Where the Past Begins Read online

  Whatever imagination is, I am grateful for its elasticity and willingness to accommodate whatever comes along, for giving me flotillas of imagery circumnavigating a brain that finds emotional resonance in almost anything. I just have to let go of self-consciousness for it to spill out freely, as if all I am doing is listening to music.

  CHAPTER TWO

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  MUSIC AS MUSE

  I’ve never played any of Rachmaninoff’s music on the piano. Had I tried, any one of his pieces would have killed me with its demands for polar-opposite dynamics, acrobatic articulation, and cool concentration while evoking the extremes of human emotions at inhuman speed. While I have always liked music that takes me into dark thoughts, Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique was about as gloomy and as difficult a song as I was able to manage. In comparison, I thought Rachmaninoff’s music was over the top on a psychopathology scale. It sounded like the voice of a hysteric who warbles between pledges of undying love and threats of suicide. Minor struggles become catastrophes, hopes bubble into delusions, and blame turns to vengeance, ending with someone’s ancestral home being burned to the ground. This music would have been ideal for accompanying the moods of my mother.

  And then, about fifteen years ago, I fell in love with Rachmaninoff’s music. I found it hard to believe I had ever found fault with it. Age probably had much to do with my changing musical tastes. Over the years, I’ve accumulated plenty to reflect on: chest-ripping joy, strange fortune, disembowelment by betrayal, and love cratered deeper by the loss of far too many, including my mother. Rachmaninoff’s music has become a wonderfully sympathetic companion. My fingers remain still. I am the listener, ready to take the emotional path into a story.

  I used to think that everyone saw stories in music. But when I learned this was not true, it was like discovering that people don’t see a story when they read words, that it is only mental understanding. I’m not saying that music should contain story narratives. It’s more that I can’t stop them from emerging freely, which, sad to say, is not what normally happens when I write novels. Writing requires conscious crafting, and the more conscious I am of how I write, the clumsier my sentences come out. The more effort I expend, the less imagination is available. In contrast, when I experience stories in music, it’s effortless—and that’s because I am not composing. I’m simply the listener, and through my imagination I can wander far into a field of sound. The experience is fun, even exhilarating, but I could never use either the process or the output for a novel. My imagination is oblivious to craftsmanship and focus. The story may have holes and inconsistencies. The character may morph several times. The storyline may be chaotic, predictable, or even maudlin. But I can’t improve this spontaneous story any more than I could adjust the weirdness of dreams during sleep. They are simply what my mind went to in the moment—the freely formed melodic reveries guided by the emotions I feel in music.

  In recent years, I’ve noticed an increasing need for reverie for some portion of the day. I feel this most acutely when I am on book tour and must talk, answer questions, and be a scintillating conversationalist from morning to night. I reach a point when my mind no longer wants to hear myself talk nor monitor the intelligence or truth of what I’m saying. It wants to take leave of orderly thoughts and the common sense to not mention sex and drugs in front of a general audience with young children. If I ignore the need to silence myself, I eventually feel mentally claustrophobic, as if I’m on a crowded elevator that stops at no floor.

  I find reverie in drawing, or sitting in the garden on a sunny day when birds are hopping about. I find reverie in watching fish in an aquarium. And there are also melodic reveries, which are slightly different from other forms. The stories I see in music allow my mind to stretch—much in the same way one might stretch a muscle that is cramped. By allowing my imagination to run with the music, it acts as a purgative in clearing my mind of cluttered thoughts. No matter where I am in the world, music is the bringer of reverie. It is not simply pleasure. It is essential.

