jenkepesh 's review for:

The Ensemble by Aja Gabel

5.0

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I am not altogether sure how this book came to me. A message popped up that my due date to read this was coming soon. What due date? Which app? What institution had I borrowed it from? Something to do with a library app crossed with amazon....I will figure it out. But I don’t remember much, so it is as if the book was left on my doorstep, wrapped in brown paper, an Alice-in Wonderland tag attached with twine: “Read me.” So I did.

The Ensemble is one form of art daring to transfigure another in generous offer to partake of the sublime that usually comes only with years-long dedication and mastery. “Here, this is why live classical music. It is so much ore than the concert. It is two decades of devotion to this form of beauty, two decades of technical, physical mastery, before an ensemble can even begin its gestation. It is all the time after that, mutual creation. It is a holy order. The most passionate listener will never know music in their sinews and neurons and soul as does that the ensemble who plays it.

Gabel stunned me by evoking both music as it vibrates into bring, measure by measure, and simultaneously capturing the consciousness of one who was bringing it into being together with ones co-creators, listening and adjusting and reading and answering one another at the speed of sound with the fineness and finesse of all the previous work.

I am truly in awe that Gabel attempted this translation from music to novel, and more so that she accomplished it.

Moreover, she wrote a beautiful paean to four imagined individual lives. The members of the Van Ness string quartet are growing beings throughout the book, individuals as much as one entwined bring. They are colleagues and individuals. They annoy each other and let each other be themselves. They live outside of their ensembles as well as inside it.

Reading this, being re-initiated into music’s divinity, was such grace.