"Blish, James - A Work of Art" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

pole.
"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 com-
poser 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 wants 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
"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 paperboth had been aston-
ishingly hard to findwhen 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
was 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