Posts Tagged India
The Undercover Soundtrack – Clare Flynn
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on August 26, 2015
‘Watching the wintry sea and reflecting on a marriage’
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 guest is Clare Flynn @ClareFly
Soundtrack by Artie Shaw, Debussy, Ravi Shankar, Noel Coward, Pasadena Roof Orchestra, David Gray, The Civil Wars, Joni Mitchell, Martha Wainright, JJ Cale, Robert Plant, Alison Krauss, Dean Owens, the Beatles, Fairport Convention, the Black Keys, Pussycat Dolls
When writing Kurinji Flowers I had to spend a lot of time inside the head of my character Ginny Dunbar – not always a good place to be. I tend to work in silence but music plays a massive part in my writing. It helped me get close to Ginny – and sometimes to get away from her. It also took me to Ginny’s world: 1930s England and colonial India.
Inhabiting another era
When the book opens Ginny is 17 and a reluctant debutante, in thrall to an older man who seduced her at 14. Rupert Milligan is playing Artie Shaw in his studio when Ginny’s mother finds out about their affair. The song here is Cole Porter’s Begin the Beguine. We had the old 78 RPM disc of this when I was a child so it was nostalgic as well as mood enhancing.
Ginny’s honeymoon is in the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, from where the BBC broadcast its popular radio show From the Palm Court. In 1936 the orchestra was led by a violinist, Tom Jones. Here he is playing with his ensemble in the hotel in 1933.
The sound of the orchestra had kindled a sense of romance in me but it had failed to move my husband”
I visited the Grand and the bedroom where Ginny would have stayed. It has a balcony looking out over the sea and is known as the Debussy suite. The composer had an extended stay in the hotel in 1905 and composed La Mer there. Ginny stands on the balcony, watching that same wintry sea and reflecting on her marriage.
Most of Kurinji Flowers is set in India so I played a lot of Ravi Shankar to create the ambience in my head – this is Raag Jog. As an ex-pat, Ginny had no immediate access to the indigenous culture and was forced to show up and fly the flag at the Planters’ Club, so I listened to Noel Coward, whose classic Mad Dogs and Englishmen fits perfectly, as well as the Pasadena Roof Orchestra – here singing Me and Jane on a Plane.
Love, Loneliness, Lies, Letters and Loss
David Gray’s Sail Away is particularly poignant as it is a declaration of love and a desire to escape with a lover – but Ginny’s husband sails back to India ahead of her and she follows, alone, weeks later. The song conveys what she would have liked but didn’t get.
When Ginny does find love, it doesn’t bring the happiness she’s dreamed of. I was listening to Barton Hollow by the Civil Wars while I was writing the book. Their version of Leonard Cohen’s Dance me to the End of Love is romantic but also plaintive and sad. The harmonies the duo create are a perfect combination of two voices. Sadly they broke up in 2014 – which makes it even more fitting.
Ginny’s loneliness is existential. She’s full of good intentions that always backfire. She desperately wants to love and be loved. Joni Mitchell’s All I Want sums it up well – she’s on a lonely road looking for something but doesn’t know what it is – just like me at the same age – when it was one of my favourite songs. I tuned into Ginny’s misery via Martha Wainwright’s Bleeding All Over You:
Grief, pain, betrayal, gnawing me away like a rat devouring me from the inside. Killing me slowly.”
Most of the men in Ginny’s life lie to her. JJ Cale’s Lies captures the I’m-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-this-any-more moment and the anger and liberation that comes out of it. Ginny feels that anger when she discovers the truth that has been hidden so long.
I’ve always loved using letters. Unlike speech, which is transient and capable of misinterpretation and memory lapse, the words of letters are frozen on the page. The act of writing a letter conveys significance to an event. It allows the writer to say exactly what he is thinking and get it across without interruption from the recipient. Please Read the Letter by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss was a perfect song to channel what my letter writer was feeling.
I was listening to Dean Owens when I was finishing off Kurinji Flowers. One of my dearest friends was dying – and Dean’s music was important to her. Evergreen is all about bereavement and the memories of love.
I had no photographs from that day to draw upon. Only my still vivid memories.”
And I Still Miss Someone, Dean’s version of the Johnny Cash song, captures how the hole love leaves is never filled.
