by Tony Daniel
If you then take that G and make it the tonic—play it on another pipe, say, which is shaped to make a G note, its dominant overtone will be a D, which is a fifth above the second G overtone that the pipe will be producing along with the primary sound. If you continue doing this, you will work through precisely twelve notes in all: C, G, D, A, E, B, F sharp, C sharp, G sharp, D sharp, A sharp, F and then C again.
To Claude, this all came as a revelation. The beauty of the system was directly tied to its physics and, for Claude, more importantly, its algorithmic language. Music happened because the world was arranged in a certain way. It arose out of the world. And then Jensen played Mozart for the class, and Claude realized that, though music arose from the world, it was not necessarily of it. There was something else happening. Something better. Something above. Using the precision and order of nature, beauty could be produced, could come into being. If you began with a set of unifying principles that were all consistent with one another, you could work variations upon them that participated in that consistency and precision, but which were novel.
It was exactly the opposite of everything his life had been so far. For the first time, Claude felt a bit of the anxiety that gripped his stomach loosen (he had never even realized it was there before). There was something that could be done about the mess of life. Claude signed up for Jensen’s advanced class, and found himself devoting most of his free time to practicing the piano and working on theory and composition.
Toward the end of the term, Jensen called Claude into his office. The room was as orderly as the man. Then Jensen lit a cigarette. When he saw Claude’s surprise, he cracked a thin smile.
“My cigarettes are like Western tonality,” he said. “A bad habit I can’t seem to get rid of.”
He motioned for Claude to sit down, and Jensen remained standing next to his desk, without leaning upon it for support.
“I have a bit of a proposition for you, Claude,” Jensen said. “As you know, we’re somewhat forward-looking here at Asap. Willing to try new things. We want the best for our students.”
“Yes, sir,” Claude replied.
“You’re on scholarship, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“The point is this.” And now he did lean against his desk slightly. “The gymnasium has been approached with an idea for teaching. It’s a new idea, and I think it has some merit. So does Headmistress Volars, for that matter. We thought, before we implemented it with the regular students . . . I mean, the other students, we might try it out on someone who had . . . a special ability, but someone whom . . . well, if the idea doesn’t work out, it would be better if the student’s parents did not complain to the board, or even withdraw their child. If you see what I mean?”
“I understand, sir.”
“Well, then.” Jensen ashed his cigarette, took a short drag, then ashed it again. “What it comes down to is that this new stuff, this nanogrist, has allowed the computer programmers to do some rather remarkable things with what is called artificial intelligence.”
“I know something about that,” Claude said. In fact, he had several a.i. programs as serving algorithms in some of his virtual constructions. He had not been particularly impressed with their real intelligence, except for doing complicated arithmetic and playing games that were based on complications of adding and subtracting.
“In fact,” said Jensen, “some of these computer geniuses in the lab here in Bach have come up with . . . something that is causing quite a stir. It’s a music composition program called Despacio.”
“I’ve heard of it,” said Claude. “But I haven’t heard any of the music it makes.”
“Well, I happen to have some of the files available. Desk, would you play one of the Despacio pieces? The portion of the piano sonata?”
“The one called A4?” said the disembodied voice of the office desk.
“That’s the one.”
They were silent, with Claude sitting and Jensen standing. After a moment’s pause, the room filled up with music.
For a moment, it seemed ugly to Claude—perhaps some of the dissonance school works that Jensen had played samples of in the advanced class. And then something happened, the atonalities came together, and Claude could have sworn he was hearing a rainstorm. He could even picture it, although he’d never seen actual rain before. Then came low thunder, sonorous and warm on the horizon. A couple of bolts of lightning. Then the storm passed. The music beat quickened and the key—if that’s what you could call it—changed. The smoke-stale office suddenly felt freshened, full of life. The music faded, off, faded, then returned to medium intensity and ended, not with a flourish, but with a final statement, as if to say: This will continue, thisfreshness, whenever you remember this song.
“File A4, complete,” said the desk. Claude and Jensen did not speak for a moment, then Claude said, “It’s wonderful. Are you sure a computer program wrote that?”
“It’s well documented,” Jensen replied.
“I’m impressed, sir,” said Claude, wondering if that’s what Jensen wanted to hear. Perhaps he was trying out the Despacio on a scholarship student before springing it on a class of rich kids who might get offended and run tell their parents that Mr. Jensen was making them listen to corrupting stuff.
“The thing is,” Jensen said, “that this Despacio program is not really a program at all. Not in the way we think of programs.” Jensen ground out his cigarette and immediately lit another. “You see, they’ve managed to copy a human being. That is, copy over the human brain. Into the grist.”
“So this Despacio program is a copy of a person?”
“Not exactly,” said Jensen. “These a.i. people wanted more. They wanted to go one better, they claim. It’s actually several people—several prominent composers and performers—sort of mixed together. With added programming of their own. They claim to have run the program through a sort of simulated evolutionary process. It’s all very complicated and has lots of quantum things involved that perhaps you understand, but which I do not. The upshot is, they claim this program is conscious. They claim it knows that it is writing music, that it understands what music is.”