  I don’t see full stories with every piece of music. If the song is only a page or two, a scene and mood may appear, but when the music stops, the scene will, too. That’s the case with Schumann’s songs in Scenes from Childhood, which I played when I was eleven or so. Now, just as then, the songs evoke a scene, a child, and her moods. “Pleading Child” was a girl pouting and tugging at her mother’s skirt to buy her a doll. “Perfectly Contented” was the same child, dancing with her new doll. I liked the songs well enough, mostly because they were easy to learn, but I did not identify with the conniving child. Only one song from that album felt true to the way I felt: “Traumerei,” which simply means “dreaming” in German. I grew up thinking it meant “trauma,” or “tragedy,” and that the song expressed perpetual heartache. That is still the way I hear “Traumerei.” If “Pleading Child” had been followed by “Traumerei,” I would have imagined not just the girl trying to wangle a doll from her mother but also the transformational event that followed: a mother and father kneeling at the bedside of their recently deceased child, who is now holding her coveted doll, posthumously given. The emotions in “Traumerei” signaled the end of childhood, and at age eleven, when preadolescent hormones were kicking in, that song was perfect for me.

  Larger pieces—sonatas, symphonies, fantasias, concertos, and the like—are long enough to carry me into a narrative covering the vicissitudes of life. The stories they evoke are harrowing. They follow bad maps and sudden hairpin turns. Happiness, hard work, and Christian intentions go plummeting off cliffs. These turbulent melodic stories don’t reflect my current life. I’m a fairly happy person. I worry only a bit out of habit, which is why I make lists. I’m prone to petty irritations, like everyone, and only occasionally do I wish I knew voodoo to make certain people wake up mooing like cows. Yet the music I choose for melodic stories are not what I would characterize as happy. They are dramatic and strong enough in emotion to knock loose self-control. The composers whose music provides that emotional range are the “Romantics”—from Beethoven, Shubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann to Chopin, Mahler, Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Rimsky-Korsakov, early Stravinsky, and, of course, Rachmaninoff. The romanticism of their music should not be confused with tunes suitable for marriage proposals. The music I am the most drawn to is more freely driven by the story, and comes with full orchestrations and dynamic extremes, which impart the emotional sweep I love by literally sweeping from one section of the orchestra to another, violins to cellos, to woodwinds, to percussion, and onward. The dark mood in music serves as momentum. You see dark clouds and sense rain may come, and it does, with gale force winds. The narrative moves forward in bad weather. People run for cover to escape lightning. If it’s sunny and people are happy, less happens. People sit down for a picnic, followed by a long nap.

  When the music is played with the full orchestra, I experience the story omnisciently. But the point of view is fluid and can switch to a first-person narrator when the melody takes on the voice of a solo instrument. And the instrument I love most is the piano. It can hold the world in two hands and evoke practically anything, from landscapes, battles, and county fairs, to parishioners in a large church or a single penitent praying on calloused knees for love or mercy.

  The time period and setting in the story is anchored to the nationality of the composer and the period in which the music was composed. With Rachmaninoff’s music, for example, the story location is what you would find in a folktale in a pre-Bolshevik Russia. My imagination is peevishly stubborn about the time and the parameters of setting. Opera directors are able to relocate nineteenth-century operas into twenty-first-century parking lots and Laundromats, while also freshening up the social or political context. My conscious attempt to change that setting would be as successful as my contriving a novel about a family of athletes in Greenland. Forcing a different context would take me off reverie and into the conscious role of a writer. If I have to push my mind to go in a certain dire
ction that is not intuitive, it can no longer imagine freely. It’s more like a committee throwing out ideas for a whiteboard marketing strategy.

