What she came up with was a Saturday evening performance of a man named
Alfred Brendel playing Beethoven sonatas. Kuperman looked the word "sonata" up in the dictionary, but didn't find it very helpful. He also bought a little blue book containing musical terms. He quickly saw that any command of the subject of music was not going to be possible, at least not at his age. Mainly, he wanted to avoid embarrassing himself by saying or doing something really stupid. 

The audience at Orchestra Hall was peppered with a few more younger people than the one at De Paul. Lots of old GJs, as Kuperman always referred to himself, to German Jews. People seemed rather better dressed, though still less than glittering. Does musical culture, Kuperman wondered, make its followers a trifle shabby in appearance? This world, which Judith Neeley was taking him into, was mysterious to Kuperman, who didn't much care for mysteries. 

The greatest mystery of all, of course, was the music. Alfred Brendel, an Austrian, Kuperman learned in the programme notes, sat upright at his piano and played with an air of the greatest seriousness. He assumed that he was Jewish. Kuperman felt that he had previously heard some of the melodies that came booming out of Brendel's piano; or at least wisps of them. He stole glances at Judith Neeley, who had on her normally pleasant face an expression quite as serious as Brendel's. Kuperman was not bored by the music — not at all — but if you asked him what he had heard, he couldn't have told you, couldn't have hummed a note. Judith Neeley seemed in a state resembling ecstasy. In the programme notes he read that one of the sonatas had an "incomprehensible sublimity." Kuperman got only the incomprehensible part. 

Judith Neeley — Kuperman for some reason found it difficult to call her or even think of her as Judy — continued to invite him along to concerts and even twice to the opera. He cared less, cared really not at all, for the latter; the improbability of the proceedings — heavyset men madly in love with vastly overweight women, whose response to being stabbed was usually to sing louder than ever — didn't seem to work for him. Studying the audience, Kuperman concluded that opera was chiefly for homosexual men and women whose dreams and fantasies obviously were not going to be realised. He didn't of course mention this to Judith.

But concerts still fascinated him. He came to like chamber music more than symphonic concerts. The blend of so many instruments when played by a symphony orchestra tended to confuse him, whereas in listening to a chamber group of from three to eight players he could tell which instruments were contributing what sounds. He sensed an order here that pleased him, though he could not say exactly why it did so. He began to tune his kitchen radio at home to WFMT, the local classical music station, to the accompaniment of which he ate his breakfast. But when he would hear something played that he thought he had heard before, he could never call up what it was. Along with his other inadequacies, he had, it seemed, almost no memory for this music. Hopeless, the whole damn thing seemed hopeless. 

Kuperman sensed that a lot of music was about setting up anticipations and then satisfying them, but often in unpredictable ways. Sometimes his own mind seemed to him fairly sharp in the concert hall; and sometimes it wandered all over the place and, strain to do so though he did, he couldn't keep it in the room and on the music. Once, presumably listening to a Handel oratorio in a church in Oak Park, all he could think of was the hundred gross of long out-of-fashion ties he had bought that afternoon at eight cents apiece. Could he move them? At eight cents a shot, how could he go wrong? Still, a hundred gross?