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 immensely magnified sound track. “Whistle me the tune of that, and name the instruments it sounds like.”