38
PARTISAN REVIEW
Physiology. Like all epoch-making discoveries, Dr. Howard's had
been most simple. Having noted the fact-among the many brought
to light in his nursery, among the pegs and chips and mazes and
colors and marbles and fruits and traps and enticements and with–
drawals and ups and downs-that apes can count to five, it had
occurred to him, since he was a great lover of music, that apes
ought to take to music. The musical staff has five lines, and
the overtones you can hear whenever a note is struck are five; the
most complicated chords are based on five elements, and five is the
mystic number that dominates all music.
If
apes were able to count
to five, exactly to five, and if all apes could do this, it clearly indicated
that they were deeply imbued with musical sense and all that had to
be done was to call it forth from them.
The results were indeed marvelous. Even the first ape generation
achieved wonders, on practically all instruments, and three genera–
tions of special breeding, radioactively-induced genetic mutation and
selection, combined with environmental conditioning, did the rest.
Nobody had ever heard such music. The piano seemed to be no
longer
.a
piano, the violin no longer a violin. Such teamwork was
never before known. The performing apes seemed to be one single
soul; composition, apes, instruments, and audience, all one single
soul, entranced; and time ceased to exist. This happened, that is,
if
it
was a good evening. The apes so penetrated the spirit of a composi–
tion that if the trainer left some blank spaces on the score, the sight–
reading ape would inevitably fill in the notes correctly. One concert–
izing ape was known to have insisted on a D-sharp in
.a
Haydn
sonata, where the score had D-natural, to which the trainer stuck.
But in vain. The ape played D-sharp until it was a scandal. At
that point the aged Dr. Howard stepped in-it was the last time he
made headlines before his death. He personally flew to London to
consult the
Urtext
and behold, the
Urtext
had D-sharp....
Superb it was, when the apes were in form. But they were not al–
ways. It seemed that one wrong note, a sloppy octave, a miscalculated
jump, sufficed to throw the simian mind into utter confusion. And any
artist, man or ape, is apt to play a wrong note, once in a while. The
ape's memory collapsed in such cases. He would furiously repeat the
wrong note, trill on it violently, bang on the piano with hands and
feet, then tum to grimace at the audience, strumming with his behind
