Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. Amy Tan

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 direction 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 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. СКАЧАТЬ