Emmanuelle de Maupassant: Are there particular pieces, or musical styles, that stir you deeply, transporting you to an alternative (or enhanced) awareness of yourself? Are you aware of particular musical pieces/songs/singers having influenced your writing directly?
TAS: I worked as a musician for much of
my adult life, eking out a modest living as a singer and a classical composer. I was published (under my ‘other’ name) and had my work performed all over from
New York to San Francisco and LA—and if I were to sit down and figure out my
average income for those thirty years, I probably couldn’t have afforded a cup
of coffee once a week.
But, yeah, of all the things that
have influenced me as a writer, none is more deeply personal—intimate and
elemental—or so essential a part of myself as music, and, particularly,
classical music. (Don’t get the wrong idea, though; I’m not some sort of snobby
elitist with a rod stuck up my pretentious ass. I like all kinds of music, from
70s prog rock to world folk, bluegrass and country (one of my short stories, Saturday Nights in the Middle of Nowhere
features an aspiring country-western chanteuse) to grand opera, avant garde
classical-influenced jazz, hip hop and rap.)
I’ve composed chamber music and symphonies, written sonnets and poems in English and Hebrew that I’ve set to my
own music, as well as not-very-good lyrics for country songs. I can say without
hesitation that editing a symphony is a lot easier and far less time-consuming than
editing a 70,000 word novel!
But, to get back to the point: there
is nothing that equals the power of
music to express emotion, to evoke atmosphere, and establish mood. (This
is why a film without a score often seems to fall short of its potential,
lacking the full measure of visceral impact—just compare the scene in Jaws where the shark attacks the boat,
first without John Williams’ music in the background, then with it. You’ll see
precisely what I’m talking about.) Whether conjuring a sense of existential
anxiety and dramatic tension, desolation or euphoria, claustrophobic horror or
the sublime vastness of space, nothing comes close to music.
In talking about the way music
has influenced my writing, here’s the thing: when you’re composing a symphony
or an intimate piece of chamber music, you have to think multi-dimensionally; you
have to conceive spatially and temporally as well as tonally, and you have to
be able intuitively to discern structure. Plus, there are rules about spelling
and grammar and syntax in music just as there are in prose. Melody, harmony,
and rhythm all have to be coordinated to form a coherent statement. You can’t
be a great composer if you only grasp what’s on the surface—even though that’s
the only thing most listeners will ever hear. You have to appreciate the inner
workings, the way these disparate elements all come together. You have to see
it all from the inside.
Now, consider the added challenges
of setting a text to music. You have to be mindful of the natural stresses of
the language you’re setting—the way spoken phrases don’t always adhere to a
single, regular meter (as so tortuously forced to do in far too many pop
songs). You have to recognize the particular word or words that need to be
given extra weight in order to communicate the poet’s rhetorical intent. The
20th century English composer Benjamin Britten was probably the most
gifted and fluent ‘text-setter’ who ever
lived—and he was one of the composers who most strongly influenced me as a
composer, and continues to inspire me as a writer. My little m/m story A Lovely Boy from The Moon-Haunted Heart was inspired by Britten’s setting of
Coleridge’s Lines on a Child which
appears in Britten’s song cycle, Nocturne
Op. 60. I’d also have to cite Britten’s earlier song cycle Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings Op. 31 as a work of art that
truly changed my life—his settings of Keats, Blake, and Tennyson are truly
magical!
Great music has a sense of flow, an
inevitable logic, leaving the impression in the end that every constituent
element in a score is perfectly coordinated with every other element. I can
think of a lot of possible examples here, but what comes most immediately to
mind are the great operas of Wagner, particularly Die Walküre and Siegfried
from Der Ring des Niebelungen in
which the music never seems to pause even once to catch its breath. I want that
quality of sensuousness—that inevitable sense of flow—to permeate my prose and
animate my storytelling.
Always—always!—whenever I sit down
to write a story, I consider the musical quality of the words, the
prose-melodies that are created by the artful combination of words and phrases
gradually built up into the literary equivalent of a symphony (that word, by
the way, means ‘sounding together’). The way the writing sounds when read aloud
is important; if it doesn’t flow, if it doesn’t reach out and tickle the
reader’s ear—if it doesn’t make music—it’s not ready to publish.
