Circle of Fifths
Richard Bader
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Ronald quit the chorus. He didn’t consider this the end of his singing career — there were lots of other places he could sing, that could make use of his talents, talents that he perhaps thought were greater than they actually were — but he had had it with this group.
He decided at the “retreat.” A waste of time, if you asked him, with all the blowing through straws and games with soulfege (“now leave out the fa and la”) and whatnot. What put him over the edge was when they were sitting at their armchair desks and were supposed to do something with the Circle of Fifths. His pencil bobbed in the air over the printout with the Circle of Fifths on it. He never was quite sure what he was supposed to do with it, but whatever it was, he wasn’t doing it. He would have stared out the window if he could have, but the closest window was on the other side of the room, and it was stained glass — some saint, with sheep — so he couldn’t see out anyway. The church where they rehearsed had stained glass everywhere, most of it in the sanctuary, where the chorus wasn’t allowed. That was for the church’s choir. Well la di da.
There was no light in the window, so it must have still been cloudy out. Maybe it had started to rain. Now Ronald tapped his pencil’s eraser on his desk, not even bothering to look at the Circle of Fifths. It was the kind of eraser that didn’t erase but just made things worse.
“You’re not doing your exercise,” the Music Director said. He was hovering over Ronald, behind his shoulder. He might have detected him there had he not been so focused on the eraser. Your exercise, the Music Director said, as if it were his and his alone.
“No,” Ronald said, looking up with what he hoped was a defiant look, but he may have just looked confused.
“Why not?”
“How is this supposed to make us better singers?” he said, nodding his head at the sheet with the Circle of Fifths. He was surprised to hear himself say it. Also, “We’ll forget this as soon as we leave here.” If we ever learn what we’re supposed to learn in the first place, he almost added.
Ronald was a rule follower, and questioning authority didn’t come to him easily. But if he had wanted to take a course in music theory, he would have signed up for one. He could read music, after all. That was more than some of them could do. And it wasn’t like he was getting paid for the privilege of singing. In fact, he was paying, shelling out good money, not a lot, but enough, especially when you multiplied it times the number of people in the chorus, the fees helping to cover the Music Director’s salary, if you could call the paltry amount he made a salary. When he left here, the Music Director would probably go to some other “retreat,” where he would inflict a different group with the Circle of Goddamn Fifths after they blew through straws. The Music Director looked at him with the kind of look elementary school teachers deployed to keep their students in line. Ronald was no kid. He didn’t deserve to be treated this way.
The Circle of Fifths was supposed to have something to do with complementarity, with harmonic progression. The sheet of paper lay on his desk next to the skinny straw he’d used earlier, wet now with his saliva.
He quit. It was pretty simple, really. He just stopped showing up.
He sent the Music Director a note to say that he was quitting, though he really didn’t have to. The note was a courtesy. In the note, which he sent by email and in which he said nothing about his frustration with the “retreat,” he simply said he was quitting, claimed he didn’t have enough time. He promised to turn in his music at some point (though he thought his fee entitled him to keep it) and had no expectation of being reimbursed for the remainder of the term. The end.
Except it wasn’t. A week or so later he got a letter in the mail from the Music Director. The envelope was a light blue, the color that at one time was the color of airmail envelopes. The stationery matched the blue of the envelope. It had the Music Director’s name and address on it. The ink was red, the letter starting out in all-caps print, but transitioning to an upper case-lower case cursive. Ronald didn’t read it immediately, but instead put the letter back in its envelope and placed it on the desk in his apartment.
***
He read the letter. At first Ronald intended to read just the all-caps part and save the cursive part for later, but once he started he found he couldn’t stop. He read the whole thing.
In the all-caps part, the Music Director mostly complained. He complained that the sopranos were getting too full of themselves, that there weren’t enough basses and they weren’t any good anyway, that the altos were nothing but a grab-bag of people who talked too much and were altos because they couldn’t weren’t ambitious enough to sing soprano and they didn’t want to drop down to tenor where all the men were. All of this was true, but none of it was original. All these things applied to every chorus Ronald had ever sung in.
The only section the Music Director didn’t criticize was the tenors. Curious, Ronald thought. He was, or had been until he quit, a tenor, and the tenors were no more immune to mistake than anyone else. He was more of a baritone, actually, but the tenor section was where he had sat. He suspected that a lot of men who sang tenor were really baritones.
The Music Director went on to complain about the other music groups he was responsible for, how the elementary school chorus was terrible and totally devoid of anyone who might be a prodigy, how the “mature” adult group (all singers were over 50) in the western part of the state wasn’t too bad, but they were full of themselves and it was a long way away and he had to make the drive in the dark in all sorts of weather.
The Music Director went on to complain about his lot in life, how his parents told him he’d never make any money with music, how they had wanted him to invest (their word) his college years in something other than music — business, maybe — something that held out the hope of a steady job and the income that went with it. The Music Director complained that his mother never loved him anyway, that his older brother was the favored son, how one summer at camp his brother had made one of those stupid dreamcatcher things, and when he hung it in their living room window his parents started referring to it as their “favorite sun.”
The Music Director went on to make a case for himself, argued (though there was no one to argue with) for why his music degree made great sense (it didn’t) and how he was much happier for having decided on the creative “career” he’d decided on (he wasn’t). Anyone with half a brain could see through this. Plus, as he complained to the choristers more than once, he had no vacation and no health plan. A life devoted to art sounded great, but it really wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
All the complaining got tedious. Ronald wondered if the Music Director mentioned his lack of benefits so frequently because he knew Ronald worked in insurance and maybe could help him out. More likely he mentioned it because he knew Ronald would understand, would recognize this as a genuine problem, would sympathize. Still, Ronald thought, maybe the Music Director protested too much. Didn’t Shakespeare say that in one of his plays? Ronald had minored in theater, and even played the Baker’s Father in the college production of Into the Woods. It was then that he discovered (or was told by the play’s director, a professor whose name he couldn’t recall) he had virtually no talent for acting, but had a halfway decent singing voice.
