In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Andrea Avery’s Visiting Composer is a novel with music at its heart, the riveting story of two young women composers.
Gregory Spatz wrote of the book:
“Gorgeous, layered, and full of feeling, this brief trip out of time and into the hearts and minds of two psychically connected young composers is a delight. Avery knows how to write about music–about the people whose main love is music, and the creeps who live to take advantage of them–more movingly and accurately than anyone I’ve come across. This is a fantastic piece of work.”
In her own words, here is Andrea Avery’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Visiting Composer:
There’s that quote, sometimes attributed Thelonius Monk, sometimes to Steve Martin, sometimes to my fave, Elvis Costello (though he denies it’s his, punting instead to Martin Mull), that goes: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. When people say this, they mean to say something about the futility of writing about music, or to declare music uniquely, sublimely, off-limits to scribes. Give me a break. Writing about music is the next best thing to making music. This especially important to me now as rheumatoid arthritis has made my piano mostly unplayable (though I’m one hell of a whistler). I love reading people’s writing about music, and I love writing about music. I use music to help me tap into my characters and settings. My new book, Visiting Composer: A Novella, is a fictional story about two 19-year-old women who both want to be composers. One of them, Gloria Clifford, lives in Baltimore in 1910. But after falling down a staircase and hitting her head, she crash-lands in Enid Bluff’s music theory class in Arizona … in 1996. During the three days they spend together, they play music, listen to it, and discuss it. As music students, both women are familiar with the music that predates them. But in this story, Gloria gets to skip ahead almost 90 years and hear music that hasn’t been written yet—even her own magnum opus—sometimes on instruments or devices that haven’t been invented yet. I had a lot of fun, while writing Visiting Composer, thinking not only about how old music sounds to new ears, but how new music might sound to old ears.
Viola Sonata: I. Impetuoso, by Rebecca Clarke (1919)
When I say this sonata “speaks to me,” I mean it literally: a viola can sound so much like a human voice. In this sonata, the viola’s voice is a that of a lucky middle child: she can out-sing her little sister the violin but she can also out-growl and out-whisper her big sister the cello. The first movement of this sonata opens with a cocky ta-da, ta-daaaaa and closes 9 minutes later in a kind of sober, retiring sigh. I always emerge from it feeling aged in the best way. Like I’ve been through something. As a composer, Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) has never really gotten her due. Thinking about Clarke, and all the other women who weren’t taught, discussed, or even acknowledged in my own undergraduate music program in the 90s, I started to imagine Gloria Clifford, the protagonist of my book. When we meet Gloria, she is 19, bright-eyed, confident, hopeful and ambitious. She is on her way to becoming America’s greatest woman composer (ta da, ta- daaaaa!). But in the story we learn, too, that Gloria will never become America’s Debussy, fading instead into oblivion in 1940.
Quatro Pezzi (Su una nota sola): IV, by Giacinto Scelsi (1959)
This is the piece of music that Gloria and Enid hear in that first scene in the 20th-century music theory class for a close-listening exercise, the fourth of a suite of four pieces for 26 chamber musicians. Each of the movements features a single pitch (in this case, it’s A) probed by the instruments. They wander and slide around but they always home in on that single note. The attentive listener can’t help but become hyperfocused on timbre, attack, decay, breath, and silence, nuances that sometimes get overshadowed by harmonic, melodical, and lyrical razzle-dazzle. These pieces feel to me like the aural equivalent of Yves Klein’s Monochrome Blue: Maybe at first you’re like, so what … it’s just a painting of a blue square? But if you give yourself over to it, you start to experience, even inhabit, blueness.
