Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

you don’t want to come right out and say something. But the number of word roots was too limited for the technological age, even with a lot of ingenious coinage, and with the mass education that came along in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the whole society became bilingual. The second language of choice, of course, being Inglex. Inglex simply swallowed everything up. And with Inglex went the western culture that had produced it.”
    “Alis is right,” a new voice said. Bram recognized Olan Byr. The cellist had changed from his sweaty singlet to a crisp blouse and pantalets. His dark hair was wet. “The same principle holds true for music. The western forms simply absorbed the eastern forms. By the time of the period she’s talking about, Japanese musicians were abandoning gagaku music in favor of Mozart string quartets, committees of Chinese composers were writing piano concertos in the western romantic idiom, and India was contributing symphony conductors to the Inglex-speaking world.”
    “Hold on there a minute, Olan,” said a young man who looked like one of Mim’s music-student friends. “You can’t write off everything else that way. What about Balinese music? Arab music? Indian gita and vadya, for that matter. We don’t have many samples, I admit, but—”
    “My point exactly,” the cellist said. “We don’t have many samples. Oh, our designers made an effort to transmit a broad spectrum of human culture, if only to define the full range of what was human. Just as, for the same reason, all of us contain a panracial assortment of genes. But pentatonic scales and ornamented monody and Arab maqams that stray from the natural harmonics were cultural dead ends. Frozen artifacts.”
    “Hold it right there, Olan,” the young man began hotly. “The number of mathematical combinations possible in a typical maqam —”
    “No, you hold it,” the cellist went on smoothly. “At your age I was convinced that there was an unrealized universe in the Robertsbridge Codex, our only example of primitive organ music. But the point is that the universe was realized by Bach. In the same way, your pet eastern scales and rhythms are already in our mainstream as exotic elements. No, my young friend, our cultural center in music will always hover around Bach and Beethoven, just as in language it will always hover around Shakespeare. That’s why we do have so many samples of them. ”
    Mim, who had been listening with growing absorption, broke in. “And there’s so much that’s missing, even there! We have only eight Beethoven sonatas! We know there were at least thirty-two. We’ve got twelve preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier. We know there were forty-eight. We—” She broke off as she saw all the eyes looking at her.
    “No, go on, Mimsy,” Olan said. He helped her out. “We have only one Beethoven symphony because it takes more data bits to transmit an orchestral score than a piano piece or a string quartet. That’s why I’ve orchestrated all the sonatas.”
    Mim might have been a little flustered by the glittering, older company, but she was not shy. Bram felt a thrill of admiration as she held her own.
    “I was just thinking,” she said sadly, “of all the treasures we’ll never know.”
    “We’ll make new treasures of our own, Mimsy,” Olan said. Bram did not care for the way he smiled at her.
    “You musicians think you have reason to feel sorry for yourselves?” The speaker was a weedy red-haired individual who evidently had spent some time around the punch bowl. “How would you like to be a painter? We have nothing to go on except cartoons—about two thousand digital excuses for line drawings to represent fifteen thousand years of art, from the cave paintings on! That comes to about thirteen per century. With digital codes for approximate masses of color, very helpfully keyed to wavelengths of light—never mind what kind of a sun we’re living under! And then, just to break our hearts, the Big Twelve in full color transmission! One Giotto, one Rembrandt, one van Gogh, one Picasso, and so forth. All chosen by committee and guaranteed to be Great! In all the marvelous wealth of detail that a couple of thousand scanning lines can achieve. If you don’t care about small details like brush strokes, that is.”
    He touched off another argument. A partisan of Homer started to complain about the fact that the Odyssey had been transmitted only in Inglex