He nodded and plopped himself into the chair at our tiny table. He pulled out a briar pipe whose bowl was shaped like a barrel and which had a hinged metal top like a beer stein. “You mind?” he asked, striking a loose match against the old cast-iron wall beside us.

“Not at all,” I replied. He worked the pipe. Scents of cherry and autumn bonfires wandered my way.

He smiled somewhat weakly at me. “I will do the job. I estimate it will be seventy dollars. It might be less, it will not be more. Fair enough?”

“Of course,” I said. I’d kick in the extra twenty dollars out of my own pocket. “But, Professor, what about the piece itself?”

He finally allowed, “I am very glad the young woman is attractive.”

“She’s a remarkable talent,” I added.

He patted my right hand with his left. “You, my boy, are most certainly in love.” He gave the slightest nod toward the musical score on his right. “And this composition is noise.”

I was disappointed in his response, but I quickly realized I’d expected too much from the elderly man, who’d thought everything written after Bruckner was either bilge or redundant, with the notable exception of his own work. Still, to call the piece noise . . .

I countered, “They also said that about The Rite of Spring. ”

He frowned. “I’m still not sure they were wrong, but at least when Stravinsky wrote it, he had already demonstrated he could write excellent Rimsky-Korsakov. You have to know the rules before you break them. That is the difference between revolution and anarchy. This young woman, what else has she written, has it all been in this style? Understand, I call it ‘style’ to be polite. I am, after all, your guest.” He laughed and took a small sip of the dark beer that had been set before him.

I couldn’t give an intelligent response to what he said, because, in point of fact, beyond Swing, the only other composition of Gail’s that I had any knowledge of was her abandoned attempt at orchestration, “A Bach Ache.”

“I understand, Professor, but I think most composers who attempt to do something new in music are, in the beginning, invariably accused of writing, as you say, ‘noise.’ I used to get this from my classical friends regarding jazz. They called it the sound of barnyard animals in heat!”

“Und?” he asked. He leaned back, wreathed in smoke like Father Christmas. “This”—he flicked his hand disdainfully at Gail’s score, and I really didn’t like him doing that—“this is a mediocre composer hiding in the uncharted Sumpfland, the swamps, of the avant-garde.”

I told him I would have to respectfully disagree with his opinion. His response was a temperate sigh.