Author Reveals & Next Time

[morbane]

Authors are now visible for all stories. Here's the collection again: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Jukebox2013

Thank you again for participating. I had a great time. I'm still reading through the collection.


I plan to run this challenge again, so I'd appreciate feedback, on what worked for you and didn't. (Anonymous comments are still enabled.)

Here are a couple of things I think I might change:

• The dates. This has run up closer to Yuletide than I was anticipating. I was also participating in hhertzof's Exchange at Fic Corner challenge, which hhertzof says she will run again next year in July-August-September. Because of this, I'm thinking of shifting Jukebox 2014 to February-March-April (ensuring the writing time doesn't overlap too much with Purimgifts) or April-May-June (though that overlaps a bit with Not Prime Time).


• The beta reading mailing list. I'm not sure that quite worked (thoughts, anyone?). Especially, it seems a bit silly for me to be playing relay like that when I'm in such a different time zone to most other people - I suspect it decreased, rather than increasing, efficiency. (I don't think this was a problem for pinch hitting, though, since I could decide when to send emails out.)


• What fanworks are included. Currently, I don't have a strong idea about how to include podcasts or fanvids - or whether these make sense to include. But I am interested in fanart. So, question: would other people be interested in either offering or requesting art fills for song prompts?


• The definition of a song. There are many discrete pieces of music without lyrics where the creators, performers, and audience can agree on the shape of the story being told. (Programmatic music being one branch of this.) Would you be interested in offering or requesting music of this type? And if you are, could you help me come up with an appropriate definition?



Other things I'd love to get discussion on: was writing for a song outside your comfort zone, or not? Did the song you wrote for remind you of other particular songs? (I ended up buying three songs in iTunes based on other people's nominations.) Are there un-filled prompts that you especially wish had been written as well?

Comments

[seekingferret]

As to songs without words, my main argument really boils down to this:

There is a lot more 'world' to play with in things like Strauss's "Till Eulenspiegel" than there is in things like They Might Be Giants' "Minimum Wage".


But let me say more about this. I am definitely not advocating for the absolute inclusion of all music in jukebox_fest. There is a lot of instrumental music that is abstract, and doesn't carry anything that we could easily term narrative or story. One could easily, I believe, find inspiration for fiction in this music, but I don't think that fiction would be reasonably said to constitute fanfiction. There is a lot, for example, in my story "The Music Speaks for Itself that is structurally drawn from the music of Debussy and Ravel, but I wouldn't really expect a reader to see those effects without doing an extremely close reading.

This music does not belong in Jukebox. It would not be fair to an author to have to try to reconcile their interpretation of a piece of abstract music to that of their recipient. To explore the reason why, consider me attempting to write fic inspired by the first movement of Haydn's "Surprise Symphony", one of my favorite works of music. My approach would be to pattern the story on the repeated rhythms of the piece and particularly the dynamic range of the piece: Moderately loud, then progressively quieter, than suddenly FORTISSIMO, then the details unfold as themes are unpackaged and reassembled toward an ever looming conclusion. I would probably mimic that with sentence lengths, amount of action, amount of emotional intensity, and a disjunctive time leap at the FORTISSIMO. I would make reference to the variance in orchestral color by assigning different characters or groups of characters to different instruments and move through those sets of characters in rough adherence to the score. And I would of course try to have a major surprise. So it's not that it's really that hard to write fanfiction for abstract music, it's just that there is no particular setting, no particular set of characters, no deep stylistic prescription. I could write a huge variety of stories based on these elements, but they wouldn't be remotely what the requester had in mind.

But there is a long tradition in music of what I keep calling 'programmatic music'. This is instrumental music that has a scenario, either explicit, or implicit, associated with it. And I think that it is as reasonable to ask that this musical narrative be fleshed out as it is to ask for a musical narrative with lyrics to be fleshed out. Mostly, what I am speaking of is a classical music tradition, but not exclusively. And I don't think that the process of turning this kind of song into a story is qualitatively different from the process of turning a pop song with lyrics into a story: Certainly there were no demon hunters in "Blue Caravan" until I reoriented the song that way, and I spent at least as much attention on trying to match the quiet moodiness and rhythms of the song as I did to matching the canonical narrative throughline. I'm not sure that we could very easily say that "He Was a Beautiful Fiction" was what my author was expecting out of a "Blue Caravan" story request, but I think the result was unquestionably driven both by the music and the scenario of the original song.

