(Philip K. Dick, 1953)
This is how he came to think of the Preserving Machine. One evening as he sat in his living-room in his deep chair, the gramophone on low, a vision came to him. He perceived in his mind a strange sight, the last score of a Schubert trio, the last copy, dog-eared, well-thumbed, lying on the floor of some gutted place, probably a museum.
A bomber moved overhead. Bombs fell, bursting the museum to fragments, bringing the walls down in a roar of rubble and plaster. In the debris the last score disappeared, lost in the rubbish, to rot and mould.
And then, in Doc Labyrinth’s vision, he saw the score come burrowing out, like some buried mole. Quite like a mole, in fact, with claws and sharp teeth and a furious energy.
If music had that faculty, the ordinary, everyday instinct of survival which every worm and mole has, how different it would be! If music could be transformed into living creatures, animals with claws and teeth, then music might survive. If only a Machine could be built, a Machine to process musical scores into living forms.
Originally published in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1953, Philip K. Dick’s “The Preserving Machine” describes the efforts of a certain Doc Labyrinth who worries that modern civilization is on the brink of collapse akin to ancient Rome, and that “music is the most perishable of things, fragile and delicate, easily destroyed.” To prevent the loss of music, Labyrinth comes up with the idea for a machine that will convert musical scores into living creatures with their own survival instinct and equipment for self-preservation. He succeeds in finding some university researchers to realize his plans, and proceeds with the conversion: Mozart’s G Minor Quintet becomes a bird with peacock-like plume; Bach’s Preludes and Fugues turn into a flock of round bugs; a composition by Brahms comes out a centipede, Schubert yields a playful sheep-creature, Wagner a large quick-tempered animal, and Stravinsky a bird “made up of curious fragments and bits.” Labyrinth is mystified by these outputs of the machine, which don’t feature the survival tools like claws and sharp teeth he expected. He is disturbed by the sense of “some strong, invisible law” beyond his comprehension governing the transformations. And unlike the composer in Richard Powers’s Orfeo, who anticipates that a composition encoded in DNA will undergo mutation, Doc Labyrinth is unprepared for the further metamorphosis of his creatures. When, after the creatures have lived freely in the woods for some time, he puts one of the Bach bugs into the machine and turns it back into a musical score, the result is “distorted, diabolical, without sense or meaning, except, perhaps, an alien, disconcerting meaning that should never have been there.” The story’s narrator suggests this alien music is a product of the struggle for survival, and that this is a force incommensurate with the human morals and manners that Labyrinth sought to preserve. Raising big questions about nature, culture, and bioethics, Labyrinth’s preserving machine also serves as a metaphor for how technologies like writing, print, and sound recording can transform their objects in unforeseen ways.
Text: Philip K. Dick, “The Preserving Machine,” Fantasy & Science Fiction vol 4, no. 6 (June 1953), pp. 73-80, available at Internet Archive
Images: From an edition of Franz Schubert’s piano trios (1906), available at IMSLP
Special thanks to Kirsten Paige for recommending “The Preserving Machine.”