Love Life
Miscellaneous: Grief. Books. Kurt Weill's American musicals
Hi all,
This time, fewer gas engineers. Instead, miscellany in need of subheadings. Before some news from the last month, here’s a throwback to the beginning of writing While the Music Lasts. It would be a lie to say I was sad to cut this passage. I produced so much material as I wrote my way into the book that when I rediscovered it this morning, I barely remembered it. I like it, though.
When Someone Dies
When someone dies, you temporarily lose touch with the things you used to think were important. I forgot things. My concentration was non-existent. My inbox became a mist of lines that had neither hold nor urgency and that simply fell away, lost for good once they no longer made the first page.
It was freeing, although I supposed that if I could have brought myself to care it would have been vaguely unsettling. I stood outside myself, looking in, and wondered about the person who used to feel that my professional responsibilities were so vital when they was now so evidently pointless. What a strange person she must have been.
My brain was directing its energy elsewhere, apparently; those systems that pay attention to the details, the ones that translate an email saying you have a meeting at 2pm into remembering to go to aforementioned meeting at 2pm, have been temporarily disabled. It was reassuring to learn. I missed a lot of meetings.
I didn’t reply to my emails, because those little red flags brains usually puts up every so often to say ‘hey, remember that reply you owe Chrissy?’ were casualties of the hurricane and lay scattered, meaning voided, hung broken in trees.
The brain and body do all sorts of things to protect themselves and to keep the person who has died close. To process, to use that awful word that summons machines and cogs and factories and oil. Trauma. Shutting down all but essential functions, hibernating, numbing. Researchers agree that people need to be able to regulate how they engage with their grief. They avoid the feelings, then they dive in again. Periods of intense confrontation are followed by periods of respite and avoidance. And music is a powerful tool in this process. Perhaps, in my opinion, the most powerful tool. You might listen to music. I didn’t, but many do. My mum did. In the early weeks, some people listen to music relentlessly. The music they played at the funeral. The music that makes them think of the person who’s died. Music that comforts them. Music that makes them sad.
Because it brings people who have died to life. Because you can have too much of it. Because it can be too intense. Because it stirs something deep.
Because on that Wednesday that we returned from the hospital, everything was still there. All the physical detritus of a life: glasses, notes, German language homework. It felt like he could come back; his leaving had been too sudden to process. And to be honest, it would take a long, long time for my brain to accept that he wasn’t. Coming back. What was missing came the following morning, and in all the days that followed. The absence. The quiet where he had once been, thrumming through the house.
Empty, uncanny, unfamiliar. Our home was not ours without the sound of the guitar hanging in the air, blanketing the stillness.
January news
First up, I had a radical haircut, to cleverly make sure I no longer look like the author photo on my book. It’s very Emily circa 2011-2016, only significantly more grey at the front. I love it.
I also got the train to Leeds to see Opera North and play the role of ‘presenter’s friend’ for a BBC Radio 3 recording of Kurt Weill’s 1948 Broadway show, Love Life, to be broadcast on Saturday, 22 February. The presenter whose friend I got to be was the lovely Mark Forrest, who lives on a farm. Kurt Weill is best known for his Weimar works with Bertolt Brecht, but after he escaped the Nazis and moved to the States, he also collaborated widely with some of the US’s biggest literary and stage names: the poet Ogden Nash, the African-American writer and activist Langston Hughes, and, for Love Life, Alan Jay Lerner, of later My Fair Lady fame.
I’d never heard the whole of Love Life before, let alone seen a production—strikes after the initial Broadway run meant a full cast recording was never made, and the show has only been put on a handful of times in the 77 years since then. So thank goodness that the BBC’s recording of Opera North’s production will be released as the first ever full recording, as I’m basically now addicted to the songs (especially a rather problematic but totally toe-tapping jazz number about women’s suffrage). I highly recommend listening in on 22 Feb. Also the guys who mix the sound in the truck are virtuosos.
Book updates
In book news, the final text and extremely beautiful jacket design have gone to the printers. Finished copies will arrive at the end of the month. I’ve been continuing my awkward mission to drop copies of the bound proofs into local bookshops. It’s becoming slightly less mortifying. You get to watch the dread in the bookseller’s eyes turn to relief when they realise that what you are handing them is a real book with a publisher they know, and not something you knocked up in your garage.
My first in-person event has been booked, a conversation with the amazing cultural historian, author, and musicologist Laura Tunbridge (incoming Heather Professor of Music at Oxford, and author of Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces) at Oxford Blackwells on Monday 26 May. Tickets are available here. And there are some developments with radio interviews around the publication date that I don’t want to jinx.
As ever, I’d be thrilled if you’d preorder While the Music Lasts if you think you or someone you know might fancy reading it—it needs the support of the preorder algorithm to get copies into bookshops. And I’ll be reviewing new classical releases on Radio 3’s Record Review live this Saturday 8 Feb, or afterwards on BBC Sounds, if you fancy hearing how well I get on coordinating notes, brain, and mouth between 2:15 pm and 3pm.
That’s all for now—
Emily x