• About
  • Listening
    • Baroque
    • Bluegrass and Country
    • Classical Fusion
    • Classical Period
    • Early Music
    • Film soundtracks
    • Folk Music
    • Jazz
    • Modern Classical
    • Modern Pop Fusion
    • Musicals
    • Romantic Classical
    • Spoken word
    • World Music
  • Reading
    • Fiction
      • Children’s and Young Adult Fiction
      • Classic writers and their works
      • Contemporary Fiction
      • Crime and Detective Fiction
      • Fictionalised Biography
      • Historical Fiction
      • Horror
      • Lighter-hearted reads
      • Literary Fiction
      • Plays and Poetry
      • Romance
      • SF
      • Short stories
      • Western
      • Whimsy and Fantastical
    • Non-Fiction
      • Arts
      • Biography and Autobiography
      • Ethics, reflection, a meditative space
      • Food and Drink
      • Geography and Travel
      • Health and wellbeing
      • History and Social History
      • Philosophy of Mind
      • Science and nature
      • Society; Politics; Economics
  • Reading the 20th Century
  • Watching
    • Documentary
    • Film
    • Staged Production
    • TV
  • Shouting From The Soapbox
    • Arts Soapbox
    • Chitchat
    • Philosophical Soapbox
    • Science and Health Soapbox
  • Interviews / Q + A
  • Indexes
    • Index of Bookieness – Fiction
    • Index of Bookieness – Non-Fiction
    • Index of authors
    • Index of titles
    • 20th Century Index
    • Sound Index
      • Composers Index
      • Performers Index
    • Filmed Index

Lady Fancifull

~ adventures in a mainly literary obsession

Lady Fancifull

Tag Archives: Us Conductors

Aside

It’s Publication Day! Sean Michaels – Us Conductors

16 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by Lady Fancifull in Fiction, Literary Fiction, Reading

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Book Review, Publication Day, Sean Michaels, Us Conductors

Us Conductors

It’s release day for this wonderful prize-winning novel by first time Canadian author Sean Michaels. A book about music, politics, love and science. This is definitely one of my books of the year. Here is my original review, written after receiving it as an ARC from NetGalley in digital form

Us Conductors Amazon UK
Us Conductors Amazon USA

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Print
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Sean Michaels – Us Conductors

22 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by Lady Fancifull in Fiction, Fictionalised Biography, Literary Fiction, Reading

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Book Review, Clara Rockmore, Espionage, Gulags, Lev Termen, Russian Revolution, Sean Michaels, Stalinist Russia, Theremin, Us Conductors

Strange, ethereal music : Russia and America, between the wars;  the darkness of espionage and the gulag, leavened by love

Us ConductorsSean Michaels is a Canadian author, though born in Scotland, so maybe he can be claimed North of the Border!. He is known as the founder of a long-standing music blog, Said The Gramophone, and is also North American music correspondent for The Guardian.

Us Conductors, astonishingly, is his first novel, and won Canada’s version of the Man Booker, the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Without having read the other nominations, perhaps I can’t comment : but this is an wonderful book, and I had completely surrendered to it by a handful of pages in, because, however the story was going to unfold, and whoever the characters were going to be, it was blazingly clear that here was a writer using language and imagery with beauty, conveying a lot with economy and precision. It made sense that this is a book about music (among other subjects). I think of notes, and the harmonics which arise from them, and I felt that quality in Michael’s use of language, realising  he was taking about more than one subject at a time :

Lev Sergeyvich Termen is not the voice of the ether. He is not the principle that turned glass into firefly. I am an instrument. I am a sound , being sounded, music being made, blood, salt and water manipulated inair. I come from Leningrad. With my bare hands, I have killed one man. I was born on August 15th, 1896, and at that instant I became an object moving through space toward you.

