title: The Life of Schumann (Musical Lives)
author:  Michael Musgrave 
description: Robert Schumann had a difficult start as a composer. Denied any significant musical upbringing, he took a long time through indirect routes to establish himself as a major composer. Persistent illness also dogged his work. His final catastrophic mental collapse has combined with the autobiographical and secretive aspects of his music to cast for posterity a veil of ominous mystery over his entire life. Yet this is only one view. Schumann battled his personal demons and was acutely self-aware and organized. He transformed himself from a brilliant youthful fantasist in small forms into a composer of extended works in every genre. This book provides a new focus on Schumann as a practical working musician interacting with the professional world to develop his creative gifts to the full, and examines the central role of Clara Wieck Schumann in helping to bring this about.
zlib_text: THE SIMULACRA
  
  by PHILIP K. DICK (1964)
  
   **1**
  
  The interoffice memo at Electronic Musical Enterprise frightened Nat Flieger
  and he did not know why. It dealt, after all, with a great opportunity, the
  famed Soviet pianist Richard Kongrosian, a psychokineticist who played Brahms
  and Schumann without manually approaching the keyboard, had been located at
  his summer home in Jenner, California. And, with luck, Kongrosian would be
  available for a series of recording sessions with EME. And yet --
  
  Perhaps, Flieger reflected, it was the dark, wet forests of the extreme
  northern coastal region of California which repelled him; he liked the dry
  southlands near Tijuana, here where EME maintained its central offices. But
  Kongrosian, according to the memo, would not come out of his summer home; he
  had entered semi-retirement, possibly due to some unknown domestic situation,
  hinted to be a tragedy involving either his wife or his child. This had
  happened years ago, the memo implied.
  
  It was nine i