The week-long celebration of The Star Shard continues! Be sure to leap from this blog over to Emily Fiegenschuh’s (she’s the amazing artist who illustrated “The Star Shard” in its original form in Cricket Magazine — and wow, has she got some fascinating things to say over there about techniques and the artist’s process! You’ll never look at harpies the same way again!).

Music is integral to this story. Cymbril sings. Birds all around the Thunder Rake and in its own native treetops sing. The Armfolk sing as they row the Rake along on its travels. In its own juggernautical way, the Rake itself sings, shrieking and booming over the land. To quote from an early chapter:

She had always heard the tones of the world and had always answered them from within herself, matching the sound. As a very small girl, she’d stood in the middle of a deck and sung with the Rake. Her voice echoed the shriek of the axles, the roar of crowds, the stir of wind in leaves . . . and added something of her own, a nameless emotion that was both joy and loneliness, a cry that would not be stilled. When Rombol had determined that nothing ailed her, that she was singing like no child he’d ever heard, he found her a teacher of music and voice. Rombol knew a commodity when he heard one.

Cymbril’s world is a singing world. The book ends with the singing of a bird. The Cricket story begins with the two-word sentence “Cymbril sang.” The book’s cover bears the line, “The magic of music, the power of freedom.” The act of singing is a powerful metaphor for this book, because it’s the story of a girl finding her voice, letting her spirit grow and scintillate.

One of the best things about expanding the shorter tale into a book was that suddenly I had more room to let the story breathe and grow. I could restore some of the descriptions we had to excise from the magazine draft. I could turn the “camera” on more of the shadowy corridors I wanted to explore. I could delve more into the stories behind the story. There’s still not nearly enough of this, is there? — which is why this needs to be a series. There’s so much of Cymbril’s world glimmering beyond the narrow borders of even a 304-page novel!

One element that for certain I wanted to include in the book was some specifics of Cymbril’s songs. In the Cricket version, we got to hear a few titles; we had the briefest hints of what the songs were like. We know that Cymbril sings from a rich tradition. Rombol has seen to it that Cymbril was taught to read, and she has learned some of her songs from books. She has also had the best music teacher that her wealthy master could produce. We learn that her songs are hugely popular with crowds, who also know many of the lyrics by heart. She sings the music of the people — the songs they laugh, clap, dance, and cry to. Sometimes the crowds sing along; sometimes they listen in hushed awe. At the market in Deepdike, Cymbril is spontaneously joined by two minstrels, Bobbin and Argent, who lend her their voices and their instrumental facility to the delight of the audience.

Two songs of Cymbril’s we hear in their entirety, and these came very late in the revision of the book. They were like crowning flowers that blossomed when all the garden was grown and nearly ready. What are the words? I wondered. What are these poems that hold the crowds still, that stir their hearts and unlock their dreams? My clearest memories of the songs coming to me are of days at Niigata University, when I was there to teach. I can remember scribbling lines on the back of a syllabus, on a wobbly table in the crowded student lounge, where I’d go to get 70-yen coffee from a vending machine. I can remember sitting on a bench just outside the building where I taught, eating lunch and jotting lines. I remember tiny, brave flowers growing in the tangled grass. I recall students stopping to wave at me through the windows, giggling about the teacher writing in the courtyard.

But another dimension was coming. My friend Dorothy VanAndel Frisch, known to long-time blog friends as Daylily, had set some of my words to music in the past, and she began doing the same for Cymbril’s songs. What follows is Dorothy’s own account of how she went about it:

“The Green Leaves of Eireigh” began with one stanza Fred wrote for the book and emailed me for my enjoyment. I could see that I would love to set this to music, and I asked him to write more stanzas. That first stanza fired my imagination. I listened to Celtic music and wrote Fred, “It seems to me that the melodies of Cymbril’s culture would bear a relationship to Celtic music. Yet there would be something just a little different about the music. Maybe it would have an unusual scale or mode as the basis for the melodies. Certainly not plain old major or minor! But the music would have the energy and drive of Celtic music. It would have to be music that non-musicians could enjoy. So it would be different, but not too different. That would be an interesting challenge. It would be the equivalent of inventing a folk music for a different culture.” When working with “a steed to carry me back to Eireigh,” I came up with a phrase in D Dorian mode with a raised fourth scale degree. That seemed exotic enough for Cymbril’s culture, and the scale worked well for the entire song, after Fred had written three more stanzas.

I liked “The Green Leaves of Eireigh” so well that I was inspired to make an arrangement of it for three-part women’s chorus, piano, and flute. This piece will be premiered on Thursday, May 3, 2012 at Shrewsbury High School, Shrewsbury, MA in the spring concert beginning at 7:30 p.m. I will be at the concert; if any of the Fellowship of the Blog attend, please introduce yourself to me!

Fred and I enjoyed the collaboration on “Eireigh,” and then he became inspired to write another complete song to include in the book: “Blue Were Her Eyes.” That one I set in D Mixolydian mode with a raised fourth scale degree. So the two songs bear a relationship in style, with that unusual feature of the raised fourth scale degree. At some point, we realized that readers might enjoy having some real music included in the book about Cymbril, since her singing is a central focus of the book.

This is Fred again: it gives me — and I’m sure Dorothy, too — great delight to imagine readers of The Star Shard going to their pianos, picking up their flutes or violins, trombones or oboes or horns or tubas and discovering for themselves the notes as Cymbril might have sung them, under the blue sky and a fair breeze, as marketgoers stopped to listen.

I told you in a blog post awhile back about how, just before I left Japan, a friend and colleague at Niigata University recruited me to be involved with a major artistic event: in a huge concert hall/stage theater, before a packed house, “Blue Were Her Eyes” was on the program. Dressed in my tweed suit, standing in a blinding, Spielberg-like spotlight, I read the poem aloud, while on the stage to my left, a nationally-famous Japanese young man interpreted it through dance, garbed in a costume of his own design. You can review my account of that day here.

As the Urrmsh say: “We push, and we pull, and we sing. It is a good life.”

Join us tomorrow for Day 6! And tell everyone you know that s/he should be reading The Star Shard! 🙂