A Strange Composition: Classical Music Meets Bioterror In 'Orfeo'
On describing pieces of music that don't actually exist
My challenge as a writer was how to create descriptions not just of canonical 20th century pieces, but to create vivid descriptions of fictional pieces. Works for small ensemble, for voice, symphonic orchestra, operatic works that did not exist and yet describe them in a way that was vivid and compelling and re-created the internal drama of the composer as he was at work on them. So it was almost as if I had in my own head to write the music first and then produce a kind of prose that recaptured the music and the rhythm and the challenge and the transgression of these pieces.
On living vicariously through his characters
The great beauty of being a novelist is that you can spend three or four or five years vicariously pursuing those imaginary Walter Mitty-like lives that you never got to pursue in the real world. I do have a stack of youthful compositions sitting on the bottom of my closet, so it was a great pleasure to spend these years working on this book — not just rediscovering the 20th century and this avant-garde tradition, but also to imagine myself into the life of somebody who sees and hears and feels the world through sound.
On our modern approach to music
It's a great challenge to the maker of music that requires a kind of concentrated and repeated listening to realize that we're living in an age where all music is available potentially all the time to everyone from everywhere and the ability of any one piece to make claims on the attention is almost overwhelmed by this flood of superabundance. He is working out of this tradition — composers like Shostakovich, for whom music was a matter of life and death, or [Olivier] Messiaen, for whom music was a way of surviving a concentration camp in the middle of winter — and is now presented with a world where a lot of music is used primarily to fill the silence while driving or jogging. And that, too, is music, but his personal crisis is what to do with this desire to create a complex music in a world that's become overfilled with instant, satisfying, entertaining, easy-to-access sound.
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