My Soundtrack by G.G. Vandagriff
Right next to my love of writing is my love of music. In fact,as I look at my novels, I find that music is inescapably woven through them. Itake my literary cues from the music I listen to.
Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major was the inspirationbehind my women’s fiction: Pieces ofParis. My heroine, Annalisse, is stuck in the Missouri Ozarks with herQuixotic husband who thinks he has found the Garden of Eden. However, she grewup on a farm and knows that a farm is just a farm. She is overcome by PTSD andfinds herself immersed in flashbacks of another life her husband knows nothingabout. Before that life ended tragically (thus causing her to bury the memoriesdeeply), she was a concert pianist (Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto andChopin’s etudes figure here). More importantly, she was passionately in lovewith a brilliant violinist consumed by Tchaikovsky. In creating that character,I also became consumed—both with him and with that amazingly complexcomposition. I played it as I wrote, and Jules became one of my most memorablecharacters. The concerto is vastly yearning, longing for resolution. Jules’scharacter development traced the concerto’s. In the same way, as I wrote thisbook during my twenty-five year apprenticeship, I was yearning for thecompletion that only writing could give me. I was stretching, as the violiniststretches in this composition. It was plainly the soundtrack for my literarylife.
In another book, The OnlyWay to Paradise, a tale of four women who find hope and healing in Italy,two of my “crazy ladies” are violinists. Arthritis has stricken Georgia, endingher career as a violin sensation. The Mendelssohn Violin Concerto was hersignature piece, and she played it “like silk.” As I wrote of Georgia and hermemories, I played the concerto as my “soundtrack.” When she thinks she wantsto end her life, she hears through her window in Florence, the sound of theDvorak violin concerto played by an anonymous virtuoso. The Slavic melody ofthe music echoes her mood, but saves her life. The violinist turns out to beone of her companions, whom she undertakes to mentor.
Just today, I was writing the penultimate love scene in mylatest Regency romance, MissBraithwaite’s Secret. To put me in a sweepingly romantic mood, I putPandora on Giacomo Puccini, my favorite composer of opera. It worked! Anyway, Ithink so. You will have to judge for yourself when the book comes out nextmonth!
It is one of life’s great ironies that I understand music, butcannot play a note, nor even read it! However, I cannot live without it.
G.G.Vandagriff is the author of fifteen books and an inveterate genre hopper. Shehas a series of five mysteries, two suspense novels, one award-winninghistorical epic, two women’s fiction, and two non-fiction. Her most recentproject is a trilogy of Regency romances: The Duke’s Undoing, The Taming ofLady Kate, and Miss Braithwaite’s Secret. She is also a journalist, writing foran on-line magazine and Deseret News. Educated at Stanford, she studied musicat Stanford-in-Austria. Though published by Deseret Book for years, she haspublished her last four books as an Indie publisher. Visit her website at http://ggvandagriff.com to read about and order her books.G.G. Vandagriff Amazon Page
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