The passage of time
The last section of the book is set in the 1960s. Ginny revisits the pub where her husband proposed to her 30 years earlier. Like so many of her generation, she is out of her time in the swinging 60s. The war changed everything and she is an alien in a strange country. She hears the Beatles song playing on the juke box as a couple are snogging in the seat where Tony proposed to her so formally in 1936.
Yes, love was all I needed but it was everything I hadn’t got”
The incomparable Sandy Denny of Fairport Convention with Who Knows Where the Time Goes? worked perfectly to give me a sense of time passing, of aging, of loss, of change. A kind of weariness.
Winding down
When I’m writing about sad stuff I need a pick-up at the end of the day. Sitting at a desk in front of a computer means my bones need shaking up too, so my soundtrack has to include music to listen to with a glass of wine, cooking my supper and dancing round the kitchen. What better than Lonely Boy from The Black Keys – the YouTube video features some classic Dad Dance moves. And to go with it, but with a nod to the Indian setting, is AR Rahman’s Jai Ho by the Pussycat Dolls – a celebration of life – and a good fit for the end of the book.
Clare Flynn is the author of A Greater World and Kurinji Flowers. After a career in marketing, working on brands from nappies to tinned tuna and living in Paris, Milan, Brussels and Sydney, she is now happily settled in West London. Co-founder of the popular website, Make it and Mend It and co-author of the 2012 book of the same name, her next novel, Letters from a Patchwork Quilt, will be published later this year. Find her on her website, Facebook, and Twitter as @ClareFly.
The Undercover Soundtrack – Anjali Mitter Duva
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on October 8, 2014
‘A hushed, whispered jingle mimicking a drizzle of rain’
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 my guest is historical novelist Anjali Mitter Duva @AnjaliMDuva
Soundtrack by George Ruckert, L Subramaniam, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Chopin
Music is at the heart of Faint Promise of Rain. The setting for the story — 16th century Rajasthan in Northwest India — had already been laid down by multiple visits to that stunning part of the world, where temples and fortresses rise up from golden sand, where textiles are jewel-toned, and the sky is devastatingly blue. The next story layer came in a very different shape: a class in kathak dance, a classical storytelling art from North India.
I’d decided to try out kathak, and stepped timidly into the dance center where a class happened to be offered just down the street from my home. As I climbed the three stories of steps to the kathak studio, the sound of ankle bells grew louder. Then I discerned the slap, stomp and drumming of dozens of feet, and the glorious sound of voices singing in unison. In kathak, the dancer becomes an instrument. In addition to studying dance technique and compositions, the dancer must become intimately familiar with the cycles in which Indian classical music is structured—the 16 beat cycle (tintal), the 14 beat (dhammar), the 10 beat (jhaptal) and many others—and develop an awareness at all times of where in the cycle she finds herself. In addition, dancers memorise their compositions and recite them in a series of mesmerising syllables that roll off the tongue: kita taka tun tun na tete dha dha dhin dha kita dha dhin dha. The hundreds of small brass bells around their ankles lend music to every step, a hushed, whispered jingle mimicking a drizzle of rain, a deafening jangle indicating an exploding storm. And then there are the sounds of the feet, sharp slaps of entire soles coming down hard on the floor, deep drumming of heels, soft pats of tapping toes.
As I delved deeper into the dance, I learned of its early history, first among wandering minstrels bringing the Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, from village to village, then as a devotional dance practiced in Hindu temples by devadasis, girls who were wedded to the temple’s deity and served it through dance, while also serving wealthy patrons as sexual companions. Soon, it all began to coalesce into a story—the setting, the history, the dance itself.
Music and rhythm in writing
From the moment I started writing the book, I was aware of the power of rhythm in writing. Word choice, sentence length, the sounds of the syllables on the tongue all contribute to the experience of absorbing a story. When it came time, in the manuscript, to convey through words a moment of dance, I found myself dancing the piece in my dining room, or in my head if I was writing in a cafe, willing the feeling of the music and movement to flow out of my body through my finger tips and into the keyboard. I tried to hear the musicality in the raindrops of the city’s first rain in five years, in the beat of hooves as a horse galloped over searing sand.
