When he was finished, he had two days still to spare before the beginning of rehearsals. With those, furthermore, he would have nothing to do. The techniques of performance in this age were so completely bound up with the electronic arts as to reduce his own experiencehe, the master Kapell-meister of them allto the hopelessly primitive.
He did not mind. The music, as written, would speak for itself. In the meantime he found it grateful to forget the months’-long preoccupation with the stage for a while. He went back to the library and browsed lazily through old poems, vaguely seeking texts for a song or two. He knew better than to bother with recent poets; they could not speak to him, and he knew it. The Americans of his own age, he thought, might give him a clue to understanding this America of 2161; and if some such poem gave birth to a song, so much the better.
The search was relaxing and he gave himself up to enjoy-ing it. Finally he struck a tape that he liked: a tape read in a cracked old voice that twanged of Idaho as that voice had twanged in 1910, in Strauss’s own ancient youth. The poet’s name was Pound; he said, on the tape
… the souls of alt men great
At times pass through us,
And we are melted into them, and are not Save reflexions of their souls.
Thus I am Dante for a space and am
One Frangois Villon, ballad-lord and thief Or am such holy ones I may not write, Lest Blasphemy be writ against my name; This for an instant and the flame is gone.
‘Tis as in midmost us there glows a sphere Translucent, molten gold, that is the “I”