Posts Tagged cello
The Undercover Soundtrack – William Alexander
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on October 30, 2013
Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative environment – perhaps to connect with a character, populate a mysterious place, or hold a moment still to explore its depths. This week’s post is by US National Book Award winner William Alexander @williealex
Soundtrack by Zoe Keating, Tom Waits
Both of my novels, Goblin Secrets and Ghoulish Song, are set in the same city and unfold at the very same time. They also share a soundtrack. The first is about a goblin theatre troupe. The second is about a girl who loses her shadow and becomes a musician.
First let me tell you a bit about this shared setting. Zombay is a playfully broken place, its pieces repurposed and cobbled together. The noise of and voice of this city clanks and clamors. One single bridge — the Fiddleway — connects two halves of the city (barely), and various musicians play at all hours to keep that bridge from falling over.
Luce Strumgut the sailor explains how and why in Ghoulish Song:
“You can shape music to reshape the world, just as words do in charms and curses. Sailors learned that first.” Luce proudly tapped the tip of her nose with one finger. “We sang chanties to the rhythm of oar and hoisted sail. It’s madness to trust your own weight to a bit of bark adrift on water. It’s only ever possible to face up to that madness with a song. So we made the music necessary to hold a barge together—or a bridge. The madness of the bridge, of walking and living and building whole houses high above the River, is only possible with many songs. You can hold anything together with the proper tune—or you can tear it apart.”
Two albums in particular helped me map out my city and hold it together.
First I used Real Gone by Tom Waits. I often started a writing session with Hoist that Rag. It’s a working song, a sailor’s song, and it has an urgency and a clanking, jangling rhythm that I found especially useful.
Once Tom forced me awake and growled at me until I started working the album would fade into background noise. That’s no criticism of its quality. All of Real Gone rewards close listening, but the songs didn’t seem to mind humming and muttering between themselves while I mostly ignored them and went about my writing business. There’s one track I couldn’t ever ignore, though: How’s it gonna end? Every time it came up I would write faster. Tom needed to know the ending, and so did I.
Lyrics can be distracting, though, and the stories told and hinted at in the rest of How’s it Gonna End don’t really match up with the stories I was working on. The other album I had set to endless repeat was Zoe Keating’s Into the Trees—an absolutely gorgeous album, played by a single cellist looping and accompanying herself. Keating composes ideal soundtracks for dark fairy tales. You can stream the tracks from her site, but pay particular attention to Optimist.
Take a moment to imagine both Tom Waits and Zoe Keating guest-starring on The Muppet Show. That sense of unsettling playfulness is pretty much what I was aiming for. If I hit the mark, then I owe it to those two musicians.
William Alexander won the US National Book Award for his first novel, Goblin Secrets, and the Earphones award for his narration of the audiobook. His second novel, Ghoulish Song, just came out. He read the audiobook for that, too. Will studied theatre and folklore at Oberlin College, English at the University of Vermont, and creative writing at the Clarion Workshop. He lives in the Twin Cities, right in the middle of the States. Find him online at goblinsecrets.com and on Twitter under @williealex.
Brief hiatus: The Undercover Soundtrack is taking a short break and will be back in two weeks’ time on 13 November. See you then!
The Undercover Soundtrack – Jane Rusbridge
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on August 8, 2012
‘He sees her playing wildly. She feels exposed. Ashamed.’
Once a week I host a writer who uses music as part of their creative process – perhaps to open a secret channel to understand a character, populate a mysterious place, or explore the depths in a pivotal moment. This week’s post is by award-winning author Jane Rusbridge @JaneRusbridge
Soundtrack by YoYo Ma, Saint-Saens, Jacqueline Du Pre, E Elgar, Mstislav Rostropovitch, JS Bach, D Shostakovich, Michaela Fukacova, B Martinu, M Bruch, Shadowboxer
I’d love to be able to write in a crowded room like D.H. Lawrence, but I need silence and solitude. The early stage of Rook was a very noisy exception. Cello music, volume up high, accompanied me most of the day, as did the cellists I watched on Youtube, over and over again: YoYo Ma, playing Saint-Saens, The Swan; Jacqueline Du Pre playing Elgar’s well known Cello Concerto in E minor, especially the Adagio.
