The Musician

Thank you so much for reading and for contributing your wisdom and wonderings along the way. Regardless of how deeply felt the flow goes, the process of writing is an intrinsically solitary endeavour. Ideas explode into worlds and stories, and it sometimes feels like they’re all coming from somewhere else entirely. This magical and mysterious feeling of being in service to the flow has kept me at my writing desk for more time than I care to admit.

But there’s also a reader in me. The same reader who had his mind, soul, spirit and perspectives blown over and over again by literature in my formative years. I can’t imagine who I’d be without all the secret portals that I stumbled upon in second-hand bookshops. My fascination naturally evolved into a curiosity about how these amazing feats of fiction had been written.

What was the inner game of a writer? The habits? The strategies and practices? What’s the brain doing when it reads? How do stories move through us and around us? Eventually, I had to start writing. For myself, yes, but also for the young reader in me whose mind was routinely blown up by the magic of fiction.

Do you have any other feedback or would you like to stay in touch?

I’ve spent over 20 years working on The Musician. The adventure started in Pai, Thailand when I was travelling and I decided to have a go at living without music. I didn’t get very far with that! One fateful evening, when I was listening to the delicious guitar-playing of Goong Warutama in a cafe called “Jazz Up: By Serendipity Group”, I came across these lines in The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse and my life changed forever:

“It was as if by becoming a musician and Music Master he had chosen music as one of the ways toward man’s highest goal, inner freedom, purity, perfection, and as though ever since making that choice he has done nothing but let himself be more and more permeated, transformed, purified by music — his entire self from his nimble, clever pianist’s hands and his vast, well-stocked musician’s memory to all the parts and organs of body and soul, to his pulses and breathing, to his sleep and dreaming — so that he was now only a symbol, or rather a manifestation, a personification of music.”

Hesse is posthumously describing the father figure of the lead character, Joseph Knecht. It doesn’t read like grief though, does it? It barely even sounds like death. Doesn’t it read more like a sighing outbreath of enlightenment — the Music Master has become more dead than he was alive. I read those lines and became gripped by an idea I’ve never been able to shake off. What would that look like? To get to that state, not through meditation but through music? What kind of music could do that!

And so the adventure began. It took me through history to the moment (possibly apocryphal) when the geometry of musical scales was figured out. It took me through as many cultures as there are melodies in search of patterns, ideas and possibilities. I have a Master’s degree in physics, which came in handy as I began to explore the scientific basis not just of harmony and music, but the neuroscience of listening and cymatics (the study of how patterns of sound give rise to physical structure in matter). It all got quite metaphysical, philosophical, spiritual, scientific and then… I started writing.

But I didn’t want to write a book of ideas. I wanted a thriller. A page-turner with speculative elements that pushed the boundaries and asks us to question the stories we’ve been told about the world. Because my lead character — when he eventually unravels the mystery of who he has been — was never ‘just a person’ in history. Shrouded in mystery, teaching by oral tradition, he is more like a mythical placeholder for a body of ideas than a clearly defined human. That gave me the freedom to play with history in a way that no historian could categorically say was ‘untrue’. It was a wild ride :-).

It’s not just about pacy page-turning and the bubbling through of all the crazy things I learned about music, though. The Musician also carries a secret sparkle of hope that will find its way into people as a gentle seed that, if well-tended, might just make the world a better place.