Michaels teases the reader with the following statement, before the book begins

This book is mostly inventions

Having finished the book, I smiled even more broadly at the clever double meanings in his disclaimer, which is followed by a quote from Tennessee Williams

In memory, everything seems to happen to music

Leon/Lev Termen was a scientist and inventor, whose initial fame came through his invention of the theremin:  ‘ an electronic musical instrument in which the tone is generated by two high-frequency oscillators and the pitch controlled by the movement of the performer’s hand towards and away from the circuit’

Here is Termen demonstrating his invention

Termen was a believer in the Russian Revolution, and in his country. He travelled to America as part of a trade initiative for Russia, between the wars. The theremin, and his other electronic inventions  presented opportunities to demonstrate the dynamism of Russia, the brilliance of its scientists, and to generate capital. Also, it appears that under the aegis of trade, espionage possibilities were possible.

In America, which Termen found an exciting country, and one which welcomed his brilliance, both as someone who was an artist, and as someone who was a scientist, he met a woman who was to completely obsess him – a Lithuanian born violinist, Clara Reisenberg, (later Clara Rockmore).  Clara, in her teens, developed bone problems which cut short her burgeoning career as a violin virtuoso. However her musicality, and her meeting with Termen and the theremin, meant she studied how to play this, not as some kind of gimmick, but as an instrument in its own right.

Clara Rockmore and Leon Termen. Wiki Commons

Clara Rockmore and Leon Termen. Wiki Commons

And I must admit, whilst sourcing media for this review, I listened to many Youtube videos of people playing the theremin, and thought ‘well it’s a bit of a gimmick, really’, until finding some recordings of Clara. Here she is playing Saint Saens’ The Swan.

Although Termen by all accounts proposed to Clara several times, she married another.

Meanwhile, Termen was inventing various security devices as well as refining musical ones, but was probably involved in darker matters. His loyalty to his mother country and those who were ‘minding’ him in his sojourn in America, led to his involvement as an industrial spy for Russia.

And then, in 1938 he was suddenly recalled to Russia, where he found himself regarded as a class enemy, was imprisoned and sent to the gulag.

None of these pieces of information are really spoilers, as they were rather what I gleaned the book was about from the publisher blurb

I decided not to investigate the finer points of biographical truth in Michaels’ astonishing novel, ‘this book is mostly inventions’, till I had finished. And indeed at the end of the book the author does reveal what is true, and what might not strictly be true, but may have been pieced together from research and also from creative imagination

Because it trusts the worker’s own senses, not the knowledge locked  away in the lessons and textbooks of the elites, the theremin becomes a revolutionary device – a levelling of the means of musical production

These are the bare bones of the book, a story of a man with a rather remarkable life, but this is far more than a biography, it is of course a work of literary fiction, a gorgeous thing, a meditation on the power of music and art, on politics, on Russia, on love as a compass needle for a life.

I was, often, breathless reading this, particularly those sections set in the gulag

The winter came quickly, in place of fall. I lived only barely, by coincidence. At the end of every workday, wrecked, ruined, we trudged back into the camp. We queued for our evening mean: a morsel of herring, a spoonful of pea soup, bread. Someone might steal the soup or fish, but never the scrap of limp brown bread. The prisoners had made this rule themselves. This is humanity, at the end of the world: the refusal to tear away a piece of bread

I was delighted to be offered this as an ARC from the publishers, via Netgalley. It is already published in the States, but UK publication is not till 16th of July

My digital ARC was a little littered with formatting signs and instructions such as Sean Michaelsphysical page numbers mid text. But the formats included one, strangely apposite one. In place of symbols which might indicate a change of scene or subject matter, a shift of emphasis within a chapter or to indicate page and chapter breaks, was the use of the letter A

A is of course the note the orchestra tunes to, taken from the oboe. This typo sent a shiver up and down my spine, as it rather echoed the ‘true North, or the true note, of Clara, which Termin, in this novel, pitched to, over that complex life

