were always my refuge and escape when I was younger. But I also empathize with Marie, a woman of learning and spirit who made the wrong choices when she was young, yet who eventually found true love.
This is your second novel in which you bring together music and history. What attracts you to this world? What about music is important to you?
Making music, making instruments that make music, is a defining human characteristic. Music, whether most people realize it or not, is intertwined with everything that has resulted in the many big, historical events of our modern past, perhaps even longer ago than that. Music has been used for political purposes. Music has been used for religious purposes. Music touches the soul in a way that no other art form does, or even than literature can. In essence it is wordless and imageless, although combining it with words provides an additional layer of meaning and experience to those words. The challenge to me as a writer is to convey the importance of music and its changing aesthetic in a way that somehow communicates not only its place in history, but its emotional and psychic effects on auditors and practitioners. Besides, I could read music before I could read words, and music still has as much power over me as words, perhaps more in some ways.
How do you decide what you are going to write about? Do the characters find you and then you do your research or do you research to find your story?
So far, my ideas have arisen from the research I have done as a musicologist in past years. I find I am obsessed with fitting music into a bigger picture of a
