I read this book by a beloved Irish author sometime before I began this blog so that means sometime before 2006. I had remembered only that it focused on a woman who was a composer and that I loved it. Now that I have read it again, I still love the book and it is bristling with post-it notes.
The passages I marked are largely in two categories: one is the effort by a wonderful writer to describe music in words and the other is usages of words in ways that are unfamiliar to me. I love that sprinkles are called “hundreds and thousands,” the word unsnib means to unfasten or open a door, and I had not heard that the term “catch” refers to music sung in rounds (“Three Blind Mice,” for example). And here’s an example of using language to describe music, in this case about rounds, “Catherine loved the way the rhythms clashed — like a wave coming into the harbor wall. Once it struck, lots of wavelets jigged and bounced back and jostled the next big wave coming in.”
Catherine is writing a piece in the form of a mass; her mother is horrified because Catherine is no longer a believer. Catherine says the mass is a great form, a great structure. “Later the joined voices will become layered when the line lengthens — like the singing of the monks at Lavra. The thread of a single voice meshes with the next voice and its neighbors to become a skein which weaves with other skeins of basses and tenors and altos and sopranos to make a rope of sound, a cincture which will girdle the earth so that there is neither East nor West….The chords of voices stack vertically. Chords becoming cords, unravelling.”
The book was darker than I remembered; it begins with a funeral, describes a woman suffering from post-natal depression, and details life with a sinking alcoholic who turns in to an abusive partner. Catherine escaped with her daughter Anna from the abusive partner and when the book ends, she is at the first performance of her work, feeling very anxious. This piece includes Lambeg drums played by four Orangemen, a sound that is an anathema to people like Catherine, a Catholic in Northern Ireland. The fife and drums with their huge sound felt like oppression in her neighborhood. That she brought them in to be part of her music was not easy. The whole piece is minutely described by the author, was a triumph for Catherine, and an impressive feat by the author.
The boldness of this author is evident in that he wrote in great detail about a woman in her most personal moments. I found the descriptions of the music to be affecting and believable. The use of the rambling thoughts of Catherine throughout worked well. I was uneasy with his detailed description of the birth of Catherine’s daughter.
Bernard MacLaverty, Grace Notes, W.W. Norton, 1997, 277 pages. Available in the public library.