ME .. MY READING …. MY WRITING and … MY MUSIC LOOKING FOR A CLICK IN MY HEAD : MUSIC AND STYLE IN MY WRITING ……….. sudhanshu

ME .. MY READING …. MY WRITING and … MY MUSIC

LOOKING FOR A CLICK IN MY HEAD : MUSIC AND STYLE IN MY WRITING ………..

As H. L. Fowler points out in a book I read long back Modern English Usage, “in a really good writer every sentence is rhythmical, while bad writers perpetually offend or puzzle” the ear. For some good writers, the connection with music goes?beyond that: they think of their prose in terms of melody, dynamics, harmony, and even orchestration. Here is a sample understanding of it in my life :

?When I was young, I was attracted to the idea of being a composer. I was never a very good musician, never a natural musician. In the eleventh grade I realized I would never be a composer, when I tried to write these little piano pieces: I could come up with interesting new harmonies but I couldn’t hear them in my head. The only reasonably musical thing was I had a certain feel for rhythms—I wrote some percussion pieces and could always notate rhythms. So there’s a similarity of some of the things I wrote in music to the cadences in my prose, especially the delaying of a dying fall. When you come to the end of a phrase in a piece of music and you think that it’s going to close, but then there’s a further little progression and then it closes, that gives it a kind of conclusiveness it wouldn’t have had otherwise.

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I’ve always been fascinated by the greatness of American jazz. I was a kid in the late 60s and early 70s when bop was breaking on the scene. I was fascinated by what Mohd Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar – Shankar Jaikishan and Naushad were doing in India and Bud Powell and Charlie Parker were doing, in West. ?It started with Armstrong—these sort of creative agons they engage in that they actually call cutting contests, where you’re playing against one another. That is almost exactly the same thing as I see in literature. Even it fascinates me to listen at length to old numbers of Rafi and Lata and Coltrane, and the ghost of Charlie Parker is always there. It’s the sound in his head.

I always employ music in all my books. I’m always looking for rhythm, looking for a click in my head. I listen to a lot of music. I am passionate about a lot of singers, and I try to infuse my books with the passion that the best singers had.

From 1972 till 1980, I played drums and Tabla. ?That taught me different things—for one thing, that Kerouac and those guys didn’t understand improvising. I heard so much jazz. There were so many people playing. Within a couple of years, I had in place the sound I wanted to have, in my life …… I fell in love with music.

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My father was a music lover ?and I played the oboe all through my childhood and youth. In my family, we listened to music as the primary culture. In writing, I always have to have a sense of the way the piece sounds. Finding the voice initially is like a musician finds how her/his instrument sounds, through different chord changes.

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I could sit down and go through every essay I’ve written, and see how it would correlate to some kind of musical piece. I’m always aware of how many beats are in a sentence. I use a lot of short sentences—I like staccato. And after a long riff, I always have short one after it, for readers to catch their breath. I see writing as very much about riffs—to the point where, after I’ve written something, I need to make sure it tracks logically. The first priority is how it sounds.

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I tend to overdo adverbs, and that’s a musical thing. I always want to stick something in front of a verb, just for rhythm. I feel it needs a grace note.

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My Cuban friend when I was attending a ?Management course at Concordia University Montreal, Canada - ?gave me El clave – he told me EL cave is the mother of all rhythms in Cuba. When I listened to it – I found it ?underlies all musical forms. The beat is 1-2, 1-2-3. It’s the one instrument that doesn’t improvise. Everything else is on top of it. If you’re not attuned, you miss it, because of all the other pyrotechnics going on. I realized at one point that my sentences have the rhythm of el clave. There’s a boom-boom, then the comma, then a variation.

Jazz has had a big effect on my sense of structure—the relationship between theme and variation, the rhythm. Most of the writing I like has that quality.

Sometimes I’ll do quadruple alliterations, rhyming with words and within words, three phrases in a row that match. The style pulls you through first. It’s a lot like listening to music. When I’m listening to a hip-hop MC for the first time, the first thing that grabs me is the flow. You have to have a cadence. It changes multiple times within each voice. You create the rhythm with your voice. The beat is under it. The rapper will “flow”—that’s the timing you use to accentuate your beat. The counter-rhythm is the voice, like a second or third drum. The better the rapper, the more complex your relationship with the beat. You’ll change it two, three, four times before the chorus comes. I’ve been listening to that for twenty years, and it can’t help coming out in my writing.

?My Reading - ?Writing is the music for me.

It is not only the SOUND OF MY PAGES but also the MUSIC OF MY PEN or THE KEYBOARD NOW. ?