hard deadlines

Now shortlisted for the Nebula® Award, this story appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, where you can read it for free. SFWA members can also Read it here.

• "Stupendously weird and expansive"
  — BoingBoing
• "[A] fascinating philosophical excursion with music theory, phenomenological thought, and complex character dynamics intertwining like the voices in one of Bach's canons."
  — The Internet Review of Science Fiction
• "I strongly recommend 'Keyboard Practice...' and expect to see it in the "Best" anthologies,"
  — Mundane SF

The preservation of artistic and emotional integrity... is hardly ever the preoccupation of artists whose lives are made up of intrigue, rivalry, comparison and tiresome repetitiveness.

—Bruno Monsaingeon
   Le dernier Puritain

Aria

I’m an unreliable narrator. Everything I know about classical piano could be stored handily, uncompressed, in the lobotomized set-top box of an antique cathode television. Still, it falls to me to transcribe the events surrounding the Van Meegeren Piano Competition of 2023 and the alleged visitation by the late Stefan Janacek.

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Variation 1

Stassy intro, nep?

Yar, yar, copied; ‘swhatcha get when I type not talk. Gomenasai. Not a storyspeaker — ich bin eine musicalische opster. I clip, I doop, I rap, I dub and shunt, pull leitmotifs from the noosphere ‘n’ singledoubletriple layer, pack and run the tuples, skiffy ins-n-outs wrapped moebial around sparse, selective, show-don’t-tell syllables relevated from the subway and limousine earth. A hardwired hook sniffer: What edge will cut through the commodified wash of minute-15 Will-Have-Beens? Hafta lay down a tuff rhythm groove and scan for a tasty solo line; grimly practical, paratactical composition.

But a keyboard is needed to massage this medium. Got to force myself to sit down, sluice, educe the force that through these carpal tunnels drives the florid. Grep the keystroked sense of this, in at least a first approximation, before it evanesces.

Because I don't believe in ghosts. I never have. I never will. And yet, tonight...

And yet tonight, I saw one.

With my own eternally doubting fingers.

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Variation 2

You’ll want, first, to know where it happened.

The Van Meegeren Competition has been housed in the Cleveland Play House for as long as it has been supervised by Mona Tzedak. Our Bolton Theatre is a roomy but intimate 500-seat house with warm reflections and a pear-shaped decay profile. Sound infrastructure’s a bit long of tooth — 1.5GHz wireless — but the boardware is current rev, and Net rights from the Van Meegeren underwrote the extravagance of a top-shelf smart pAIno.

"Welcome to Ohio!" Mr. Costello, Competition chair, drooled to the first-night corporate oyabun in the orchestra seats, "Even our name says hello!" A sweating functionary twisting amid Tzedakian gusts; protégé of the prior chair we forced from office.

Mona long ago offloaded administrivia to a series of the ambitious semi-talented. They never lasted long, artistes Peter-Principled up way past competence. The passively offensive King Logs slid oilily among Net execs; les rois Stork came unglued almost immediately, issuing executive orders about coffee room behavior, thundering at the box-office staff, huffing threats of legal action against the insubordinate.

Within weeks of appointment last February, Costello’s storky predecessor tried to fire one of our Local 27 brothers, and had to be sandbagged in his parking lot, pounded like carpaccio and dumped in the snow to learn humility. He submitted a resignation — for health reasons, which was true — shortly thereafter.

“We’re honored to have an outstanding field of 77 young pianists, representing 32 nations,” Costello voiceovered in front of the obligatory montage on the PPV videoscrim: Cross-dissolves of grimy practice rooms; upstage hover-shot zooms into strobing fingers; standing ovations; Cyrillic airport kiss ‘n’ flies. “Over the next two weeks,” he continued, “We’ll narrow this to the eight you’ll see in the final round on August 5th. And now, let me introduce our judges…”

Live pit image replaced canned vid, as our camjock Terry Garrison tracked over this year’s assemblage of academics, industry hacks, and C-lebs. Uniform expression of serious thoughtfulness masking dread and boredom. Mona skipped the first two rounds, and it was hard to find half a dozen people in the Biz who had ever listened to keyboard at this level. If I wasn’t feeding our pAIno’s commentary to their earpieces, most would have been stupefyingly clueless.

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