“What do you think, sir?”
“You heard the piece. Unless this is some elaborate hoax, I’m inclined to agree. It may not be a human being, but it certainly is a musician. And a great one.”
“I still don’t see what this has to do with me, sir.”
Two quick drags, ash, ash. “Yes, well, Mr. Schlencker, I am getting to that. These a.i. people are the ones who approached the school. They say they are not content for the program to merely compose. They want it to interact with other musicians. To teach. They have offered to take on several Asap students as pupils. Or, I should say,it has.”
“It?”
“Despacio.”
“And you want me . . . to—”
“Take lessons with it. Three times a week, two hours a session. It would be what you could do next semester instead of taking independent piano with me.”
Claude thought about it a moment. Lessons from whoever or whatever wrote the A4 Sonata he’d just heard. The sonata was amazing. It would be like taking lessons from Beethoven. Or Mozart.
“I’d really like to do that, sir,” he heard himself saying.
Jensen crushed out his second cigarette. “Good then,” he said. “You start tomorrow.”
Twenty-four
It was a virtual sitting room with the most amazing re-creation of a grand piano that Claude had ever seen. The big letters above the keyboard read:
BERKHULTZ
He later learned that this was the name of a famous programmer of virtual instruments. The sunlight streaming through the heavy curtains of the window was low and of a wan character, like a sunrise in winter on Earth might have been.
“So,” said Despacio, when Claude appeared, “you are the one they sent to try me out.”
“I don’t imagine that I am trying you out, sir,” said Cl
aude.
“What is it you imagine then?” Despacio appeared today as a middle-aged man with a goatee and a monocle. He was dressed in simple black and white. Claude was to learn that this was only one of several manifestations, and that Despacio did not picture himself—he was definitely male in all his appearances—as a particular person in a particular body at all.
“I think that I am very lucky to have an amazing chance,” Claude said. “Maybe a historic one.”
Despacio gazed at him through his monocle glass for a moment with a cold, blue eye. “Even if you are a young man who is full of shit,” he finally said, “you are probably right. Let us begin. Sit at the piano with me.”
And with that, the lessons commenced. At first they worked on nothing but technique. Despacio was appalled at Claude’s and set him to doing a complicated series of exercises for several weeks. The music was pretty enough, but it was only a means to build Claude’s finger strength and dexterity.
Claude went at it with intensity, nonetheless, and one day after a particularly complicated run Despacio grunted, sat back on the piano bench beside Claude, and said, “Yes, well, enough of that.” And then he began to teach Claude how to play music.
They worked through piece after piece in what, to Claude, seemed an entirely random order. First Bach, then some blues, then Debussy followed by a Zipper tune-wander from the twenty-third century. Contrapuntal early music. Rezik’sClabberwerks. But in each piece, Despacio challenged Claude to feel the music, to learn to see through the notation, to even see through the touch of his fingers against the keys.
“You have to go inside the piano,” Despacio said. “You have to respond to it before it even makes a sound.”
“But—”
“But, nothing, young man. We’re not talking mysticism. Not yet. We’re talking about understanding what music is. It isn’t what you play. It’s what you find. Like mathematics. Exactly like mathematics. It’s out there, and all you do is explore it.”
Claude didn’t really see what Despacio was getting at, but he applied himself diligently, tried toperceive, at least, if not to feel.
Then, as abruptly as he’d ended the finger exercises, Despacio called a halt to the learning of new pieces.
“My version of theWell-Tempered Clavier has certainly shown its worth,” he said. “Now we at least know what we’re dealing with. Go away, now, Claude. I have to think.”
“But, I don’t . . . are the lessons over? Have I failed?” Claude suddenly felt the old anxiety clench its fist around his gut again. For a moment, he prepared himself for Despacio to hit him.
“No,” replied Despacio. “Please be at your next lesson on schedule.”
“Are you sure. I could—”
“Good-bye, Claude. Day after tomorrow.”
“I’ll . . . all right. I’ll be here.”
Claude shunted back to his dorm room feeling as if he’d been hit in the head with a wooden beam. He spent the next day fretting, and showed up for the following lesson exactly on time. Despacio was waiting in the sitting room as usual, but there was something profoundly different. With a start, Claude realized that the Berkhultz grand was gone. Now there was only a table and two chairs. Despacio was sitting in one; he motioned for Claude to take the other.
“There is something inside you,” Despacio began without preamble, “that will not let you play.”
Today the composer was dressed in a plaid shirt and blue jeans. He had grown a big mane of a beard whose hair was snow-white. This was, Claude knew, his “Ben Johnston” body.
“I have come to the conclusion,” he continued, “that we will never make a performer out of you. That is, you will never be a great performer, or even a very good one. I don’t know what the problem is, but it is beyond my skills to correct.”