Music to transport me
I wrote the book in New England. There are some hot days, and many cold ones. Bundled up in a wool sweater as a Nor’easter rages outside, dumping two feet of snow and closing schools, it’s hard to imagine being in the Thar desert of Rajasthan. So I often turned to music to pull me back to the right place. One of my favorites for this is L Subramaniam playing his violin, especially in Raga Kalyani. The strains of the Indian violin are haunting, rich and emotionally charged. They always give me goosebumps, and conjure up images of India right away. L. Subramaniam is from South India, and plays in a Carnatic style that is not the one found in Rajasthan, but his music is all I need to feel back in India. I get memories of playing among the rocks on the coast of the Arabian Sea in Mumbai with my friends while the sun set smoggily and the air filled with the smoky smell of kerosene fires. I see myself standing wrapped in a shawl on the ramparts of the fort in Jaisalmer, looking out over the grey-blue desert as the sun rises and colors it with warmth. I think of sitting on an elephant, plodding through foliage dripping with the night’s condensation, listening for tigers at the break of day.
Music to elicit moods
Once in an India frame of mind, I have some favorites that I put on while writing to elicit a certain mood, or to help with inhabiting a character’s mind. For scenes depicting dancers and musicians, I love the creative and melodious music of George Ruckert, sarod player/composer and longtime disciple of the late Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, a true maestro. George Ruckert is the husband of my dance teacher, a professor, a mentor and a friend. His dedication to his art is inspiring, and so is having his music playing as I write. (He is also on the book trailer.) For energetic scenes, I enjoy the dynamic, celebratory qawwali (Sufi devotional) singing of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It’s hard to feel down when he sings. And for getting into the writing mood on a rainy day, I diverge to Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturnes. The simple beauty of the piano playing, stripped of any distractions, is meditative, and reminds me of the necessity of getting to the essence of the story and the characters.
The daughter of an Indian father and an American mother, Anjali Mitter Duva grew up in Paris, France. After completing graduate studies in urban studies and civil engineering at MIT and launching a career in infrastructure planning, she found the call of storytelling too great to resist. A switch to freelance writing and project management allowed her more time for her own creative pursuits. Additionally, she is a co-founder of Chhandika, an organization that teaches and presents India’s classical storytelling kathak dance. In delving into the dance’s history, Anjali found in it, and in the dance itself, the seeds of a quartet of novels. Faint Promise of Rain is the first. Find Anjali on her website, Facebook, and on Twitter @AnjaliMDuva
‘A hushed, whispered jingle mimicking a drizzle of rain’ Anjali Mitter Duva
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on October 7, 2014
Music is at the heart of my guest’s story this week. The setting is 16th century Rajasthan in Northwest India, a landscape of temples and fortresses, jewel-toned textiles, blue skies and golden sand. It’s also the land of kathak, a stamping, rhythmic, hypnotic devotional form of dance practised in Hindu temples by girls who were wedded to the temple’s deity – and wealthy patrons who looked for companions. My guest wrote her story in New England, and listened to the rhythms of the traditional dance to conjure up her novel’s parched, colourful landscape and people, a place where rain was so rare that children would view it with terror. She is Anjali Mitter Duva and she’ll be here on Wednesday with her Undercover Soundtrack.
The Undercover Soundtrack – Kathryn Guare
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Undercover Soundtrack on September 4, 2013
‘Intensity, wildness and urban mayhem’
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 debut suspense author Kathryn Guare @KGuare
Soundtrack by Great Courses audio seminars, sound of rain, sound of thunder, Secret Garden, Solas, Arbaaz Khan, Rory Gallagher, Mychael Danna, Luka Bloom, Samuel Barber
When I first began writing what would eventually become my debut suspense novel, Deceptive Cadence, I started it at the end. I just didn’t realize it.
The book tells the story of Conor McBride, an Irish musician turned reluctant undercover operative. The beginning details his recruitment for a very personal mission to India to find and capture his own brother, but the first scene that came to me ended up as the beginning of its final chapter. At the time I knew little about the protagonist. He didn’t even have a name. I knew he was Irish, and was emerging from a traumatic, life-changing ordeal. He was physically depleted, emotionally raw, and frightened. Why? I didn’t know. To find out, I kept writing.
