The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Vistata Form

by J. Neil Schulman

  Joan's instrument had several such extra lines among its twelve gems, including a wolf at 10,600 Angstroms in the infrared, an unavoidable but invisible line in her laser's darkest red gem.

  But this was not the only Wolf attending Joan in the lawn dome at Helix Vista, as she practiced to the last possible moment before her mother's celebration.

  In a front-row couch of the lawn dome, Wolfgang Jaeger watched Joan practice. There was no conflict of interest in seeing Joan play before judging her competition performance, since he was not serving on Joan's jury. Jaeger had told LCAA that he could serve only on the jury of the Junior Competition, saying that with five of his students in the Senior Competition, it would be impossible for him to remain objective. That was what he said. His actual reason had more to do with not wanting to expend energy arguing with another committee when even standing up in his abominable gravity well was an effort.

  Thus, having arrived early for the party, he reclined in the dark, blissfully watching Joan run through her Vistata.

  First movement. A leitmotif in orange dances against a green field surrounded by a violet perimeter; outside the perimeter is a slowly dimming red glow. The orange lietmotif dances from one edge of the green to the other, as if searching for something, then notices a gap in the perimeter. The leitmotif dances through the gap from green to red, loops around several times, and is about to dance back into the green when the gap closes up.

  Second movement. The orange leitmotif makes several more attempts to get back to the green, unsuccessfully, while the red glowing shifts increasingly to dark violet. When the shift is complete, a red leitmotif joins the orange on the now violet backdrop, and the two leitmotif carefully engage each other in conversation. When the dance is completed, they begin a cakewalk in larger and larger circles.

  Third movement. The red and orange leitmotives start dancing slowly across a phosphorescent white field, even as their own patterns take on a ghostly aura (provided by the thirty-sixth hue in ultraviolet). The leitmotives stop, the red circles cautiously around the orange several times, then the two leitmotives resume their journey across the phosphorescent white.

  Fourth movement. Halfway across the dome, a bright flaring in yellow stops the two leitmotives, casting violet shadows behind them. A second flare from the opposite side doubles the shadows, signaling the ominous appearance of a leitmotif in dark blue. As the orange leitmotif backs away, the blue leitmotif engages the red in an apache dance; but the red disengages and, rejoining the orange leitmotif, continues across the phosphorescence.

  Fifth movement. The blue leitmotif dances in rage, time and time again blocking the red and orange leitmotives, encircling them, trapping them.

  Sixth movement. The red leitmotif dances between the orange and blue leitmotives, and begins circling the blue enticingly. The blue responds to the red by attacking, and the red falls. The orange leitmotif counterattacks the blue, but with no effect. With one swift shove, the blue sends the orange spiraling across the field.

  Seventh movement. The blue circles the red, slowly, and as it circles, the red leitmotif changes into a leitmotiv in bright gold. The blue leitmotif begins circling the golden leitmotif, drawing it higher and higher and higher toward the center of the dome, until their patterns are so small that they look like one green leitmotif...then the gold leitmotif spins to the dome's edge as a shockwave, turns red again, and expands toward the center until the entire dome is bathed in a dying red glow, broken only by a small, pulsating remnant of the orange leitmotif.

  The dome went black. Wolfgang Jaeger applauded as his "Bravissima!" echoed through the empty dome. Joan raised the glowing.

  When he had stopped applauding Joan said, "How about an encore?"

  Jaeger chuckled. "You're prepared to outdo yourself?"

  Joan twisted a lock of red hair around her finger. "No, you."

  "Not another rainbow cadenza, I hope?"

  "Next year," Joan said.

  She dimmed the glowing again, began running her fingers across the console, then built up a stylized image, line by colored line, in the center of the dome. She fixed the image and began concentrating on movement. Then Joan touched a foot pedal to bring up a diffraction, and fingered a key to place each image under discrete control.

  "Three butterflies," she said, as they began looping around one another in three-way counterpoint.

  Jaeger laughed resonantly. "My God, you remembered that?"

  "I remember almost everything, Wolf," Joan said.

  "Thank the stars, I don't," said Jaeger.

  "Composer?" said Geoffrey Moulton to Jack Malcolm. "The man is color-blind. That blue jay couldn't compose a competent Yulegram, much less a vistata. If you judge by the duration of his 'pieces', he probably suffers from premature ejaculation."

  Eleanor had given up an hour before trying to keep the discussions from getting serious. When lasegraphers got together, they argued lasegraphy; similar discussions were in progress all over the terrace, interrupted only by a robot with canapes, or a trip to the cannabistro, or a shift in factional loyalty. Near the cannabistro, one small crowd was gathered around the white-haired Jack Malcolm and his contemporary, Geoffrey Moulton, who alternated between coming across as a petulant young man and as the holder of keys to eternity.

  "Nevertheless," Malcolm answered Moulton, "Roland Church sold approximately five times as many recordings last year as the total sales of everyone at this party."

  "With choreography set to music," Moulton said.

  "That is the convention of the medium," Malcolm replied, snagging a pimento crust as it went by.

  "Pandering to the lowest impulses of the public."