“I’m sorry,” Claude said. Again the fist in his stomach, clenching.
“There is no need to be sorry,” said Despacio. “I am certain that it is beyond your powers to influence what has happened to you or the abilities with which you have been born.”
“Yes,” said Claude. “I suppose you’re right, sir.”
“Don’t give me that ‘sir’ bullshit,” Despacio suddenly exclaimed. “Don’t you think I’ve noticed by now that, with you, ‘sir’ is a term of anger, a pointed way of stabbing out using respect as a weapon?”
Claude was silent. He didn’t know what to make of Despacio’s comment.
“It doesn’t matter,” said the composer. “What matters is this: Do you want to continue with music?”
“Yes,” Claude answered without hesitation.
“Why?”
“It’s . . . the only thing I have.”
“You will never have it.”
Again Claude was silent.
“But there is something,” said Despacio. “Something harder. From now on, you and I are going to work on composition only, my boy. I think it is the only way”—he tugged at his beard, fixed Claude in his gaze—“for someone like you.”
Then the cool air-conditioning flowed in Claude’s mind. The fist unclenched. A little.
“I don’t care how hard it is,” Claude said. “Sir.”
“Of course you don’t,” replied Despacio, “because you are a hard thing, yourself.”
Claude crossed his arms and looked into Despacio’s eyes, now big and dark. “What is it you want me to do?” he asked.
Twenty-five
from
Quatermain’s Guide
The Advantages of the Strong Force
A Guide to and History of the Met
by Leo Y. Sherman
History of the Met
For several years in the late twenty-fifth century, it seemed certain that even if it were possible, a structure such as the Met could not be built. The politics were all wrong; the science and engineering seemed chancy, if not misguided, to many of the decision-makers of the day. If not for the almost superhuman drive of Amanda Breadwinner, who would later be the Met’s first chief engineer, the Met might never have been built.
Breadwinner was born in Dublin, in the old E.U., in 2429, the daughter of American immigrant writers. She grew up in Ireland, then obtained her graduate education at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. The mid twenty-fifth century on Earth was dominated by the ECHO Alliance, a consortium of transnational information brokers. Growth and commerce, though sluggish, were generally steady. For the arts and sciences, however, it was an era of stagnation.
This was the century immediately preceding the astonishing 2500s and 2600s when the discoveries of Merced would revitalize physics from the ground up, and create new technologies that weren’t dreamed of in the malaise of the 2400s. It was generally believed around 2450, that all of the fundamental discoveries in science had been made, and the task remaining for present scientists was to refine and reconfirm the work of their predecessors. In the arts, the 2400s are known as the Ironic Age.
Breadwinner had wanted to be an architect, but was dissuaded after learning that she would not be licensed to produce a new work until she had produced three perfect copies of previously built edifices on the same scale as the projected new project. Since she had mathematical aptitude, Breadwinner moved into the sciences and searched until she found an area where original work was being done. And in the 2400s, the only technological advances that were being made were occurring in the field of nanotechnology.
In the pre-grist era, nano was being perfected as a method of construction, and astonishing feats were becoming commonplace—that is, in the laboratory. Because of the odd architectural and structural engineering practices of the day, new methods of building were looked upon not as forbidden but, worse, as vulgar and déclassé. Fortunately, by that time construction had begun on the first of the planetary orbital tethers, and nano was allowed to be used for the completion of their construction. The principles of “space elevators” had been known since the twentieth century. It was clear even to pre-space-age humans that putting an enormously lon
g string into geosynchronous orbit about the Earth would provide a much easier and more cost-effective means of getting out of Earth’s gravity well than did the reaction-mass rockets that had then not even made it to the moon.
It was in researching the twentieth century in preparation for some of the background material for her thesis that Breadwinner first discovered a way out for her frustrated artistic side.
“For better or worse, those people did not let the past dictate the terms of the present,” she said. “I never was much of a philosopher, but I thought this sounded like a pretty good way to live. And if the world didn’t want to let me . . . well, I knew how to make and use nano, so the world had better watch out.”
Breadwinner entered a series of engineering competitions, and when her designs inevitably lost because of their new approaches, she, and a group of nanotechnological compatriots whom she gathered around her, built the structures themselves, using micro-instantiation processes. In one case, they even built a bridge in two nights. The winning proposal had outlined afive-year construction period, and a cost several million times greater than Breadwinner’s, who financed the construction by selling her car, a personal transport used on Earth at the time.
Such antics soon brought Breadwinner into conflict with the authorities, in particular with Bron Hofink, who was the Sub-sub-librarian of Technology in the ECHO Alliance and so, in charge of an immense bureaucracy that oversaw all major construction on Earth. Hofink was a dedicated postdecadent who professed to be annoyed by anyone who claimed they could produce “anything new under the sun.” In a famous hearing in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., of Earth, Hofink and Breadwinner clashed before an audience of several million during a broadcast on the old Web, the electromagnetic predecessor to our merci.
