Music can inspire me to visions of Russian winters and Arabian nights, but once in a while, I hear something that throws me down a rabbit hole and into a scene so vivid that I must recreate it.
That’s how “Cafe de Nuit” came to be.
This week I was introduced to the music of Adam Hurst, a musician out of Portland who has so much credibility that I can’t do him any sort of justice here except to plug in a link to his website (click on his name to go there). A friend had posted a link to a couple of absolutely gorgeous tracks that sent Ter straight for the iTunes Store. The album is called “Ritual”, and I’m pretty sure it won’t be the lone Hurst album in our collection.
As each track played, I found myself slipping into fiction – picturing images, hearing bits of conversation, sensing raw emotion, that sort of thing. The music was dreamy enough to lull me into my angels’ world ... but then the last track started and everything changed.
The piece is called “Midnight Waltz” (hear here). From the first note, I was drinking absinthe with the Impressionists at that Parisian cafe. I smelled the cigarette smoke and heard the glasses tinkling, the voices murmuring; I felt the night air on my skin and the idle promise of something deeply, delightfully sensual to come. The scene was so strong, so overwhelming, that I had to write it all down before it would let me sleep.
It emerged as the blurb I posted on July 16. It’s both curious and thrilling how that sole piece of music was able to transport me to another time and place. That’s the magic of creativity, of writing and music and imagination. One begets another and art is born.
But is “Cafe de Nuit” art? Or is it a fragmental memory of another life?
Music is such a driving force in my writing too. In fact, I honestly cannot write in silence (most times). If I am hunkered down in my writing room, I NEED music to propel me forward. It's a kind of Muse for me. Music is powerful and I LOVE how it helps us create and inspires other art forms.
ReplyDeleteI'm the same - writing in silence generally means I'm going through the motions, so whatever I produce will be substandard. What really revs my motor is hearing something that throws me headlong into someplace else, when I can't type fast enough to keep up with the imagery.
DeleteI love art. How can people say it matters less than science???