My main character, Nora, had to be a cellist so, knowing nothing at all about the cello, I needed to observe technique, as well as listen. I bought CDs and played them in the car and in the kitchen, until my husband complained. He’s more of a BBC Radio 5 Live person. I read Mstislav Rostropovitch: Cellist, Teacher, Legend by Elizabeth Wilson, a book which lead me the Bach Prelude in G major and helped me fall a little in love with Rostrapovitch and his spark of genius.
Wrestling with ferocity
A friend teaches at the Royal Academy so I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to sit in on some lessons. These had a profound effect and were inspirational in terms of understanding my central character. One gifted young student, Cecilia Bignall, played cello music I’d never heard, such as Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1 and the Martinu cello concerto no. 1. To observe, at close range, a cellist play such vigorous, powerful music in a relatively small room was electrifying. My whole body reacted; the sound vibrated through my spine, ribs and jaw-bone. It raised my pulse. Cecilia is petite. Her body language while playing gave the impression she and the cello were wrestling with ferocity over the music.
Influenced by Jacqueline du Pre’s tragic life story, I’d been under the misconception the cello was largely a romantic, melancholic instrument. While music like Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei still plays a vital role in the novel, discovering the cello’s gutsy side was a revelation, and led to the development of Nora’s corresponding passion and strength of mind. Though she’s been knocked sideways by what happened to her, she’s feisty.
Wild and feral
Not long after my Royal Academy visit, I went to a university conference on the Uncanny. In one seminar session, we discussed the ‘wildness of being’ which exists beneath language. We talked of the fear of wildness, about feral children and the wildness of giving birth. In my notes at this point is a drawing of a light bulb – my private shorthand for eureka moments – followed by a few frenzied scribbles about Nora, my main character.
‘Harry sees her playing ‘wildly’. Martinu. She feels exposed. Ashamed.’
Nora, a professional cellist, has abruptly abandoned her career, her reasons gradually revealed as the novel progresses. Our discussion about the fear of wildness that day helped things fall into place: Nora’s memory of certain events has been repressed. Trying to ‘tame’ her spirit, she no longer allows herself to play with the abandon she once did. If the wildness resurfaces, her memories could be too painful to bear. Ideas about wildness and taming also tied in with the story of the baby rook Nora finds and nurses back to health. I wanted both the rook and Nora to be able to ‘return to the wild’ at the end of the novel.
I got home from that ‘wildness’ seminar and wrote a scene in Rook where, at dawn, Nora takes her cello down to the cellar to play. She
‘holds the cello close, fingers flat on the wood, the flecks and ripples of varnish, the intimate flaws in the gleam of the cello’s surface, the strength of its body’s curve against her hip and breasts’.
This scene, where Nora plays the Martinu cello concerto no. 1 ‘with the urgency of long deprivation’, is a turning point her recovery.
Natalie Goldberg talks of the ‘wild mind’ of the writer, a phrase which I use in preference to the ‘unconscious’. Through the discovery of the wild side of cello music, I found parallels between my creative process and Nora’s relationship to her cello, essential to my understanding of her character and motivation. And the trailer for Rook has just gone live. The music was composed especially by Aiden O’Brien of Shadowboxer, and inspired by photographs Natalie Miller (my daughter) took of rooks when we were rooking together. If you like, it’s the other side of the coin – music growing from the writing process.
Jane Rusbridge is the author of The Devil’s Music, long-listed for the 2011 International IMPAC Literary Award, and Rook, one of the launch titles for exciting new imprint Bloomsbury Circus. She is the recipient of the Philip Lebrun Prize, and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Chichester, where she was Associate Lecturer in English for more than 10 years. She lives and works in West Sussex. She has a blog Jane Rusbridge and can be found on Twitter @JaneRusbridge
‘He sees her playing wildly. She feels exposed. Ashamed’ – Jane Rusbridge
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on August 6, 2012
My guest this week was planning a novel about a cellist and imagined a romantic, melancholy instrument – until she sat in on a lesson at the Royal Academy. The young player’s gutsy ferocity was so electrifying that it threw the novel into a different pitch – an exploration of wildness and taming. She is award-winning novelist Jane Rusbridge and she will be here on Wednesday talking about the Undercover Soundtrack for Rook