Richard Powers by The Time Of Our Singing

details, until it became clear to her that, with Jonah, her knowledge might not be the liability it was with the rest of the student world. Then she let loose with both barrels.
    As Kimberly Monera went into her recitation, Jonah craned around and shot me a look: We two were backwoods amateurs. We knew nothing. Our tame home schooling had left us hopelessly unprepared for the world of international power artistry. I hadn’t seen him so awed by a discovery since our parents gave us the record player. Kimberly’s mastery of the repertoire put Jonah on highest alert. He grilled the poor girl all afternoon, yanking her down by her bleached hand whenever she tried to get up to go.
    Saddest of all, Kimberly Monera sat still for his worst treatment. Here was the best boy soprano in the school, the boy whom Boylston’s director called by first name. What it must have meant to her, just this one little scrap of selfish kindness.
    I sat two steps above them, looking down on their exchange of hostages. They both wanted me there, looking out, ready to bark a warning if any well-adjusted kid approached. When her feats of verbal erudition trickled out, the three of us played Name That Tune. For the first time, somebody our age beat us. Jonah and I had to dig deep into the recesses of our family evenings to come up with something the pastel Monera couldn’t peg within two measures. Even when she hadn’t heard a piece, she could almost always zone in on its origin and figure out its maker.
    The skill broke my heart and maddened my brother. “No fair just guessing if you don’t know for sure.”
    “It’s not just guessing,” she said. But ready to give the skill up for his sake.
    He slapped his hand down on the stoop, somewhere between outrage and delight. “I could do that, too, if my parents were world-famous musicians.”
    I stared at him, aghast. He couldn’t know what he was saying. I reached down to touch his shoulder, stop him before he said worse. His words violated nature—like trees growing downward or fires underwater. Something terrible would happen to us, some hell released by his disloyalty. A Studebaker would roll up over the sidewalk and wipe us out where we sat playing.
    But his punishment was limited to Kimberly Monera’s lower lip. It trembled in place, blanched, bloodless, an earthworm on ice. I wanted to reach down and hold it still. Jonah, oblivious, pressed her.
    He would not stop short of the secret to her sorcery. “How can you tell who wrote a piece if you’ve never even heard it?”
    Her face rallied. I saw her thinking that she might still be of use to him. “Well, first, you let the style tell you when it was written.”
    Her words were like a ship breaching the horizon. The idea had never really occurred to Jonah. Etched into the flow of notes, stacked up in the banks of harmony, every composer left a cornerstone date. My brother traced his hand along the iron balustrade that flanked the concrete steps. The scattering of his naïveté staggered him. Music itself, like its own rhythms, played out in time. A piece was what it was only because of all the pieces written before and after it. Every song sang the moment that brought it into being. Music talked endlessly to itself.
    We’d never have learned this fact from our parents, even after a lifetime of harmonizing. Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows. To him, the thousand years of Western music might as well all have been written that morning. Mama shared the belief; maybe it was why they’d ended up together. Our parents’
    Crazed Quotations game played on the notion that every moment’s tune had all history’s music box for its counterpoint. On any evening in Hamilton Heights, we could jump from organum to atonality without any hint of all the centuries that had died fiery deaths between them. Our parents brought us up to