#writing #music: @LudovicoEinaud

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From the Becoming shared last week, let us continue this journey into another realm. I discovered it while stumbling about–virtually, that is. (Though feel free to picture me tripping over rocks and logs in a forest if that helps.) YouTube was on shuffle as I dug through Wisconsin history to dig up curious reference points (like the Mormons torching their own houses in La Crosse before running on down to Texas) for my upcoming novelette “Night’s Tooth.” After yet another annoying drink ad, there was this wee chime, piano, and then violin…

Perhaps it’s the video of boys that connected me so quickly and so completely to this song. I see the parents desperately saving their son at the end, and my mind races to when I came so close to losing my own, each in different ways.

I had to learn more about this creator of narrative music.

Ludovico Einaudi is Italian born and bred; like me, his love of music is rooted down and in with his love of family. A scholarship to the Tanglewood Music Festival exposed him to the blossoming movement of American minimalism (a style developed in part by another favorite of mine, Philip Glass). He’s been composing music for stage and screen since the 1980s, but has also produced solo albums, the first–le Onde—being inspired by Virginia Woolf’s short stories.

How curious to listen to a man inspired by fiction to compose music while his music inspires me to compose fiction!

Here’s a lovely example of the minimalism present in one of his more recent albums, Elements.

(If this Video doesn’t work, I found another live Vid here.)

I’m so happy to have found a live version of this song for the visual of this minimalism. No orchestra here–just a piano, a violin, a cello, a guitar, and a percussionist. Yet with these few instruments, you feel the world about you fill with sound, trickle-slow, like water moving through a child’s crafted wall of river stones. This steady build fits beautifully with the rise of tension in a scene, or of a character’s resolve to face the darkness.

(If this video doesn’t work, here’s another go with a different upload.)

Like young Lucy opening a wardrobe door to another world, Einaudi’s “Primavera” welcomes us into another world of magic created by trills and arpeggios–fitting touches in a melody for a song entitled “Spring.” And because spring is not always a delicate season, Einaudi makes the wise choice of building the strings up at the 2:00 minute mark to send them cascading like a downpour upon us. They run up like lighting, the bass notes rumble as thunder, and we are left standing in the deluge until the harp arrives to soften the rainfall and crack the clouds.

Einaudi’s talent for building darker worlds can be found in another album, In a Time Lapse.

(In case this video doesn’t work where you are, try this one!)

It is another song that builds, yes, but there’s a menace this time. The relentless snare drum forces us forward on whether we wish to or not. At roughly 2:00 a violin cries out, a plea for…for what? A plea to listen, to change, to stop. There’s tragedy in that relentless march, and if we don’t escape, we will lose our hope. The lone piano that ends the song tells me…well. What it tells me and what it tells you may be two different things.

That’s one of the great beauties of narrative music: interpretation.

Music is a life-force. It moves our hearts to beat, our souls to breathe. May Einaudi’s compositions beat in your characters’ hearts and breathe across the fantasy-scapes of your worlds with all the magic of a thunderstorm on a summer’s eve.

Stay tuned for author interviews galore! We’re going to learn more about some beautiful historical fiction set in World War II, a cracking cozy mystery, and a series of Young Adult novels set in the cut-throat world of horse-racing.

(And, if I find the right bribe, we’ll hear all of “The Invention that Changed the Chicken World” told by the author herself!)

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!

35 thoughts on “#writing #music: @LudovicoEinaud”

  2. I really hope things are going well for you. Loved your words this morning. I found Einaudi after I started playing a classical cd boxset my partner gave to me before the world changed. Kept playing Nefeli and Due Tramonti over an over again. Along with Maxwell Davies Farewell to Stromness.

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    • Thank you! It’s a mix right now, but only because this is such a crazy state of transition with summer breaks and finals, job stuff and house stuff and…all the stuff. Not the writing stuff I’d like. BUT. I must be patient. That time will come, too.
      Patience. Bloody hard to have some days.
      Hope you’re well, too. xxxxxx

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  14. ah so delighted you share the Einaudi yearn and spill! Olafur Arnalds is another long favorite, Max Richter, Nils Frahm, Chad Lawson, Clem Leek… have storied my world since George Winston in my youth :). Thank you for praising it

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