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