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

mensely 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 tunethe note was much nearer to the standard
440/cps A than it was to B flatbut the examiner said, "So
it is. Alfie, write down, 'Also read flats.' All right, son, you're
a member. Nice to have you with us; not many people can
read that old-style notation any more. 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 daysmen like
Shilkrit, Steiner, Tiomkin, and Pearl . . . and Wilder and
Jannsen. Real goffin."
"Dock 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 sculp-
tors' laboratories; and in addition the material itself, Strauss
was quite certain, had merits of its own to help sell it.
It was the opera which counted, however. That grew and
grew under his pen, as fresh and new as his new life, as
founded in knowledge and ripeness as his long full memory.
Finding a libretto had been troublesome at first. While it
was possible that something existed that might have served
among the current scripts for 3-Vthough he doubted it
he found himself unable to tell the good from the bad
through the fog cast over both by incomprehensibly tech-
nical production directions. Eventually, and for only the
third time in his whole career, he had fallen back upon a
play written in a language other than his own, andfor
the first timedecided to set it in that language.
The play was Christopher Fry's Venus Observed, in all