A Book of Architecture and Other Music
I’d heard it first: a reedy melody slicing through the discord that emanated from the rubble. Zeroing in, I scouted its source, ignoring the crunch of my metal feet on cracked concrete. The city’s remains seemed to sag under the setting sun, as if it knew its people had left.
Fathoms in the Earth is an intriguing project by Air and Nothingness Press where twenty-four authors reinterpreted the archetypal characters from Shakespeare's The Tempest in new contexts, with titles taken from Prospero's Books by Peter Greenaway.
I might have originally read The Tempest as a teenager; it had been very long time ago, and I remember being fascinated by its magical setting. When I read this play again to write for this anthology, I knew I wanted to take the viewpoint of Caliban, and explore his love for his land which had been unjustly taken from him.
My story in this anthology is called A Book of Architecture and Other Music. As a musician trained in Western classical music and someone who has worked in the design profession, this title spoke to me in more ways than one.
The notion of architecture as "petrified" or "frozen" music has commonly been attributed to Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe. (Though the longer quote "Music is liquid architecture and Architecture is frozen music" may have been a later embellishment, possibly by someone else.) There were so many ways I had been initially inspired to explore this prompt—at one point, I even entertained writing actual music for the story to be printed with it. I was intrigued by Tom Glynn's TEDx talk where he elaborated how similar vocabulary exists in both architecture and music and how they are expressed in sound as well as in structure. In the end, the tension of reading this particular work through a modern lens, meshed with my sentiments on the state of current affairs won out. I hope you'll enjoy meeting the cyborg CLBN who sings to rubble to rebuild a destroyed city.
This anthology was edited by Todd Sanders with stories by Rose Biggin, Elou Carroll, C.S.E. Cooney, Marie Croke, Jane Doring, Gabriel Ertsgaard, Sharmon Gazaway, Mary Goodden, Isobel Granby, Paula Hammond, Rebecca Hardy, David Harlan, Beatrice Winifred Iker, Jamie Lackey, Dexter McLeod, Mike Morgan, Marshall J. Moore, Kara Race-Moore, Jude Reid, Alexandra Seidel, R.L. Summerling, Ana Sun, A. B. Treadwell, and Lucy Zhang.