“You shouldn’t have done it,” he burst out after the Krafft incident. “You can’t just walk out on a new Krafft composition. The man’s the president of the Interplanetary Society for Contemporary Music. How am I ever going to persuade them that you’re a contemporary if you keep snubbing them?”
“What does it matter?” Strauss said. “They don’t know me by sight.”
“You’re wrong; they know you very well, and they’re watching every move you make. You’re the first major composer the mind sculptors ever tackled, and the ISCM would be glad to turn you back with a rejection slip.”
“Why?”
“Oh,” said Sindi, “there are lots of reasons. The sculptors are snobs; so are the ISCM boys. Each of them wanted to prove to the other that their own art is the king of them all. And then there’s the competition; it would be easier to flunk you than to let you into the market. I really think you’d better go back in. I could make up some excuse—”
“No,” Strauss said shortly. “I have work to do.”
“But that’s just the point, Richard. How are we going to get an opera produced without the ISCM? It isn’t as though you wrote theremin solos, or something that didn’t cost so—”
“I have work to do,” he said, and left.
And he did, work which absorbed him as had no other project during the last thirty years of his former life. He had scarcely touched pen to music paper—both had been astonishingly hard to find—when he realized that nothing in his long career had provided him with touchstones by which to judge what music he should write now.
The old tricks came swarming back by the thousands, to be sure: the sudden, unexpected key changes at the crest of a melody, the interval stretching, the piling of divided strings, playing in the high harmonics, upon the already tottering top of a climax, the scurry and bustle as phrases were passed like lightning from one choir of the orchestra to another, the flashing runs in the brass, the chuckling in the clarinets, the snarling mixtures of colors to emphasize dramatic tension—all of them.
But none of them satisfied him now. He had been content with them for most of a lifetime and had made them do an astonishing amount of work. But now it was time to strike out afresh. Some of the tricks, indeed, actively repelled him: Where had he gotten the notion, clung to for decades, that violins screaming out in unison somewhere in the stratosphere were a sound interesting enough to be worth repeating inside a single composition, let alone in all of them?
And nobody, he reflected contentedly, ever approached such a new beginning better equipped. In addition to the past lying available in his memory, he had always had a technical armamentarium second to none; even the hostile critics had granted him that. Now that he was, in a sense, composing his first opera—his first after fifteen of them!—he had every opportunity to make it a masterpiece.
And every such intention.
There were, of course, many minor distractions. One of them was that search for old-fashioned score paper, and a pen and ink with which to write on it. Very few of the modern composers, it developed, wrote their music at all. A large bloc of them used tape, patching together snippets of tone and sound snipped from other tapes, superimposing one tape on another, and varying the results by twirling an elaborate array of knobs this way or that. Almost all the composers of 3-V scores, on the other hand, wrote on the sound track itself, rapidly scribbling jagged wiggly lines which, when passed through a photocell-audio circuit, produced a noise reasonably like an orchestra playing music, overtones and all.
The last-ditch conservatives who still wrote notes on paper did so with the aid of a musical typewriter. The device, Strauss had to admit, seemed perfected at last; it had manuals and stops like an organ, but it was not much more than twice as large as a standard letter-writing typewriter and produced a neat page. But he was satisfied with his own spidery, highly legible manuscript and refused to abandon it, badly though the one pen nib he had been able to buy coarsened it. It helped to tie him to his past.
Joining the ISCM had also caused him some bad moments, even after Sindi had worked him around the political roadblocks. The Society man who examined his qualifications as a member had run through the questions with no more interest than might have been shown by a veterinarian examining his four-thousandth sick calf.
“Had anything published?”
“Yes, nine tone poems, about three hundred songs, an—”
“Not when you were alive,” the examiner said, somewhat disquietingly. “I mean since the sculptors turned you out again.”
“Since the sculptors—ah, I understand. Yes, a string quartet, two song cycles, a—”
“Good. Alfie, write down, ‘Songs.’ Play an instrument?”
“Piano.”
“Hmmm.” The examiner studied his fingernails. “Oh, well. Do you read music? Or do you use a Scriber, or tape clips? Or a Machine?”
“I read.”
“Here.” The examiner sat Strauss down in front of a viewing lectern, over the lit surface of which an endless belt of translucent paper was traveling. On the paper was an immensely magnified sound track. “Whistle me the tune of that, and name the instruments it sounds like.”
“I don’t read that Musiksticheln,” Strauss said frostily, “or write it, either. I use standard notation, on music paper.”
“Alfie, write down, ‘Reads notes only.’ ” He laid a sheet of grayly printed music on the lectern above the ground glass. “Whistle me that.”
“That” proved to be a popular tune called “Vangs, Snifters, and Store-Credit Snooky,” which had been written on a Hit Machine in 2159 by a guitar-faking politician who sang it at campaign rallies. (In some respects, Strauss reflected, the United States had indeed not changed very much.) It had become so popular that anybody could have whistled it from the title alone, whether he could read the music or not. Strauss whistled it and, to prove his bona fides, added, “It’s in the key of B flat.”
The examiner went over to the green-painted upright piano and hit one greasy black key. The instrument was horribly out of tune—the note was much nearer to the standard 440/cps A than it was to B flat—but the examiner said, “So it is. Alfie, write down, ‘Also reads flats.’ All right, son, you’re a member. Nice to have you with us; not many people can read that old-style notation anymore. A lot of them think they’re too good for it.”
“Thank you,” Strauss said.
“My feeling is, if it was good enough for the old masters, it’s good enough for us. We don’t have people like them with us these days, it seems to me. Except for Dr. Krafft, of course. They were great back in the old days—men like Shilkrit, Steiner, Tiomkin, and Pearl . . . and Wilder and Jannsen. Real goffin.”
“Doch gewiss,” Strauss said politely.
BUT THE WORK went forward. He was making a little income now, from small works. People seemed to feel a special interest in a composer who had come out of the mind sculptors’ laboratories, and in addition the material itself, Strauss was quite certain, had merits of its own to help sell it.