Listening to Loreena McKennitt
Nov. 13th, 2003 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pegkerrI have been listening compulsively for the last several weeks to Loreena McKennitt’s albums, especially her Live in Paris and Toronto. As I’ve mentioned before, I go through periods where I get extremely compulsive about certain things, either stories or music, and I have to keep going back to them, re-reading or re-listening. Loreena’s music—and actually Loreena herself--is central to the most creative point of my writing life, when I was writing The Wild Swans.
I recount in the book's Afterward the book’s genesis, how I had a dream of a woman dressed in black sitting on a city park bench, watching swans swim. You know how powerful dreams can seem: the look on the woman's face just riveted my attention. Sad and solemn. She had hair, very frizzy or curly. And I knew that she didn't consider herself to be beautiful—not in that sort of fake, protesting "Oh, I'm not beautiful," sort of way--instead, the issue of her own beauty didn't even really occur to her. But she was beautiful to me.
About three days after the dream, I was paging through the newspaper, and I saw a publicity photo for a singer who was coming to town to do a concert, someone I had never heard of before. I saw the picture, and I thought, "That face really reminds me of the woman in my dream." I had already started to brood over the dream, wondering whether I could make a novel out of a favorite fairy tale I'd read when I was young, "The Wild Swans."
About two days later, I was working in the kitchen, listening to public radio, and I heard a gorgeous, lush soprano voice singing, and the word "swans" caught my ear. I turned up the radio to hear who the singer was, and the announcer said, "That was Loreena McKennitt, singing "The Bonny Swans" from her album The Mask and the Mirror. She’ll be coming to the Twin Cities in two weeks; call this number to get tickets."
Loreena McKennitt, I said to myself, where have I heard that name before? And then I suddenly remembered: it was that singer whose picture I had cut out; I'd barely noticed her name. And now, two days later, I hear her singing about swans. Do you believe in serendipity?
I went and looked at the picture again, thought hard, and then ordered tickets. I told Pat Wrede about it, and we went together to her concert. During the intermission, we both went out to the lobby and bought every single one of her CDs (This was her Mask and the Mirror tour). I got the idea for the epigram for Chapter Seventeen by listening to Loreena sing "She Moved Through the Fair." It's the chapter where Eliza and Jonathan marry, and the song verse I used goes, "She went her way homeward/With one star awake/As the swans in the evening/Move over the lake./The people were saying/No two e'er were wed/But one has a sorrow/That never was said.
Perfect. But more that, her music in general introduced me to the Celtic music I wove throughout the book. I listened to all of her albums, but particularly The Mask and the Mirror as I was writing Swans. It just seemed to talk right to whatever-was-haunting me, that was forcing me to write that book.
Moreover, her face, this face BECAME Eliza's face in my imagination. Probably the Eliza in this picture is at a little older age than she actually is in the story--but certainly there's such a depth of sad, silent feeling in those eyes that you could believe that their silent message could echo across centuries.
Now, somehow, I am listening to her again. Which is a good sign, I think, in a way, in that Loreena’s music is somehow mystically linked to the (sometimes very elusive) wellspring of my creativity. Charles DeLint has experienced something like this; he will often record in the afterward of his books what music he was listening to as he wrote it. But in another way, it may be a mistake. I want to find different music for this new ice palace book, something that speaks about ice, and how its form shapes magic, and fish, and how architecture is frozen music. And summer and winter magic.
What's more, I think this album is haunting me in a way that's distracting, in that I'm getting urges to pull away from the ice palace book to write a short story about the song that started it all, "The Bonny Swans." (Lyrics are here.)This is a re-telling of the tale sometimes called "Binnorie, " or "The Cruel Sister." Call it something like "The Harp of Bone." In some versions of the story, there are three sisters. If the oldest killed the youngest, what about the middle sister? There is also the brother, Hugh. What might either one of them have to say about the events of this story? And what happens after the story, after the harp has sung its song?
The problem is, Pat Wrede got haunted by that album and that song, too, and she’s beaten me to it! It was included as her story "Cruel Sisters" in her collection of short stories, The Book of Enchantment. She had us critique the story in our writing group, and it was one instance when I almost got mad that I hadn’t written it myself.
Ignore . . . harp . . . of . . . bone . . . must . . . write . . . ice . . . palace . . . book . . .
