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March 14, 2022
Joel Agee's Playlist for His Novel "The Stone World"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Joel Agee's novel The Stone World is a compelling and lyrical exploration of childhood.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"The story is loosely based on Agee’s own childhood, and he dexterously establishes the curious, imaginative, and innocent narrative voice of his young narrator."
In his own words, here is Joel Agee's Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Stone World:
Music enters The Stone World at many moments. Six-year-old Peter (“Pira” to his Spanish-speaking friends) is intensely responsive to its messages. So are his parents, Martha and Bruno. The setting of the story is a small unnamed Mexican town in the late 1940s. Peter is American, as is his mother. His stepfather is an exiled German communist writer.
Beethoven, “Spring” Sonata," Anne Sophie Mutter and Lambert Okis
Early in the book, Pira asks his mother about magic. A man they know performs magic tricks, but can he do real magic? Can anyone?
Martha tells him that music is real magic because it can create happy and sad emotions where there were none before, and can even join them together as if they were one and the same. She is a violinist. To make her point, she plays him the opening phrase of Beethoven’s Spring Sonata.
It takes great artistry to do justice to Beethoven’s magic. I can’t think of better interpreters than Anne Sophie Mutter and Lambert Orkis.
Traigo mi 45, Francisco “Charro” Avitia
Pira wants, almost desperately, to be Mexican, no longer different from the children he plays with, no longer a gringo. That may be the chief reason he likes the chest-thumping pride expressed in a song called “Traigo mi quarenta y cinco,” about a charro
with his forty-five and its four cartridges.
Here it is sung with appropriate machismo by Francisco “Charro” Avitia.
Oh Katie Dear, The Chieftains with Gillian Welch
Martha likes to sing American folksongs, accompanying herself with a guitar. One song Pira likes especially is “Oh Katie dear.”
I find this rendition by The Chieftains with Gillian Welch extraordinarily poignant.
Las Mañanitas, Vicente Fernandez
Chiocarlia, Grigoras Dinicu
In one scene I tried to describe the creation of a type of music that has not been heard before. The situation is a farewell party for a Hungarian friend of Martha’s, a fellow violinist. World War Two is over, the fascist regimes of Europe have been toppled, and now Sándor is finally going home. But parting from Mexico, his refuge during the years of exile, is painful. Together with a friend who has brought a zither-like Hungarian instrument, he weaves a medley between the sweet Mexican birthday song Las Mañanitas and an insatiably yearning gypsy tune.
This music didn’t come back to where it started the way tunes usually did. It just went away and away, as if it wanted to escape. Like that bird Pira had seen once trying to fly away from a boy who held a string that was tied to its leg. But this wasn’t a bird, it was a voice, it was crying. It was like nothing he had ever heard. It soared, it sailed, it wanted only to go far away. Tears were streaming down Pira’s cheeks.
Of course, Sándor’s improvisation can’t be found on the Internet. It has to be imagined. But here are prototypes of its seemingly incompatible ingredients: the late, great Vicente Fernandez singing Las Mañanitas, and Grigoras Dinicu, a stupendous Romani (not Hungarian) violinist: I see now that Sándor’s music was more syncretic than I realized when I wrote it!
Hermanita, Sientate a mi Vera, Pepe Pinto
La Virgen de la Macarena, Banda de la Monumental Plaza Toros México
Pira learns about the death of the great Spanish bullfighter Manolete, first in a conversation at the dinner table. Then on the radio, where a Spanish poet who was a friend of Manolete is interviewed by a Mexican woman.
Every once in a while the man and the woman stopped talking and there was Spanish music with trumpets. Pira liked Spanish music. So did Bruno and Martha. (Bruno and Martha are the names of Pira’s parents.) Sometimes Bruno put on Spanish records called flamenco where a man half sang, half shouted a long quavering “Ayyyyy. . .”, followed by words that sounded both sad and furious. A guitar ran along with them, also angry, also sad, but listening didn’t make you feel sad or angry. Martha said flamenco was like fire. The Spanish music on the radio wasn’t flamenco but it was bright and exciting and he liked it a lot.
Pira was probably hearing La Virgen de la Macarena, a traditional Spanish tune that is also popular in Mexico, and that is often played at bullfights. I’m impressed by the grandeur and solemnity of the Banda de Música de la Monumental Plaza de Toros México’s rendition.
Almost everyone has heard the long and quavering “Ayyyy…” at the beginning of a flamenco song. But most flamenco one hears these days is a commercial dilution of one of the world’s great musical traditions. In 1947, the time in which the novel is set, Pira might have heard Pepe Pinto singing “Hermanita, siéntate a mi vera quando querrá la Virgen del mayor dolor” — “Little sister, sit by my side when the Virgin of the greatest pain wants it.” Whatever those dark words may signify, the singer infuses them with tremendous emotion.
Veracruz, Augustin Lara
The theme of departure permeates the novel. Pira’s parents will emigrate to Europe, and he comes to understand that he will soon be forced to leave behind almost everyone and everything he knows. On a car ride near the end of the book, he listens with his parents to the balladeer Augustín Lara singing about Veracruz.
That was where they would board the ship, so Pira listened with interest.
Yo nací con la luna de plata
Y nací con alma de pirata
Born with the silver moon, and born with a pirate’s soul, Augustín Lara had left Veracruz long ago, but he missed her. Little corner where the waves make their nests
. . . Little piece of my homeland that knows how to suffer and sing . . .
Joel Agee is a writer and translator. He has won numerous awards for his translation work, including the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin; the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize; and the ALTA National Translation Award, as well as fellowships form the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His essays have appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, and other magazines, and he is the author of two acclaimed memoirs: Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany and In the House of My Fear. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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