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

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 operahis 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 ela-
borate array of knobs this way or that. Almost all the com-
posers 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 road
blocks. 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,
"Not when you were alive," the examiner said, somewhat
disquietingly. "I mean since the sculptors turned you out
again."
"Since the sculptorsah, I understand. Yes, a string
quartet, two song cycles, a"
"Good. Alfie, write down 'songs.' Play an instrument?"
"Piano."
"Hm." 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 view-
ing lectern, over the lit surface of which an endless belt of
translucent paper was traveling. On the paper was an im-