To be published by Sapphire Books. Release Date: July of 2018.
Music begins the story, and music weaves itself around each changing time period and evolution, Vivaldi’s transcendent notes encapsulating the various moods of the Four Seasons.
Irene has taught their intricacies for years, as the music of her life gently coils around her and her longings. As the result of a radio contest, she ends up in Tasmania, crossing over hemispheres and seasons, leaving behind winter for the warm sands of summer.
Helena, mountain woman, humanitarian, and yogurt baron, takes her yearly trek to Tasmania to assess her culture providers, unaware that she will meet her match and love in life.
Individually and together, these two women blend a musically rich tapestry of passion, eroticism, humor, intrigue, and the simple and complex layers of the human existence.
Take a peek into my novel:
“The house next door to mine burned down last night. In it were my two lovely neighbors, an elderly couple, very much in love. Due to dementia, they were days away from being forced out of their home. As I watched the inferno erupt in front of my eyes, and as I grieved the couple, dying in their own home, as I watched the power of fire, I thought of music, the fire in music, the way sounds can not only mimic fire, but describe it—the crackling energy, the destructive forces within that ironically transform life to death and back again to life. I thought of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite and the ‘Infernal Dance,’ where monsters are filled with energy that transforms evil to good. I thought of how fire is itself a kind of music, a force that consumes, devours, indiscriminate in its hunger for destruction. Fire is loud—no one can talk over fire. Unlike rain and even wind, fire takes up combustible space, its music demanding and omnivorous. I want you all to close your eyes and conjure up music that makes you think of fire, or make music in your head that does this. Think of the instruments that would evoke this concept of fire.”
After a few minutes of letting her students quietly evoke in their minds all that pertained to fire, she continued.
“Now, get into small groups, no more than five in a group, and create this music amongst yourselves. This may be in the form of composition, where someone is writing it down, or in the form of improvisation, but whatever form it is in, everyone gets to participate. I don’t want to see one single student being left out. You can have a fire that never gets extinguished, or you can see transformation and an end to the fire. Your choice. All right, off you go.”
Energized by this topic, the students quickly converged into small groups and talked and scatted and rapped and sputtered and sang and hummed and wrote down and did not write down their compositions.
At the end of class, they performed, not allowing a dry eye to remain in that room. They had gotten it, had captured the essence of fire and loss, Irene’s loss, and loss in general of forces in society that consume and gratify at the expense of others, in fiery masses of contempt, destruction, and hatred. They connected fire to racism, to greed, to any -ism that perpetuated hatred. They connected fire to an uncontained energy, out of control. Some groups found balms to heal, to stop the fire, and some students let the fire rage, spewing out anger in the form of oppression and rage at feeling continually oppressed. The sounds that emerged from their throats was electric, primal, and one could feel the endless crackle of civilizations that have been killed and mutilated.
The music was trancelike and let everyone in that room feel connected to each other because of it. Their fire bonded one to the other, transforming them, letting the energy be wild, uncontained, and then, somehow in that space of the fire, there was a release, the letting go, the image of transcendence through fire.
And then the groups were done and quiet, reigned.
Class was over. The students wiped their eyes, some hugging Irene as they walked out into the rainy morning, shaken, yet at peace, music once again expressing and converging into the place of the sublime.