To give a few examples of what I have in mind that I think should be eligible for Jukebox...

March of the Lions or Aquarium from Camille Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals". Between the titles and the clear image-painting use of orchestral color, I think there's a very clear sense of place and narrative in these pieces. You can hear the lions marching. You can hear the fish swimming. And I would love to hear someone put words to what they see when they listen to that.

Grand Canyon Suite - "On the Trail". There isn't just setting here (and whoa is there setting here, the wide open skies, the flat plains, the dusty trails, they're all musically portrayed quite richly), there are people- we hear the clop of their horses, the roll of their wheels. I want the story of their adventure. I don't have a particularly clear sense in my head of who they are, but that much I'm willing to cede to my author's imagination. ;)

The Grid from Koyaanisqatsi. And this is where the argument started, and where the process of divining a separating line between too abstract instrumental music and sufficiently concrete instrumental music becomes tricky. Glass's piece on its own perhaps does not tell a story- I say perhaps, because I think this is debatable. I can listen to it without the words and hear the whir of cars, the honk of horns. I vidded a section of the piece, and it came out structurally very similar to the original imagery of the film, because there is a structure there that holds up. But no matter, what I think is important is that when you consider the film as imparting a narrative on the music, in the complicated relationship that soundtrack music always has to a film. If we encourage consideration of the music video as imparting additional narrative elements on a pop song, I think The Grid qualifies in the same way as a song given narrative components by the film.

[morbane]

I will come back for a more detailed reply when I have had time to listen to these pieces of music. (Currently typing in a break at work.)

At present, what I'm thinking I'll do next year is let you and others nominate this kind of music, once we get a safe criteria sorted out (something like "programmatic music/ music with no lyrics but a strong narrative design/ check with Morbane/seekingferret") but insist that everyone's requests must include at least *one* song that does have lyrics, just in case writers get cold feet.

My remaining concern, which I'll refine (and possibly solve to my own contentment) when I've listened to the pieces, is what background information you already had when you first encountered them. I imagine the Koyaanisqatsi piece can be treated as a music video analogue, in that the accompanying imagery informs the narrative strongly and sufficiently, and that might be all the background a writer needs; but I wonder whether it would be significantly better as a writer to be familiar with Camille Saint-Saens' other works, or know the background of the Grand Canyon Suite.

[seekingferret]

It's a fair question, one I'm not sure I can answer clearly. I'm not particularly familiar with Saint-Saens's other work- I know his Danse Macabre reasonably well, and have a casual acquaintance with some of his chamber work. More pertinently, I've seen several different visual adaptations of the Carnival over the years, including some with added narration, and am presently uncertain if I saw one of the visual adaptations first or if I first heard the music on its own. Probably I heard the music first on its own, but unquestionably those visual adaptations play a role in how I imagine the Carnival when I hear it.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how important that is. When I hear REM's "Nightswimming" (cited as an example for no other reason than that I heard it last week and was struck with memories), I access a whole web of associations and memories from when I first heard the song- people, places, events. If I requested "Nighswimming", I obviously wouldn't be asking my writer to consider that web of associations.

I think ultimately it doesn't matter what other context I bring to the Carnival, just the context that comes directly from the 'scenario', which probably in the end means whatever context wikipedia can provide. In contemplating it, "Is there sufficient information on the song's narrative on Wikipedia?" is probably a reasonable heuristic to apply for in/out of Jukebox.

[morbane]

I like your heuristic. It's simple. We'll use it.

In listening to "March of the Lions" and "Aquarium", I found it difficult to follow the former piece in the context I would like to imagine it - pomp and ceremony, animals being brought to some sort of starting line, lions sauntering majestically along with wary handlers darting around them - but "Aquarium" gave me a few more images I could work with. I am not sure I could be as precise as you in following the music - what you described above with my approach would be to pattern the story on the repeated rhythms of the piece and particularly the dynamic range of the piece, for Haydn - but the music + minor background + a prompt would probably be sufficient.