  As the listener, I don’t have to work, but I am not passive either. It is similar to what happens when I read. Once the story captures my senses, I am no longer conscious of the act of reading words. I am in the story. So it is with music, except that, unlike reading, the melodic story is not precast. It is suggested by mood. I have found that both stories and music use motifs as recurring patterns that evoke an idea, an emotion, or a memory. The motifs are subtle—unlike the elaborately embroidered symbolism of the scarlet letter that Hester Prynne wears over her heart, or the sled named Rosebud that Citizen Kane calls for on his deathbed. I may not notice elements as motifs when they are mixed in with everything else in a story. It could be a view of six mountains. It could be a single word said by a character. In music, it could be a diatonic passage, a fast tempo, or an echo of the melody played in bass clef. What makes them motifs is not simply that they recur. It has to do with my recognizing where and when they recur, as well as what precedes and what follows them. In a story, the significance of six mountains depends on someone seeing them for the first, second, or third time. The significance of a broken cartwheel depends on having characters who are deterred from reaching their destination. The significance of these motifs is a relationship, singly and together, which grows as I continue to recognize it in all its variations. When I recognize the motifs, what once seemed random or ordinary now has an interesting and possibly deepening pattern, which is also intuitive knowledge. The act of recognizing intuitive knowledge at a particular moment is the epiphany. It’s the whole thing, not the pattern alone. The pattern itself quickly becomes hindsight that is quickly on its way to becoming a homily, e.g., a view of six mountains changes according to how fast you want to go past them. Through subtle change, both fiction and music can reveal what is different and what is connected: disillusionment that becomes reconciliation with the past; altruism that becomes betrayal by necessity. These nuances of emotional truth can be caught in a single line of text or a short passage of notes. I can feel it within a blunt word or the abrupt resolution of a chord.

  My tendency to see stories in music was probably influenced by the soundtracks of cartoons I saw as a child. They were scored to correspond to actions in a plot—the xylophone and pizzicato notes on violins matched Wile E. Coyote’s tiptoed steps as he set up a trap for Road Runner. A slide of notes on the bassoon suggested Elmer Fudd had come up with a devious plan to foil Bugs Bunny, and a downward slide of notes on the violin let you know it wasn’t such a good idea after all. During childhood, cartoons were a great way to listen to classical music. They still are. Bugs Bunny plays songs by Liszt and Chopin. Elmer Fudd sings “Kill the Wabbit” to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Carl Stallings, who orchestrated all the Loony Tunes cartoons, should get unending credit for introducing generations of kids to classical music. I rank Fantasia as the pinnacle of musical cartoon mastery for creating stories out of the music of different composers, including Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. The composers were inspired by a folktale, heroic myth, or poems. In “Night on Bald Mountain,” darkness suffocates a small village and specters of death float up like crematory ashes. Heavy stuff for little kids with eyes wide open to uncensored imagination.

  Christmas 1959. In matching pajamas: John, five; Peter, nine; and me, seven.

  There was yet another way that music released stories for me. It came from the sheer boredom of practicing the piano one hour a day—the same prelude, rondo, or sonata, and the same mistakes. I had to remain fully attentive to sharps and flats, tempo and tone, pedaling and fingering—all the mind-numbing work that was conducive more to inspiring hatred of music than reverie. The piano was a daily reminder of failure, a fact reinforced by my mother, who called attention to my lack of progress and enthusiasm. I eventually discovered that when emotions accompanied the music, it was much easier to remember the dynamics of the piece. If a story came with the music, it was always about me, whatever happened recently, be it discord in the home or an unrequited crush. I felt angry when playing forte in the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique. I felt unruffled happiness when the music flowed in adagio cantabile. Self-pity always came in crescendo surges, and lonely tears ebbed in diminuendo until there was stillness, silence, and death. The music was mine, both mistakes and emotions.

  I had a rare opportunity to see how film scores are composed. During the film adaptation of The Joy Luck Club, I was given the titular role of coproducer, which, I happily discovered, required no meetings but allowed me to tune in to the creation of the music for the different scenes. Early on, the composer, Rachel Portman, sent us one of the motifs that would recur throughout much of the movie, with variations for each scene. The motif was a short phrase of notes on a pentatonic scale, the five-note scale typical of Chinese music. It was the foundation for building the music in the opening, and it was transformed for other scenes. It could change into a darker mood of war, or a lonelier, heartbreaking one of a mother’s grief. It was as if this motif was the heart and voice of one character and the signature moment from her past that revealed the pattern of her life, one she recognized but her daughter did not.