I know i have failed to do justice to this book. It is, sure, a gripping and immersive story. The central character is wonderfully expressed, and the reader rather wants to stay with him, and listen to the narrative and the meaning of his life, as he tries, in various ways, to make sense of himself to himself, and his sense of the world he lives in, both its geography, its politics and culture, and the times themselves. What I found here is what I always yearn for – a kind of beauty. That doesn’t mean ‘pretty’ – beauty, in Yeats’ marvellous phrase, can also be ‘a terrible beauty’ But it will always mean what Keats said

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

Us Conductors Amazon UK
Us Conductors Amazon USA

And finally, nothing at all to do with this thoroughly wonderful book, but I found ithis curious, weird, irresistible Youtube theremin extravaganza It’s certainly not beautiful, and you do have to sit through a speaker addressing the world’s largest theremin orchestra event in Japanese, and break through the boredom of ‘Is anything going to happen?’, but for your unbelieving delectation and delight :

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Print
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Page Indexes

  • About
    • Index of Bookieness – Fiction
    • Index of Bookieness – Non-Fiction
    • Index of authors
    • Index of titles
    • 20th Century Index
  • Sound Index
    • Composers Index
    • Performers Index
  • Filmed Index

Genres

Archives

May 2022
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Mar    

Posts Getting Perused

  • Alan Sillitoe - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
    Alan Sillitoe - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
  • William Butler Yeats - Vacillation
    William Butler Yeats - Vacillation
  • Zhu Xiao-Mei - The Secret Piano
    Zhu Xiao-Mei - The Secret Piano
  • Judith Kerr - A Small Person Far Away
    Judith Kerr - A Small Person Far Away
  • Alex Grey - Sacred Mirrors
    Alex Grey - Sacred Mirrors
  • Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water
    Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water
  • Barbara Vine - House of Stairs
    Barbara Vine - House of Stairs
  • John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
    John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath

Recent Posts

  • Bart Van Es – The Cut Out Girl
  • Joan Baez – Vol 1
  • J.S.Bach – Goldberg Variations – Zhu Xiao-Mei
  • Zhu Xiao-Mei – The Secret Piano
  • Jane Harper – The Lost Man

NetGalley Badges

Fancifull Stats

  • 154,021 hits
Follow Lady Fancifull on WordPress.com

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Follow on Bloglovin

Tags

1930s setting Adult Faerie Tale Andrew Greig Arvo Pärt Autobiography baroque Beryl Bainbridge Biography Biography as Fiction Bits and Bobs Bits and Pieces Book Review Books about Books Cats Children's Book Review Classical music Classical music review Classic Crime Fiction Colm Toibin Cookery Book Crime Fiction David Mitchell Dystopia Espionage Ethics Fantasy Fiction Feminism Film review First World War Folk Music Food Industry France Gay and Lesbian Literature Ghost story Golden-Age Crime Fiction Graham Greene Health and wellbeing Historical Fiction History Humour Humour and Wit Ireland Irish writer Irvin D. Yalom Janice Galloway Japan Literary Fiction Literary pastiche Lynn Shepherd Marcus Sedgwick Meditation Mick Herron Minimalism Music review Myths and Legends Neil Gaiman Ngaio Marsh Novels about America Other Stuff Patrick Flanery Patrick Hamilton Perfumery Philip Glass Philosophy Police Procedural Post-Apocalypse Psychiatry Psychological Thriller Psychology Psychotherapy Publication Day Reading Rebecca Mascull Reflection Robert Harris Rose Tremain Russian Revolution sacred music Sadie Jones Sci-Fi Science and nature Scottish writer Second World War SF Shakespeare Short stories Simon Mawer Soapbox Spy thriller Susan Hill Tana French The Cold War The Natural World TV Drama Victorian set fiction Whimsy and Fantasy Fiction William Boyd World music review Writing Young Adult Fiction

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Lady Fancifull
    • Join 770 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Lady Fancifull
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

You must be logged in to post a comment.

    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
    %d bloggers like this: