Art Chowder September | October, Issue 23 | Page 31

What are you working on?
This past fall I began work on what I hope will become
a novel. The initial inspiration came from my research
into Antonio Vivaldi. He’s always been an interesting
figure for me — in part because of his music; in part
because he was such a flamboyant character — he was
a virtuosic violinist, a priest, a prolific composer, and he
had a fair amount of celebrity at the peak of his career.
Much of his career he spent composing mainly religious
pieces for the women of Ospedale della Pietà (a Venetian
orphanage), but also paradoxically chasing after a career
in opera (which would have been like the punk music of
its day), both as a composer and impresario. Late in life
he traveled around Europe in an entourage with his father
and some others, including a kind of mediocre singer
(Anna Giro) for whom he wrote countless arias, and her
sister. No one totally knows why he was so fixated on
Anna or wrote so much music for her. The relationship
was evidently always platonic. He died alone and
destitute in Vienna.
But, as I got into reading about all of this, I came
to realize that the women of the Pietà and the other
Venetian Ospedali were much, much more interesting
than Antonio. At a time when women were not allowed
to perform music publicly anywhere, ever (just too
suggestive, you know), these women were achieving near
celebrity status for their performances and their exquisite
musicianship. By the end of the 1700s they were widely
regarded as the finest musicians in all of Europe. They’d
have to stand in galleries above the audience and had to
play from behind a concealing metal grate whenever they
performed. Their daily lives were pretty austere but also
self-directed. If they chose to, they could spend all their
days doing nothing but playing and teaching music. Many
or most of them chose this. At a time and in a culture
where women had so few choices, this is astonishing
and fascinating. And the music is incredibly good. It’s
much too soon to say where this is all going, but I spent
the fall of 2018 traveling, reading, researching, listening
to music, and got a little foothold into what I hope will
become a novel. So that’s the project.
I mean, constantly. Obsessively. And I think the notion
that these two activities that I liked so much had to have
an active hands-on corollary came from the fact that my
parents were (still are) musicians, and that they started
me in violin lessons as soon as I asked. So, there were
instruments in the house and violin lessons and there
were always musicians coming and going. From this I
developed the sense that the most logical way to engage
with something you loved, artistically, was by doing it.
And from that I somehow always extrapolated that I’d be
spending my life writing books and playing music. 
But I didn’t actually get into the discipline of writing until
I was in college, and didn’t really face the challenges
involved until I’d finished college and gone out in the
world a while and realized what a difficult and ridiculous
thing it is to set aside hours a day for hanging out in
imaginary worlds with imaginary characters, trying to put
together some kind of unified narrative form for them that
no one may ever see. In no time, I was deep in the weeds,
trying to find my way and to develop some sense of
discipline about it. Eventually, I had to realize that I had
no idea what I was doing. A big turning point came for
me when I enrolled in the MA creative writing program
at University of New Hampshire. My teacher there,
Thomas Williams, who I had the incredibly good fortune
of working with the last year he was alive, really gave me
the push and the direction that I needed.

What is the best way for someone to be introduced to
your work (music or writing)?
Any of the Jaybirds’ recordings will give you a pretty
good idea of the kind of bluegrass I play these days …
http://www.thejaybirds.com. The recording my wife and
I put out last year, All Along the Sea, will give you a
sense of the more eclectic world-folk music I like to play,
but on that recording I hardly play any fiddle. Mostly
I’m playing bouzouki ... https://caridwenandgregspatz.
hearnow.com. This was long in the works! We’ve done a
few band recordings together over the years but never a
project that featured just two of us.
What brought you to writing?  Do you have memories
or experiences to reflect on? For publications, I’d say read the latest which came out in
June, What Could Be Saved.
I had a notion that I wanted to write and to play the violin
from very early on — like age six or seven. Mainly, this
was because I liked reading books and listening to music. https://www.tupelopress.org/product/what-could-be-
saved-bookmatched-novellas-stories.
September | October 2019
31