Bright Red, by Laurie Anderson (1994)
Early in Visiting Composer, Enid raises the issue: why hasn’t she encountered any woman composers in her school’s curriculum or in its visiting composer series? She examines her assigned textbook for her 20th-century theory course and finds exactly four mentioned: Joan Tower, Pauline Oliveros, Robin Mortimore, and Laurie Anderson. Laurie Anderson is dismissed by the textbook as a “performance artist” (which, OK, but tell me John Cage’s 4’33” isn’t performance art). As I wrote Visiting Composer, I listened to all of these women, and more: At some point, the holes in your education, if you’ve noted them, become your own responsibility to fill. I chose this track for my playlistbecause I find it chilling and hypnotic. Some scraps of text float around, but never quite cohere, as two voices trade off phrases (“I’ll never / leave you / Your / shirt / on / my / chair”). There are hints of predation (“Come here little girl / Get into the car”) that suit the undercurrent of dangerous men that both of my characters are contending with. And of course “Bright Red” opens with that ominous question so chillingly relevant to what caused Gloria Clifford’s fall and resultant time-travel: Did she fall or was she pushed?
Sixth Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (for solo piano), by Joan Tower (2014)
A second of the woman composers mentioned in Enid’s (read: my own) 20th-century music textbook is Joan Tower. Tower titled her six-part series of fanfares to allude to Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, and she dedicated it to “women who take risks and who are adventurous.” I love how the sixth fanfare starts almost tentatively – the first notes ( a string of eighth notes on a steady pitch) seem almost like mic-tapping or throat-clearing, as if to say can I do this? Then, a handful of closely clustered notes (What will happen if I go a little further?). Then: bang! The pianist needs her whole wing span to play those big staccato octaves. As the fanfare progresses, I hear an anthem of a woman finding her full voice and range. The fanfare ends triumphantly in a glory of glissandos and trills. Speaking of adventurous, risk-taking women …
Girl, by Tori Amos (1992)
If you were a classical pianist, plausibly cool, and a girl in 1996, as Enid is, you were required by law to have whole pages of your CaseLogic CD wallet dedicated to Tori Amos. In Visiting Composer, Enid is frustrated by the limited menu of musical models she’s offered as an aspiring composer: it’s John Cage or bust. In the evenings, on her own, she tucks into a diverse buffet of musics served up by her three-CD carousel: “Tori, Schubert, Björk; Chopin, Jewel, Bach; Fiona, Piazzolla, Madonna.” She wonders about the rigid categorization of music as either serious or popular. Who gets to be both, neither, or a secret third thing? A few people do (David Byrne, maybe?) but usually not women. So of course Enid would be fascinated to hear the Peabody-trained Tori Amos pounding her Bosendörffer on the mainstream FM radio station. As was I. From the moment in 1993 when Johnny Boucher gave me a dubbed cassette of Little Earthquakes in front of my locker, I was obsessed. (All the more so because Tori Amos had gone to that same high school.) I tinted my hair red with Kool-Aid. I knew every inch of my piano, but I had never heard it sound so … muscular, so cool, so sexual, so rock and roll.
Solo e pensoso, by Luca Marenzio (15–?)
This is a secular madrigal by Marenzio (1553-1599), a setting of Plutarch’s poem “Solo e pensoso” (alone and thoughtful) for five voices. I chose this madrigal in particular because Enid is feeling so lonely and searching before Gloria appears. This is also similar to the type of music Enid is studying in her counterpoint class, learning the “rules” of Baroque composition. You will hear smooth, undulating vocal lines that interweave, imitate, and pile up into lush harmonies. When notes “clash,” it’s fleetingly – the harmony will always resolve. A notable feature of this type of music, and of Marenzio in particular, is text-painting. So the melody and the harmony align with and emphasize images and sentiments in the text. For example, where the text says, essentially, “I cannot find shelter to protect me,” the soprano and alto are singing together, the notes are moving at a pretty good clip, inching around and up, trying to get somewhere, searching, until—ah—they reach a point of rest, that ear-pleasing major third … shelter. Protection. Safety.
