The Journey Between Us

THE JOURNEY BETWEEN US

Lost Things narrator and solo flute A Temporary Matter narrator Reflection I ensemble What We Talk About When We Talk About Love narrator Reflection II ensemble The Silence of Mrs Iln narrator Reflection III ensemble

THE CONCEPT The Journey Between Us is a music-theatre piece conceived as a dialogue between music and narrative stories. The music forms an imaginative framework and response to the stories; without being merely a soundtrack, it provides points of reflection within the performance. The music encourages the audience to make connections between the stories and their shared themes.

Both the music and the stories have their own separate coherence but by inhabiting the stage together the audience is taken on a journey that traverses both worlds: the literary and the musical.

BEGINNINGS The idea behind this work was borne out of a love for the short story form. After attending several short story readings I was struck by the beguiling and nostalgic experience of being read to. To sit and listen to a story being read aloud took me back to childhood. It is such a wonderful experience so why do we stop doing it as adults?

It is markedly different to the telling of a story through visual means such as television or film; a story read aloud puts the onus on the listener to create the world of the story in their imagination.

Our modern day equivalents can be found in radio and podcasts, forms that I love dearly. However, the essential act of one person sitting and reading a story has an intimacy and immediacy that can be utterly mesmerising.

The experience of listening to a story or listening to a piece of music are not dissimilar. They both require a certain presence of mind in order to find and follow the threads of meaning and of sound.

In The Journey Between Us I weave together these narrative and musical threads within the scope of an evening’s performance.

THE STORIES

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Each of the stories I have selected examine the interactions that occur within relationships and the complex emotions we experience when communication breaks down.

Raymond Carver

I was drawn to the work of Lydia Davis, the author of Lost Things and The Silence of Mrs Iln, for its brevity and sheer potency given such economy of means. She is known as a very short story writer: Lost Things is only a paragraph long. To be able to create a fictional world with so few words is a wonder and raises the question of what defines the short story form.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver is also written in a spare style, but in a very different way to the stories of Lydia Davis. The prose is distilled down to the essential information and much of this is communicated in dialogue. Whilst the text is understated and the situation it describes is quotidian, Carver manages to address some of the ‘big’ questions: what is the nature of love and how do we begin to articulate it?

A Temporary Matter drew me in from the first line. Jhumpa Lahiri beautifully describes how the simple act of turning off the lights can give two grieving people the licence to reveal what they found impossible to say in daylight.

THE MUSIC I have composed four movements in response to the stories. Three of these, entitled Reflections, are heard in between the stories. These movements could stand alone as well as acting as points of reflection and connection between the different narratives. The first movement is an introductory flute solo which is called Lost Things and is conceived as a partner piece to the short story of the same title.

Small fragments of the movements are heard within the readings providing the audience with traces of a musical thread throughout the whole performance.

Raymond Carver was born in 1938 in Oregon and grew up in the state of Washington. He was considered a writer of the ‘dirty realism’ school and was credited with reviving the genre of the English short story in the late 20th century. His short stories often focus on the everyday lives and problems of the working poor in the Pacific Northwest.

Jhumpa Lahiri Born in London in 1967 to Indian Bengali parents, Jhumpa Lahiri’s family moved to Rhode Island when she was two years old. In 2002, her collection of short stories named Interpreter of Maladies won the Pultizer Prize for Fiction.

However, her most recent book In Other Words is a work of non-fiction charting her experiences of learning and writing in Italian.

Lydia Davis Lydia Davis is an American writer born in Massachusetts and is now a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Albany, New York.

Although she is best known for her short stories, Davis is also a translator, essayist and novelist.

Her translations include Proust’s Du Côté de Chez Swann (Swann’s Way) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. In 2009 Craig Morgan Teicher described her as “the master of a literary form largely of her own invention”. © Samantha Fernando Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is published by Vintage Classics, Penguin Random House Jhumpa Lahiri’s A Temporary Matter is published by Flamingo, Harper Collins Lydia Davis’ Lost Things and The Silence of Mrs Iln are published by Penguin Random House