"Richard Kadrey - The Arcades of Allah" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kadrey Richard)

was fascinated by astronomy and had been an avid follower of both the Russian and European space
programs. Luchenko confessed his interest in music and asked if he might play for Yomiuri a piece that
he had been thinking about for some time. He performed the piece on a World War Two-vintage upright
piano in the tiny chapel attached to the hospital. This was the starting point for LuchenkoтАЩs Third
Symphony, in which the piece now stands as the fourth canto (тАЬInter-deathтАЭ). With YomiuriтАЩs
encouragement and promise to record the piece, Luchenko soon developed a plan for a piano suite
inspired by his visit with the Julia Set.

Yomiuri premiered Inter-death in Amsterdam the following fall, but already Luchenko was on to bigger
things. He realized almost immediately that he needed more room to tell the story of his involvement with
space exploration. He put aside тАЬInter-deathтАЭ and began writing what became his First Symphony,
which told the story of his aborted flight to Mars, and his lonely time in space before meeting the Set. He
first performed a piano version of the symphony in front of two hundred patients while still in the hospital.
The audience included hospital cooks and maintenance workers as well as doctors, members of the
music academy faculty, and clergymen. Prepared by LuchenkoтАЩs comments, they proved extremely
receptive, and Luchenko himself later wrote that he had never felt greater joy, attention and better
understanding of his art.

Following his release from Laev, Luchenko began work on a concert version of the piece for full
orchestra. Following the First SymphonyтАЩs successful premier in late 1998 (with Shigeo Yomiuri
performing the piano and organ parts), Luchenko retired to the French countryside to begin work on his
Second Symphony (The Iteration of Shiva). This work, though somewhat less well received than the
First, recounts LuchenkoтАЩs early years as a poetry and piano student, the influence his father (a
decorated veteran of the Afghani Wars) had on LuchenkoтАЩs decision to join the military, and his eventual
entry into the cosmonaut program. What makes the Second Symphony notable is that for the first time,
Luchenko combined his own music with his poetry, displaying a surprising lyric maturity as he wove a
text drawn from many of the worldтАЩs greatest religions together with ruminations on chaos theory and
theoretical physics.




LuchenkoтАЩs whole artistic output was based on deep spiritual roots growing out of an early disaffection
from the Russian Orthodox church and an interest in Eastern spiritual practices. Mixed with his strong
grounding in science (at his fatherтАЩs insistence), these practices led him to both a musical and a belief
system that he likened to space exploration. He always insisted that he was not a mystic, but simply a
cosmonaut of music, whose task consisted in the tonal exploration of the universe. The texts sung by the
chorus in his Second and ThirdSymphonies, often misunderstood and sometimes bitterly attacked, aim
at nothing more than a complete explication of this vision. Indeed, it was the scientific rigor that he
brought to his work that attracted so many followers, culminating finally in the quasi-religious White
Arcades movement, before their tragic involvement in right-wing Japanese politics.

In LuchenkoтАЩs only published book of poetry, Conditions and Singularities (Shambhalla Books,
2008), many ideas important to understanding the Third Symphony are to be found. The image of white
тАЬarchesтАЭ (which gave the White Arcadists their name) recurs throughout. In his introduction to the book,
Luchenko spoke of the Muslim prophet MohammedтАЩs hearing the word of God in the desert, and
likened this to his own time with the Julia Set, although he then went on to explain that he had received no
тАЬrevelationsтАЭ from the aliens in the biblical sense, and that his communication with the Set was limited.
Indeed, the differences in their modes of thought were so profound that he likened the experience to
being тАЬlocked for months in a room with a lobster and trying to establish a dialog.тАЭ