Read Online The Banished Children of Eve by Peter Quinn - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Peter Quinn
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fifteen dollars. âOld Folks at Home, an Ethiopian Melody as sung by the Christy Minstrels/Written and Composed by E. P. Christy.â Still, Foster got the royalties. One hundred thousand copies at two cents a sheet. The Sutterâs Mill of American popular music.
You write, a composer of operas once told him, in words of one syllable, with harmonic textures as naïve as the melodies. Your musical vocabulary is so impoverished that you repeat yourself over and over again. Foster stared into the grate. The pad became bloated with fire and began to collapse in on itself. Never claimed to be a composer of operas. Only said the songs were what people would want to sing. And thatâs what they did. Naïve melodies in ten million throats. You better listen. The people are telling you something.
All de world am sad and dreary, ebrywhere I roam.
Feel these bumps: Causality, Desire to Know Why; Comparison, Perception of Resemblance; Sublimity, Love of Grandeur. They stood out on Fosterâs head. Because of them he could see what nobody else could see. Sheet music and the two-cent royalty were just a beginning. When he thought about it, his brain raced so fast that hecouldnât keep up. Drink helped slow it down, but too often brought it to a halt. He sought balance. Last night, he had itâenough drink to slow rather than stop him. He told Mulcahey what he saw: a cast-iron box in every house, sound coming out of it at the turn of the tap like Croton water, song after song in succession, an unlimited profusion, beginning and ceasing at will. You pay a charge once a month, the same as for water, and you can turn the spigot on or off, at will.
They were standing at the end of a pier. River noises all around. Whistles, horns, screeching of gulls. Mulcahey dropped pebbles into the black water of the East River. Itâs no longer enough just to write music or to sing it, Foster said. Youâve got to know how to sell it, to create as well as to meet demand. Wed Hermes to Polyhymnia. Mulcahey dropped more pebbles. The circles rippled out toward infinity. The future belonged to the salesman. The country is overrun with inventions and inventors. The Patent Office can barely keep up. Machines for sawing, reaping, canning, digging ditches, cleaning streets, binding books, stitching shoes. The ones who grow rich wonât be the inventors, but those with the ability to feel the bumps on the national cranium, decipher the shape of the peopleâs desires, form those desires into a single vision of happiness, and go out and sell it.
Plug, plug, plug: Thatâs the future. The lesson of a songwriterâs career. Donât just wait for the public to decide what music it likes. Listen carefully as it hums. Measure its bumps. Anticipate the songs it wants to sing. The science of anthropometry has shown that despite all its variations, mankind comes in three basic sizes: small, medium, and large. Now all things are possible! Ready-made shirts, pants, jackets, dresses, blouses. Ready-made books, ideas, philosophies, politics, religions, music, culture. The world has become a marketplace. The same challenge for the philosopher as for the politician, the ironmonger, and the songwriter: Sell or die.
Mulcahey kept his eyes on the circles that widened out from the pebbles he dropped into the water. He dropped some more. Plop, plop, plop. He started to sing:
Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me; starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee.
Foster watched the water. The East River. But it was not a river at all. Merely a column of water connecting the upper harbor to the Sound. Yet everyone calledit a river. They chose not to think about it. They clung to the surface of things. Enough to drop a few pebbles and make the smallest of waves. A ship sounded its foghorn.
Over the streamlet vapors are borne, waiting to fade at the bright coming morn.
He could see the river for what it was. He could see through the vapors to the
You write, a composer of operas once told him, in words of one syllable, with harmonic textures as naïve as the melodies. Your musical vocabulary is so impoverished that you repeat yourself over and over again. Foster stared into the grate. The pad became bloated with fire and began to collapse in on itself. Never claimed to be a composer of operas. Only said the songs were what people would want to sing. And thatâs what they did. Naïve melodies in ten million throats. You better listen. The people are telling you something.
All de world am sad and dreary, ebrywhere I roam.
Feel these bumps: Causality, Desire to Know Why; Comparison, Perception of Resemblance; Sublimity, Love of Grandeur. They stood out on Fosterâs head. Because of them he could see what nobody else could see. Sheet music and the two-cent royalty were just a beginning. When he thought about it, his brain raced so fast that hecouldnât keep up. Drink helped slow it down, but too often brought it to a halt. He sought balance. Last night, he had itâenough drink to slow rather than stop him. He told Mulcahey what he saw: a cast-iron box in every house, sound coming out of it at the turn of the tap like Croton water, song after song in succession, an unlimited profusion, beginning and ceasing at will. You pay a charge once a month, the same as for water, and you can turn the spigot on or off, at will.
They were standing at the end of a pier. River noises all around. Whistles, horns, screeching of gulls. Mulcahey dropped pebbles into the black water of the East River. Itâs no longer enough just to write music or to sing it, Foster said. Youâve got to know how to sell it, to create as well as to meet demand. Wed Hermes to Polyhymnia. Mulcahey dropped more pebbles. The circles rippled out toward infinity. The future belonged to the salesman. The country is overrun with inventions and inventors. The Patent Office can barely keep up. Machines for sawing, reaping, canning, digging ditches, cleaning streets, binding books, stitching shoes. The ones who grow rich wonât be the inventors, but those with the ability to feel the bumps on the national cranium, decipher the shape of the peopleâs desires, form those desires into a single vision of happiness, and go out and sell it.
Plug, plug, plug: Thatâs the future. The lesson of a songwriterâs career. Donât just wait for the public to decide what music it likes. Listen carefully as it hums. Measure its bumps. Anticipate the songs it wants to sing. The science of anthropometry has shown that despite all its variations, mankind comes in three basic sizes: small, medium, and large. Now all things are possible! Ready-made shirts, pants, jackets, dresses, blouses. Ready-made books, ideas, philosophies, politics, religions, music, culture. The world has become a marketplace. The same challenge for the philosopher as for the politician, the ironmonger, and the songwriter: Sell or die.
Mulcahey kept his eyes on the circles that widened out from the pebbles he dropped into the water. He dropped some more. Plop, plop, plop. He started to sing:
Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me; starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee.
Foster watched the water. The East River. But it was not a river at all. Merely a column of water connecting the upper harbor to the Sound. Yet everyone calledit a river. They chose not to think about it. They clung to the surface of things. Enough to drop a few pebbles and make the smallest of waves. A ship sounded its foghorn.
Over the streamlet vapors are borne, waiting to fade at the bright coming morn.
He could see the river for what it was. He could see through the vapors to the
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