And how do you make music with
words? A couple quick points. First, vary the length of your phrases, aiming
for an artful asymmetry (like Mozart in his music). Never let your rhythms
become too regular or predictable. Avoid falling into the same repeated
syntactical patterns (it’s hard not to, but that’s what re-writes are for).
Understand that each word (or each note) carries its own innate energy, like a
charged particle. Each word has its own weight or mass that gives it more or
less rhetorical value depending on syntax. If you arrange words carelessly,
putting similar words too close together (apposition) you can end up draining
them of their emotive power.
Finally—and this is quite
important, I think—don’t always play your music in the same key. Great music and great writing is enhanced by modulation. So, if one were to attend a concert or listen to a record where every piece on the program is in, say, C major, eventually the
listeners’ minds will tire of C major and stop paying attention. In writing,
what this means is, vary the mood and pace from time to time—especially in multi-chaptered
works—occasionally, dark clouds need to roll in and, sometimes, the sun needs
to break through the dark clouds, if only long enough to keep the reader
interested.
I am a relatively slow-working
writer. Sometimes I am in awe of those writers who can churn out veritable
reams of fiction in a relatively short time. But—one final analogy from the
world of classical music—there are two basic types of creative: there are the
Mozarts for whom it all seems to come easily and fast, and there are the
Beethovens who must struggle, sometimes for years, to achieve their
equally-great ends. There’s nothing wrong with either approach, and—unless one
has deadlines to meet—there really is nothing preferable about one or the other.
I’d also point out that being a slow writer is in no way the same thing as
being a procrastinator—I get so tired of people who try to turn procrastination
into a virtue!!!—nor is being a fast-producer the same as being careless or
slap-dash. We all want to achieve the same goals, some of us simply take the
scenic route.
There's one more thing I'd like to mention apropos my writing. After college, I got into a Master's program in musicology (and, before you ask, yes the way musicologists are portrayed in Peter Bogdanovich's brilliant neo-screwball comedy What's Up Doc? is right on the money!) While I didn't go on to complete the Master's degree (maybe I just wasn't weird enough to fit in), I did take away some extremely valuable lessons, which have benefited me as a writer of fiction; most importantly, the technique of describing music in prose. If you can write about a piece of music with a reasonable level of technical accuracy but do so artfully, in a way that is elegant, engaging, and, ultimately, inspiring, you can pretty much do anything in prose! So, here, to end, is an excerpt from my short story Viaticum from The Moon-Haunted Heart:
I
ask you to change the record. The melancholy of this music is more than I can
bear. Finzi has always tugged at my heart, evoking the sublime agony of a soul
that pines to soar, though still not wholly willing to depart. It no longer
seems real to me—not in this hour of truth—a poignant irony that strikes too
close to the spirit. I fear I shall heed its call at last, though I cling to you
and to this moment with all my fading strength.
“Find
the Berg concerto,” I whisper.
“Subtitled
to the memory of an angel,” you read
casually from the liner notes.
“He
wrote it as a requiem for... I can’t remember now...”
“Manon
Gropius?”
“Alma
Mahler’s daughter with Walter Gropius—”
“The
famous architect.”
“Yes.
She died of polio when she was only 18.”
“How
do you remember that?”
“Listen.”
The
music is at once a bitter cry of anguish and a soothing lullaby, a rhapsody of
shifting shadows, terror and grief, daunting dissonance and ineffable
sweetness, a journey through the wilderness of ‘why.’ We seem to stumble half-blind
through this arid landscape, the sound of the violin our only guide, going
before us like an aspiring spirit glowing in the gloom. Somewhere, at last, from
out of the middle distance, muted as if from behind a veil, we hear the consonant
strains of a Bach chorale, Es ist genug—it
is enough—intoned by a choir of solemn woodwinds, wistful and mysterious.
‘Do
you hear that?’ the violin seems to inquire, ‘It is enough. It is... enough.
Perhaps... it is... enough... Yet see? The bitter pall has parted. The setting
sun bursts through.’
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