  The music for our film had all the characteristics of fin de siècle romanticism: songlike melodies based on emotion, lush orchestrations, and extremes in the dynamics. The tone and melody followed what was happening in each scene, and so closely that the music could alternately serve as subconscious memory or to express what was felt but was more powerful left unsaid. Instead of a mother saying, “I ache for my daughter the way my mother ached for me,” the poignant motif from a scene in the past could express the complications of love, when present and past merged. Whatever had been nearly forgotten could be recalled by one of the motifs. Cue up the violins for the mind-reeling vortex into the past. Or let it simply be silence. We intuit things in so many combinations of our senses, and sometimes we forget silence. In music, silence is deliberate. When I finally heard the completed music Portman had orchestrated for each scene, I was weeping with the opening credits. That was not surprising. I am often brought to tears at the symphony or opera. But in this case, I wasn’t the only one who was visibly moved by Portman’s music. The director and coscreenwriter had the same tearful reactions, and that made us ecstatic. If you can move an audience to tears, they willingly give themselves to you. There is art, purpose, and manipulation in film music.

  Because film music is deliberately composed for mood in scenes and characters, I find it ideal accompaniment while writing a novel. It serves both practical and synesthetic purposes. I discovered the former when I was working on my first novel, The Joy Luck Club. The house next to ours was undergoing renovation, and each day, starting at 8:00 A.M., jackhammers would start up, blasting the concrete in a basement just ten feet from where I sat in my basement. Since childhood, I’ve had an impressive ability to tune out my surroundings, much to the annoyance of my parents, and sometimes, my husband. I can be in a crowded room and still read or write, as long as nobody tries to engage me. My ability did not extend to jackhammers. I eventually solved this problem by listening to music through headphones. While I could still hear the noise, I was able to choose the music as foreground, what I paid attention to. The jackhammers became the background. Volume alone did not determine my focus. Over the next few days, I made a serendipitous discovery: Each morning, when I put on the headphones and played the same song, the music transported me not just back to writing but into the scene. My brain had imprinted the music and scene as inseparable. I had stumbled upon a form of self-hypnosis for writing. Over the next few months, I customized the songs to the scenes, and as jackhammers gave way to drilling, then banging, tapping, and sanding, I went from listening to The Firebird suite to selections of what my husband described as New Age gooey music. Those were
the precursors to soundtracks.

  Music continues to be the best way to keep me seated in the chair and writing. Even so, it still takes me years to write a book. I have many distractions in life, a growing list. I went through a period in which I played brainwave entrainment programs—music combined with binaural tones for brain wave frequencies associated with wakefulness, relaxation, creativity, and dreaming. If I had wanted, I could have customized music tracks and brain wave patterns for “calm reflection,” “anger relief,” “brainstorming,” and even “euphoria.” Imagine it—a human jukebox of moods. But I couldn’t do it. That degree of brain manipulation reminds me of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Individual personality and self-will are replaced with standard-issue outer space aliens.

  I still use music to write scenes. I am embarrassed to admit that I actually have playlists titled “Joyful,” “Worried,” “Hopeful,” “Destruction,” “Disaster,” “Sorrow,” “Renewal,” and so forth. I choose one track and play it for however long it takes me to finish the scene. It could be hundreds of times. The music ensures that emotion is a constant, even when I am doing the mental work of crafting the story, revising sentences as I go along. It enables me to return to the emotional dream after my focus has been interrupted by barking dogs, doorbells, or my husband bringing me lunch (what a dear man). Even when no one else is home, I put on headphones. It has the psychological effect of cutting me off from the world. It dampens sensory distractions and emphasizes the aural sense, the one needed for listening to the voice of the story. I take off the headphones when dinner is ready. I put them back on after dinner or the next morning. The emotional mood is still there. The hypnotic effect takes hold: when I hear the violins, I’m back in a cramped, cold room in China. Auditory memory has become the story’s emotional memory.