Viola Sonata in B-flat Major, Op. 36: II. Barcarolla: Andante, by Henri Vieuxtemps (1862)
Gloria Clifford tells Enid about her own music studies at “Pomeroy Conservatory,” a fictional school based on Peabody. She is infatuated (and maybe in trouble) with her dashing teacher, Luther Langdon. Among the many exciting things Langdon can do with his hands is play the piano. This is the piece they play in his office, alone, as dusk falls. The music is both lowercase-r and uppercase-R “romantic,” full of runs and chromatic flourishes and shimmering contrasts and big drama, and it is the perfect soundtrack for the seduction: a young, talented virtuoso plays her heart out in the hopes of impressing her famous teacher, while he sits behind the piano, his eyes locked on her swaying form.
It’s Oh So Quiet, by Björk (1995)
They may be from different cities and different centuries, but Gloria and Enid have a lot of interests in common: books, music, men. In her real life back in 1910 Baltimore, Gloria and her teacher have fallen in love and plan to marry, but no one knows. What a relief, then, to confide all the juicy details to her new, modern friend Enid. It must feel to Gloria as if the first 18 years of her life were relatively quiet, and then—zing! boom!—she meets Luther. It’s all about to happen for her: She’s going to be a composer and a wife! I like to think of this as being one of the songs Enid plays for Gloria on her Aiwa stereo. Gloria would find the instruments, song structure, and sentiments utterly recognizable, but probably would have marveled at a dozen orchestra instruments and a scream-singing Icelandic pixie pouring out of an electronic device the size of a hatbox.
Fuck and Run, by Liz Phair
Enid’s love life, on the other hand, is less promising. She has a few zipless fucks under her belt and a crush on an unattainable record-store clerk (every college town has one). Phair’s album Exile in Guyville is an album I can picture Enid owning. She’d have been attracted by its title (the music composition program is a guyville if ever there was one), and the record-store guy would have said something approving about its being an allusion to a Stones album, and she would have taken it home and put it on the CD player in that little campus apartment and appreciated the nakedness of its chorus: I want a boyfriend. I want all that stupid old shit like letters and sodas.
The Seal Man, by Rebecca Clarke (1922).
This song is a setting of a story by John Masefield called “A Mainsail Haul.” It tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a seal man and, at his invitation, follows him to the sea. Spoiler alert: “She was drowned, of course.” On first listen, this might appear to be a song about a wicked seal man knowingly luring an innocent land-lubbing lady to her death. But it’s subtler, and sadder, than that: “It’s like he never thought that she wouldn’t bear the sea like himself.” In Visiting Composer, we learn that Gloria’s alliance with Luther Langdon will ruin her. But is he a bad man who sets out to ruin a good girl? Or is he just a man, so safe and sure in the world he swims in, he doesn’t realize Gloria won’t survive it?
Missing Persons, by Beth Schenck (2022)
But of course there are woman composers. And they’re not all lost to time, not all waiting to be rescued from the library stacks. They’re living and working and creating right now. Unlike Enid, who longs for friends, I had a handful of brilliant friends throughout music school who have gone on to be, among other things, the successful musicians they wanted to be. One of them is the composer and saxophonist Beth Schenck. “Missing Persons” is off her album Above and Below, which was written and recorded during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic. That winter, Schenck was, like so many of us, surrounded by compromised air, swallowing lungfulls of uncertainty and isolation and fear. But while I just made banana bread and cried, she turned what she was feeling into music, breathing it back out into the world through her saxophones. The whole album is gorgeous but I chose this track to end on because in its brevity, complexity, and intensity, I think it suits the novella and, particularly, its vanishing ending.
Andrea Avery is the author of Sonata: A Memoir of Pain and the Piano (Pegasus Books), which is being adapted for the stage. Her work has appeared in Barrelhouse, CRAFT Literary, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Real Simple, and other places. She holds a B.A. in music, an MFA in Creative Writing, and an Ed.D, all from Arizona State University. She is working on a novel.