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I doubt if Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet intended to disrupt my life with The Juliet Letters, their song sequence for voice and string quartet. I premiered the CD in my car on the way to the Department of Motor Vehicles, and at once felt as if I'd just received an important overseas phone call on an intermittent satellite hookup. Later that day, I found myself involuntarily muttering lyrics (e.g., "pass the vinegar," "Daddy's on fire"), and that night I woke up half a dozen times with an eerie cello riff stuck in my head. I had a lousy night's sleep, often a warning of the proximity of great art.
I know what to picture when I hear a song like "Achy Breaky Heart" — a redneck with big hair feeling bad. But each of the Juliet songs is presented as a letter from a different character, which is awfully taxing when one is listening while looking for a parking space. Consider the song that starts, "Thank you for the flowers."
Know what's coming next? I didn't.
I threw them on the fire
And I burned the photographs that you had enclosed.
GOD they were ugly children.
Who is this person? After a few replays, I began to grasp that it is a wacky old aunt ("a few chips short of a fish supper," as I later heard Costello in concert describe her) responding to a long-lost nephew wheedling a place in her will. Over her sarcastic reply a violin buzzes like a horsefly. Its tune reminded me of a famous melody — one that, exasperatingly, I could not quite place.
The Juliet Letters is not Costello banging off ditties and backing them with antique strings, like the Beatles. Nor is it a string quartet doing a goof in which they arrange "Born to Be Wild" in the style of Vivaldi. It's not a stunt, and therefore it's hard to pin down.
So I called my friends Jennie, the violist, and Bill, the glass-harmonica player, and talked them into buying a copy of The Juliet Letters, in the hope that they would get hooked, too, and share my angst and their knowledge. A few days later, I ran into Bill in the supermarket. "Pandiatonic equidistant multitonality!" he exclaimed, beaming. "That cello motif in your dreams is outlining two chords as far apart harmonically as they can be — one of Bartók's fave sounds. Jennie's cutting work tonight to see if she can find your horsefly violin in Shostakovich."
Like the Carpocratian Gnostics, I believe in exorcising morbid obsessions by indulging them. I studied the liner notes for clues to help me understand the songs so completely that I could dismiss them as solved. It was 11 P.M. when I noticed Costello's statement that the song "This Sad Burlesque" pertained to events that would be familiar to those who lived in England in the spring of 1992. I was in no mood to stay up all night reviewing recent British history, so I phoned a chum in London, where it was 4 A.M., sang the lyrics over the phone, and heard his explanation: "Election ... bloody Conservatives still in ... cynical do-nothing bastards." My friend had had a late night at the pub.
In the song "Romeo's Seance," a man conjures his dead lover on the Ouija board and soon finds himself and his "hand-holding baby walking the floor and the ceiling." The Brodsky Quartet's violist does a vocal cameo as the voice from beyond, singing "Romeo is calling you" in harmony with Costello. I was whistling "Romeo's Seance" as I waited in line at an automatic-teller machine at the Baltimore-Washington airport. On the notes where the harmonizing voice joins in I suddenly thought I heard someone singing along with me. I looked back at the escalator and down the corridor to the security check, but saw only travellers going about their business, indifferent to my tweetling. I whistled again, and again the phantom sang. I had just pocketed my cash and decided that there was some acoustic quirk in the lobby when a young couple approached me and asked the name of the tune. I told them. "That's it!" said the man. "Every time you whistled it, I sang along, hoping it would jog my memory. It was driving me nuts."
A few weeks ago, just before dawn, I was awakened by the grinding of my fax machine. I found this message.
To: Teller
From: Jennie & Bill
Re: What that "Horsefly" violin motif sounds like
Checked Shostakosich, Bartók, Dvořák. Then it hit us: The Looney Tunes theme song.
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