers took for spirituality but which was, in fact, just grime.
    Miss Helmer’s Bach would do what its words said. If the duet began “Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten” —“We rush with faint but earnest footsteps”—then the damn thing would rush. She harassed the continuo players until they brought the song up to her mental tempo, a third faster than the piece had ever been performed. She swore at the bewildered players during rehearsal, and Jonah relished every curse.
    He, of course, stood ready to blast through the piece at the speed of delight. When Jonah sang, even in rehearsal, making his noise for people who weren’t like us, I felt ashamed, like we were betraying the family secret. He matched this woman phrase for phrase, a mynah latching onto his trainer’s every trick, their free-play imitation finally converging in perfect synchrony, as if both had found a way to catch up to their own eerie echoes and rejoin.
    On the Sunday of their performance, Jonah and I clung to the choir loft’s rail, each in a black blazer and a red bow tie that had taken all Da’s knowledge of low-degree topology to tie. We stood on high and watched the congregation mill about the pews like iridescent bugs under a lifted garden stone. Da, Mom, and Ruth came late and sat way in the back, where they couldn’t bother anyone else by being seen.
    The anthem followed the Gospel. Most weeks, the moment passed, a sample swatch of spiritual wallpaper that the customers of grace fingered and set down. But that week, the bobbing cello obbligato launched such spring that even those already dozing sat up in their pews, alarmed by pleasure.
    Out of the eight jaunty bars, the soprano lifts, an overnight crocus, homesteading the winter-beaten lawn.
    The tune is propelled by the simplest trick: Stable do comes in on an unstable upbeat, while the downbeat squids away on the scale’s unstable re . With this slight push, the song stumbles forward until it climbs up into itself from below, tag-team wrestling with its own alto double. Then, in scripted improvisation, the two sprung lines duck down the same