  "I've seen him perform," Malcolm said. "He has some lovely coloraturas."

  Moulton threw his lavender cloak backward and snorted. "I suppose the next thing you'll be telling me is that you intend to allow music in your practice domes."

  "No," Malcolm said. "With a few exceptions, my students are too lazy to allow that. They'd begin composing by ear, rather than by eye, and never learn how to draw out the implications of a theme."

  "But Good Goddess, Malcolm, that's what I've been getting at all along. This roga doesn't have any form of its own, any logic. You can do anything so long as it follows the beat of the music."

  "It isn't quite that lawless. Its dialectical phrases--"

  "All right. A few simple progressions. A key change to the dominant. Any first-year student could do as much."

  "Perhaps. But could you?"

  "Why the caldron would I want to?"

  Malcolm turned to the cannabistro for a moment, then returned with a joynette. "Perhaps," he said, "because we get so wrapped up in form and technique that we tend to forget ours in a medium relying on mythic archetypes. And what better place to look for archetypes than in the collective unconscious that buys so many Roland Church recordings?"

  Moulton rapped on his chest, the sound muffled against the heavy fabric. "In here, that's where. I don't need to look at sales figures to know what's an archetype."

  "How odd," Malcolm said. "That's almost word-for-word what Roland Church said to me when he started taking formal training with me last fall."

  Moulton's jaw dropped, and Jack Malcolm lit a joynette. "And he isn't color-blind. I tested him. As for being premature, my friend," Malcolm said, laying his hand on Geoffrey Moulton's shoulder, "you'll have to test that for yourself."

  The group around them broke up, laughing, as the two lasemeisters headed over to the court around Jaeger, which included the hostess, her red-haired daughter, His Gaylordship, and most of the other lasegraphers.

  "So you see, Maestro," said Graham Ingrams, a spindly but short comman in his thirties, "neither the coloratura nor the graphics in my Color-blind Vistata rely on traditional forms. The sequences, in fact, were arrived at by spinning a roulette wheel and transcribing the numbers to achieve a new, achromatic logic."

  "I'm beginning to see," said Jaeger, tugging at his cloak.
"Tell me. What has the audience response been to these achromatic compositions of yours?"

  "As is to be expected with new forms," Ingrams said, hurt rising up in his voice: "anger, distrust, and maintenance of disbelief. But I'm sure in time this will change. Weren't your own pathbreaking works accepted only after initial resistance?"

  "Of course," said Jaeger, pulling at his shoulder again. "Damn these cloaks. I'll never get used to them. Still," he went on, "in my search for new paths I always heeded the Tao that it's better to follow the river than dig onself into a trench."

  Ingrams turned chilly. "If one doesn't like where the river is going, isn't one free to dig a canal?"

  "Just don't follow the alimentary canal, or you'll reach a bad end."

  "The Maestro has gotten too obscure for me," Ingrams said.

  "And for me also," said Wendell.

  "Very well," said Jaeger. "Has anyone here ever been to the concert of a symphony orchestra?"

  "My class at school went last year," Joan said. "The Tokyo Repertory Orchesta was at the Television Museum."

  "Would you evaluate the concert?" Jaeger asked her.

  Joan shrugged. "They didn't play nearly as well as the old recordings we heard in class before the field trip."

  "Thank you. I rest my case."

  "Maestro," Ingrams began, "I'm afraid I still don't see--"

  "Then look," said Jaeger. "Ingrams, when I was just about your age, I attended one of the last concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the last major orchestra there was. It was pitiful. At the peak of symphonic music, there were orchestras in every major city, and most minor cities had at least community orchestras. Yet by the mid-twenty-first century, symphonic music was dead. At the concert I attended, the orchestra was down to three-quarters strength and the audience was two-thirds empty. The performance was a disgrace compared with recordings they'd made half a century earlier. Their audience could get a better performance staying at home listening to their audios than going to a live performance, so the orchestras lost out. Today a few repertory orchestras are all that's left of a once major artistic industry."

  "I don't see how that addresses my vistata," Ingrams said. "It seems more an attack on the recording industry."

  Jaeger shook his head. "What killed the symphony orchestra was not competing with their own recordings," he replied, "but not having any new symphonic compositions to use to compete with. And this was due to a sort of Gresham's law--counterfeit music driving out real music--that you would unleash upon lasegraphy."

  Ingrams drew back. "Why, I'd never--"

  "Listen, Ingrams," said Jaeger. "What you do with your career is your affair. I just want to see things sold with the proper label. You want to use an achromatic form, it's not a new idea. In music they called it 'atonality': conpositions made up of sounds without harmonic tonality, without melody or chords - chaos without letup, tension without release. But music is defined by its harmonic tonality--just as lasegraphy is defined by its concordant chromatics--and music without harmony was, in effect, music without music, just as lasegraphy without chromatics is lasegraphy without lasegraphy. And when two generations of symphonic composers, performers, and critics labeled musical tonality as a relic of the past, force-feeding their ever-dwindling audiences with noise sold as 'modern' music -- while, simultaneously, definitive performances of past tonal masterpieces accumulated on recordings--the audiences withdrew from the concert hall to their living rooms, and a great art form was dead. Every composer, performer, and critic who backed this counterfeit music with his or her reputation was a party to the murder of classical music--no, scratch that--to its genocide.

