Liner Notes #3: Années de pèlerinage
If you see the bad Photoshop job, no you didn't.
I hope this isn't copyright infringement, first of all. Secondly, I am not so pretentious as to intentionally reference Goethe--this is a single-layer allusion, okay?--but things seem to have aligned rather well: Liner Notes #3 will be Liszt-themed, ish.
It seems every year when I go to Pittsburgh, I enter a state of contemplation that often extends to the week after my conference ends. July is the one month a year I drop everything and focus on music and only music, and it's so refreshing, even if it's a ton of work, to turn my attention to Dalcroze eurhythmics for three weeks straight. I've driven from Atlanta to Pittsburgh eight times in the last ten years in pursuit of my certification. I've essentially done, as the title alludes to, a yearly pilgrimage to my alma mater in a quest to learn new things, to deepen my existing knowledge, and to ruminate on the experiences I have while at the workshop. Pittsburgh exists as a time without my children or my husband, a time where I have no compulsion to work except on music, a time to be spontaneous and wander off on adventures. Like Liszt, then, I have retreated to nature and let my well refill with what the outdoors offers (I promise I won't compose anything, though).
This year, instead of going to Fallingwater on my way home, I took a new scenic route and followed the Appalachians on my drive south, passing through the Alleghenies, Blue Ridge, and the Great Smoky Mountains before tumbling out of the foothills into the flatness of Georgia. It was hard driving at points, but very worth it to turn a curve and be greeted with ancient mountains on all sides, the trees exhaling mist, the afternoon sun on one side and darkening clouds on the other.
The first volume of the Années is titled Suisse, which I find cosmically funny as the terminal degree for Dalcroze eurhythmics can only be obtained in Geneva. Originally, I'd drafted a version of this post that went more into detail about what's asked of Dalcroze educators as opposed to Orff or Kodaly or Suzuki educators, and then I decided that was probably too much shop talk. I'll just say that Dalcroze is the most heavily gatekept of the music pedagogies. It's taken me ten years to obtain this certificate, and future steps involve visiting Geneva. I do not have Geneva money! I don't need Geneva money currently, although there's going to be a big conference in Geneva next summer and my teachers would encourage me to attend (again, I don't have Geneva money, and we're still in a pandemic, and now we have monkeypox?). I have joked that if I get a nice advance for the next book that I'd go to Geneva because there's no way I'd earn out on BITTER MEDICINE and start collecting royalty checks by June of 2023.
The next book has a working title of KEY & VALE. Trust me, I've attempted to come up with a better title that's more descriptive of what the book is about, but the project has almost always been called Key & Vale and that's what stuck. I'm terrible at titling (BITTER MEDICINE's project name for years was "temp agency"). I 100% would be the composer with no titles, just numbered pieces arranged by opus and key.
K&V has been a long time in the works, partly because I was working on BITTER MEDICINE, and partly because I knew K&V would be difficult for me, so I put it off until I felt I could tackle it. My first notes about K&V are from 2016, but I'd been turning the concept over for months before. K&V has gone through many transformations, most of which were thankfully before I wrote a draft of it. I had originally wanted to put it in a setting much like the Georgia Piedmont, but things ended up shifting. K&V currently takes place in an Appalachia-like mountainous region on a secondary world. And despite all my yammering on about how I drop everything and focus only on music in July, there was book-related stuff happening in the background of the conference. The cover reveal for BITTER MEDICINE, for example, and some marketing things, and, oh yeah, I went on submission with KEY & VALE on July 18.
A week later, film option talks were underway. A week and a day after that, I packed up and drove home from Pittsburgh, calling my agent along the way to discuss the negotiations. I took the route through the Appalachians to mark the occasion and to marvel once again at the mountains that have been present in my life for so many years and helped give birth to this novel. And three days ago, I signed the contract. Our strategy for now is to put some pressure on publishing houses to read the manuscript faster and make a decision. Here's hoping the book contract will materialize.
Image text: Publishers Marketplace Deal Report: Film rights. Author of forthcoming BITTER MEDICINE Mia Tsai's KEY & VALE, an unpublished speculative novel in which a memory hunter and her guardian use mushrooms to extract lost knowledge for the Museum of Human Memory, only to uncover an ancient memory which shakes their post-climate change world to its core, to Girls to the Front Productions, by Anne Tibbets at Donald Maass Literary Agency.
It's a twelve-hour drive from PGH to ATL, so I listened to plenty of music. I thought I'd have space for an audiobook, but it didn't feel right. Sometimes I do celebrate wins--I know this is a shock to those who know me--and thus I centered the first leg of the trip on Melissa Etheridge, then Paramore (now that I have tickets to see them, I gotta do my homework). I listened to the K&V playlist. I kept myself moving with funk and surf rock. And I began transitioning my brain to RED ENVELOPE HUSBAND, the next project, with Taiwanese R&B, indie rock, and death metal.
Here's a short list:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vya_cYljihY
Franz Liszt, Années de pèlerinage S.160 no. 9, "Les cloches de Genève (Nocturne)," played by Lazar Berman, released by Deutsche Grammophon. (Liszt captioned an earlier version of the piece with a Lord Byron quote: "I live not in myself but I become / Portion of that around me.")
https://ffm.to/lostknights
Orgone, Lost Knights
https://www.polyrhythmics.com/music/#caldera-section
Polyrhythmics, Caldera
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxQxd2AxpQ8
CHTHONIC, Taiwan Victory Live
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovzdZLXWnIg
Amythyst Kiah, "Darlin' Corey"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CowqWKS5TlM
Saintseneca, "Pillar of Na"
Tell me what you're listening to! Me, I'm reserving this week to bathe in the new Beyoncé album. Until next time.