While random scenes and bits of dialogue were popping into my head, I was commuting two hours a day to my job—and going through my local library’s inventory of audio books at a rapid rate—when I happened upon a Great Courses audio seminar called How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. To say it had an influence on my writing life would be a vast understatement. Not only did it influence the title of the book (explained here), it also inspired one of the central features of its hero—he’s a virtuoso violinist. Once I had that aspect of his character nailed down, Conor McBride’s personality and all his complexity began to come alive. Many readers of Deceptive Cadence tell me Conor is quite a departure from the typical, stock heroes of suspense/thrillers. He’s a complicated character that they want to know better. I owe that to the Great Courses, and the moment I decided he needed to be a gifted musician.
Thunder
I’m easily distracted by music. The only thing I can have playing in the background while I’m writing are those ‘sounds of nature’ tracks—rain water, thunder, bells tolling, monks chanting—but when looking for inspiration I go walking with my ipod, my music choices driven by whatever theme I’m concentrating on in a given scene.
Into chaos
One theme of the book is the paradox of an honorable man forced by circumstance to reinvent himself into something less so. Conor disappears into an assumed identity and enters a world of cold-blooded deception and violence. And finds he is good at it. The internal chaos this creates is mirrored by the literal chaos of his external surroundings. India is a kettle perpetually at full boil, vibrant and desperate, cunning and guileless, its teeming humanity contributing to an overwhelming sensory experience of sights, sounds and smells.
Secret Garden’s atmospheric piece Moving captured that internal and external tumult for me, almost a theme song for Conor’s entire journey, so that I ended up including it in my book trailer. It begins with an ominous drumbeat underlying a melody of violin and soaring flutes, evoking the Irish sea coast, but the intensity grows, creating a cascading sense of wildness, perfectly symbolizing the physical and psychic movement from idyllic country setting to exotic, urban mayhem.
The Irish-American group Solas does a cover of Jesse Colin Young’s moody Darkness Darkness that inspired me as I watched Conor falling farther from himself. After committing an act of violence that revolts him, he wanders the dark streets of Mumbai, wrestling with guilt, and I thought of this song as I wrote that scene.
For the Indian side of the equation, Munni Badnam by Arbaaz Khaan from the 2010 Bollywood blockbuster Dabaang, is a song with a driving urban beat that conjures the modern, kaleidoscopic frenzy of Mumbai’s crowded streets and throbbing nightlife. At the 1:06 mark, you even get a taste of something like a mash-up of a Hindi-Irish reel!
I’ve also belatedly discovered the legendary Irish rocker Rory Gallagher, and for some pure, tongue-in-cheek fun, his Philby is perfect for epitomising some of Conor’s disdain for the world of secret intelligence and the testy relationship with his American control officer. Ironically, Rory offers some fierce, sitar-like plucking at the song’s mid-point.
Touching the mystical
Another important theme of the book is Conor’s connection to the mystical, and the special relationship he feels with some of the people in his life – his near-psychic mother, and the tiny Indian mafia wife and guru who becomes a spiritual anchor for him. Turning again to Indian cinema, Love and Marigolds from Monsoon Wedding instantly puts me in the right space for this theme, as does Luka Bloom’s Sanctuary, and Secret Garden’s Hymn to Hope.
Back to classical
For the most emotional and climactic scenes of the book, I went back to the classical realm and the second movement of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, Op. 14. I never make it through this without crying, almost from the opening notes of its poignant clarinet solo. The entire movement, with a discordant violin gradually resolving into gorgeous melody, seems like an ode to sorrowful loss that is somehow balanced against a staggering, awe-struck wonder. I won’t reveal details, but suffice it to say this is Conor experiencing a powerful moment of grace even as he is shaken by the reality of grief.
I would like to say I’m a connoisseur of music, but that would be giving myself too much credit. I am more like a committed dilettante. I’m a curious listener and lover of diverse forms, which I experience with emotional enthusiasm rather than any depth of expertise, but at least I can say that the Great Courses seminar worked. I now can listen to and understand great music, and it fuels every creative effort I undertake.
Kathryn Guare is back in the town of Montpelier, VT where she grew up after many years of globetrotting. She spent 10 years as an executive with a global health membership organization, worked as a travel agency tour coordinator, and her extensive travels inspire her writing. Deceptive Cadence is her first novel, available now at Amazon and other online retailers, and distributed through Ingrams and Baker & Taylor. Visit her website for more pictures, music and fun facts about the book, and connect with her online on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.
In audiobook
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