  Before Ingrams could reply, Stanton Darris caught Eleanor's eye and nodded. "The supper is served," Eleanor announced. She took Stanton's arm and added to him under her breath. "Thank the Lady."

  Vera was alone on the terrace, refilling a hash pipe with Mixture No. 23, Assassin's Blend, when the woman came up again to get her handbag. "Oh, there you are, my dear," she said to Vera. "I've been looking to get you alone all evening. But shouldn't you be down at the supper?"

  "I'm going down in a moment," Vera said. "But why were you looking at me?"

  "Oh, of course. I'm Martha Silberstein from the Gazette- Holograph. I was on your jury."

  Perhaps it was the hash, Vera thought, but she had no recollection of the woman from any recent case. She tried to place a bony, olive-skinned woman with a hairdo like a layer cake, and came up short. This was embarrassing; she decided not to show it. "Of course," she said, unconsciously mimicking the woman. "How are you this evening?"

  "Quite well, thank you. You know, my dear," she said, "I've served on many juries, but I've never been so impressed as I was watching you at work."

  "Thank you," said Vera. "Perhaps I shouldn't press my luck by asking, but what impressed you so much?"

  "Oh, don't be so modest, my dear," Silberstein went on. "It doesn't take a reporter's eye to see that you have a great career in store for you. I expect to see you go all the way to the top."

  As a matter of fact, Vera did have long-term plans, involving His Gaylordship, to gain a seat for herself in the Upper Manor. "How nice of you to say," she said.

  "Have you made any plans for next year?"

  "Why no."

  "Do you plan to move to Pacifica, or just commute?"

  "Pacifica?" Vera asked.

  "Why, yes. Pacifica. I know we're supposed to be provincial, but I'm sure you've heard of it. On the Pacific Ocean, you know."

  "I'm not planning to go to Pacifica," Vera said, missing the humor.

  "Oh, but my dear, you must. This is a priceless opportunity."

  This was definitely strong hash, Vera thought; she no longer had any idea what this conversation was about. But she was in too deep to walk out now. "I'm afraid I don't see it that way," she bluffed.

  She frowned. "Have you at least discussed it with Geoffrey?"

  "Geoffrey?"

  "Maestro Moulton, of course," Silberstein said.

  Came the dawn, and Vera felt so relieved to discover that her mind wasn't gone that she hadn't yet noticed that something worse than her worst fear had come true. "I beg your pardon," Vera said. "You have me confused with my mother, Eleanor Darris. I'm Vera Delaney."

  "Oh, my dear, I'm so embarrassed. But you must play, yourself?"

  "Why must I?"

  "If you don't, what jury could you have been thinking of?

  "That's the amusing part," Vera said. "I'm a justice for Legos, Ltd."

  "Oh, that is amusing," she said, lighting a joynette. "But I do seem to associate a Vera Delaney with lasegraphy. Are you sure you've never been in the Tiger Pit?"

  "Well," Vera admitted, "not for many years."

  "Of course," Silberstein said. "Sixteen years, isn't it? You were supposed to premiere at the pyradome but fell ill. I was assigned to cover your debut."

  "You have a remarkable memory," Vera said, tightly.

  "My dear, in my business you must."

  "Mine also," Vera said. "I must admit I found it quite embarrassing not being able to remember what jury you were supposed to have been on."

  "How darling," she said. "But I wouldn't worry about the mistake happening again. You'll never find me on a jury of that sort. My mind doesn't operate in that sphere at all. I don't know anything of law, never did, and no doubt never will. Do you think we should be getting down to the supper?"

  "Go right ahead," Vera said, relieved at the end of the conversation. "I want to enjoy the night air awhile longer."

  Martha Silberstein headed to the lift, then turned back for a moment. "You don't play anymore?"

  Vera shook her head.

  "A pity," she said. "You were supposed to be quite a prodigy." The lift arrived and took her down.

  Vera stood at the cannabistro a moment longer, just looking at the stars twinkling through the anti-precipitation field; then she turned and filled her hash pipe for a third time with Mixture No. 23, Assassin's
Blend.

  It was well past 1 A.M. Saturday morning when the last guests flew out of Helix Vista. Joan's LCAA Mark 800B chromatic laser, with its full-size Model 1600 console, was still set up in the Tiger Pit of the lawn dome, as she had left it when she went up to the party hours before with Wolfgang Jaeger. Vera was thoroughly stoned when she glided into the lawn dome, powered up the laser to 860 milliwatts, and sat down at a lasegraphic console for the first time in sixteen years.

  She didn't bother with Blind Exercises, she wanted to see results immediately. Slowly--excruciatingly slowly--she began her old warm-up routine, a series of progressive lissajous. So far, so good. She played through spirals, double helixes, and opposing mandalas; and as long as she didn't try to go too quickly, there were no difficulties beyond a few minor fluffs.