Ronald was still in the part of the letter that was in all caps, though that section, mercifully, was coming to an end. He hoped the red cursive would bring a change in focus along with a change in writing style.
In the cursive part, the Music Director implored Ronald to come back. He begged. A clumsy master of the non-apology apology, he said he was sorry if he had done anything wrong.
Was it a love letter? Ronald wasn’t sure. Love letters typically included pronouncements of feelings, romantic language, some vulnerability, maybe an appreciation for the other’s body and what you intended to do with it. Love letters had plenty of good features, but subtlety wasn’t one of them.
This love letter, if that was in fact what it was, was different. There were no outright expressions of love. What there was, if there was any, lived between the lines. But the strangest thing about this love letter, if that was in fact what it was, was that it had come from a man. Ronald had never been with a man before, and had never thought of himself as the kind of person who would ever be with a man. Was that even possible?
This love letter, if that was in fact what it was, was in code. What stood for an expression of love was the desire that Ronald return to the choir, that his absence left an empty spot in the tenor section, which stood for a hole in the Music Director’s heart. In place of genuine vulnerability was an apology of sorts for calling out Ronald for his failure to even try to complete his Circle of Fifths assignment. (This may have been triggered by the abundance of wrongly filled out assignments and barely filled out assignments that the Music Director received from other members of the chorus.) Instead of Ronald’s body, the Music Director wrote of his voice, how it had an ethereal quality that had added so much to the whole and would be missed.
This love letter, if in fact that’s what it was, was a metaphor of a love letter. Things stood for other things. Things meant other things. Would Ronald go back, even if it meant coming to the conclusion that he was not who he thought he was? Or was he simply opening a door that had been shut for too long?
***
The Music Director — the same Music Director this chorus had had for as long as anyone could remember — was in his place, the members of the chorus in theirs. The Music Director looked over at the tenor section, raised his hands, their cue to begin their part. He looked at the faces. The section had changed with time, the years having seen their share of defections, of reassignments to the bass section (“They’ll be so much stronger with you!”) that were in fact age-related demotions, of the additions of two women the Music Director pressured into admitting that they were not altos but were something lower, of death. Though some of the faces he saw had been there for years.
It was mid-winter. The Christmas songs had all been put away. The songs that had been given out were all for the spring concert. The Music Director liked this time of year. There was so much to look forward to — the spring concert, the retreat, warmer weather. Truth be told, he hated Christmas, with its all-join-in Messiah, its obligatory Silent Night. The Music Director was all too glad to put those away.
There had been a hole, an empty seat, where that man had sat. What was his name? Roland? Arnold? Something like that. The Music Director wasn’t sure. It had been so long ago, the chair long since filled. Twice, in fact. The first occupant was forgettable; he couldn’t read music (not that he was alone in that!) and sang off key. Others complained. He got the message and left of his own accord. The Music Director never had to say anything, had never even bothered to learn his name.
But the second! Young Dmitri. Not so young anymore, but still Dmitri, he of the glorious voice, with the shock of black hair that fell across his forehead no matter how many times he pushed it out of the way. Dmitri, who knew music nearly as well as the Music Director himself, who could be counted on, who knew how to sing. Dmitri, with the faint trace of a Russian accent that only came out on certain words, certain syllables, never in his singing. Dmitri who, when he first showed up, had a wispy black growth on his upper lip, but now had a full beard, black, though flecked with gray. Beautiful Dmitri.
It was gone, now, the Russian accent — gone long enough that the Music Director had to remind himself that he once heard it.
Ronald. That was his name. He sat in the once-empty chair. Even those chairs had been replaced with ones that were supposed to be more ergonomically correct. How could he forget Ronald? (Easily — Dmitri helped.) He had written Ronald that note. The Music Director barely remembered what it said, but he remembered writing it. He wrote it after he had embarrassed Ronald at that retreat. Silly boy — he didn’t get the message. Not a boy, really. A grown man. A man with a wife and at least two daughters. Red ink. Where was that pen now? Red ink — the color of mistake, correction. But whose mistake? Who needed to be corrected? What decision had to be made?
He had asked Ronald to come back, to rejoin the chorus. Was it a chorus or a choir? The Music Director wasn’t sure. He had once had a way that made sense to him — a choir was what you had in a church; a chorus wasn’t — but he was no longer sure that was correct.
He looked at Dmitri. Dmitri looked at him. He still sang beautifully, though he couldn’t hit the high notes as cleanly as he once had. The shock of black hair no longer fell across his forehead. It was lost to a receding hairline. A human rights lawyer, helping people from his home country. Would he leave? Or would he be like Dan, the bass who had been in the chorus when the Music Director came and would be here when he left. Dan, past eighty now, and likely to bore his compatriots in the bass section with stories of his various ailments.
Compatriots. He almost said comrades.
What the chorus had just sung was good, but could be better.
“Da capo,” the Music Director said. Repeat. From the beginning. Do it again.
Also sempre. Always.
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Richard Bader’s short fiction has been published by the Piltdown Review, the R.kv.ry Quarterly, the Burningword Literary Journal, and National Public Radio, among others. His first novel, BOOTED, was published in 2020, and the sequel, called BURNED, was published a couple of years later.
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