Rob has installed Word, so I will be working in that now. My WordPerfect days are over. I plan to assemble the bits I have into one file, start a research file and dump all my notes into it, and start a book diary file, as Kij described. Then I have to prepare the questions for Tuesday’s interview.
I recount in the book's Afterward the book’s genesis, how I had a dream of a woman dressed in black sitting on a city park bench, watching swans swim. You know how powerful dreams can seem: the look on the woman's face just riveted my attention. Sad and solemn. She had hair, very frizzy or curly. And I knew that she didn't consider herself to be beautiful—not in that sort of fake, protesting "Oh, I'm not beautiful," sort of way--instead, the issue of her own beauty didn't even really occur to her. But she was beautiful to me.
About three days after the dream, I was paging through the newspaper, and I saw a publicity photo for a singer who was coming to town to do a concert, someone I had never heard of before. I saw the picture, and I thought, "That face really reminds me of the woman in my dream." I had already started to brood over the dream, wondering whether I could make a novel out of a favorite fairy tale I'd read when I was young, "The Wild Swans."
About two days later, I was working in the kitchen, listening to public radio, and I heard a gorgeous, lush soprano voice singing, and the word "swans" caught my ear. I turned up the radio to hear who the singer was, and the announcer said, "That was Loreena McKennitt, singing "The Bonny Swans" from her album The Mask and the Mirror. She’ll be coming to the Twin Cities in two weeks; call this number to get tickets."
Loreena McKennitt, I said to myself, where have I heard that name before? And then I suddenly remembered: it was that singer whose picture I had cut out; I'd barely noticed her name. And now, two days later, I hear her singing about swans. Do you believe in serendipity?
I went and looked at the picture again, thought hard, and then ordered tickets. I told Pat Wrede about it, and we went together to her concert. During the intermission, we both went out to the lobby and bought every single one of her CDs (This was her Mask and the Mirror tour). I got the idea for the epigram for Chapter Seventeen by listening to Loreena sing "She Moved Through the Fair." It's the chapter where Eliza and Jonathan marry, and the song verse I used goes, "She went her way homeward/With one star awake/As the swans in the evening/Move over the lake./The people were saying/No two e'er were wed/But one has a sorrow/That never was said.
Perfect. But more that, her music in general introduced me to the Celtic music I wove throughout the book. I listened to all of her albums, but particularly The Mask and the Mirror as I was writing Swans. It just seemed to talk right to whatever-was-haunting me, that was forcing me to write that book.
Moreover, her face, this face BECAME Eliza's face in my imagination. Probably the Eliza in this picture is at a little older age than she actually is in the story--but certainly there's such a depth of sad, silent feeling in those eyes that you could believe that their silent message could echo across centuries.
Now, somehow, I am listening to her again. Which is a good sign, I think, in a way, in that Loreena’s music is somehow mystically linked to the (sometimes very elusive) wellspring of my creativity. Charles DeLint has experienced something like this; he will often record in the afterward of his books what music he was listening to as he wrote it. But in another way, it may be a mistake. I want to find different music for this new ice palace book, something that speaks about ice, and how its form shapes magic, and fish, and how architecture is frozen music. And summer and winter magic.
What's more, I think this album is haunting me in a way that's distracting, in that I'm getting urges to pull away from the ice palace book to write a short story about the song that started it all, "The Bonny Swans." (Lyrics are here.)This is a re-telling of the tale sometimes called "Binnorie, " or "The Cruel Sister." Call it something like "The Harp of Bone." In some versions of the story, there are three sisters. If the oldest killed the youngest, what about the middle sister? There is also the brother, Hugh. What might either one of them have to say about the events of this story? And what happens after the story, after the harp has sung its song?
The problem is, Pat Wrede got haunted by that album and that song, too, and she’s beaten me to it! It was included as her story "Cruel Sisters" in her collection of short stories, The Book of Enchantment. She had us critique the story in our writing group, and it was one instance when I almost got mad that I hadn’t written it myself.
Ignore . . . harp . . . of . . . bone . . . must . . . write . . . ice . . . palace . . . book . . .
Rob has installed Word, so I will be working in that now. My WordPerfect days are over. I plan to assemble the bits I have into one file, start a research file and dump all my notes into it, and start a book diary file, as Kij described. Then I have to prepare the questions for Tuesday’s interview.
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*hearts*
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