Pageant of the Universe (at last!)

A while ago, I began an orchestral composition of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. The book is set up in a way that highlights thoughts, personalities, and the effects people have on one another. Through this composition, I had hoped to accomplish this interweaving, but I can’t say I’m entirely satisfied yet.

There was a lot of deleting. Especially at the opening. I knew I wanted the alto saxophone to start, with a rhythm close to the speaking of “I will buy the flowers myself.” However, I felt it sounded a bit empty, but the emptiness was necessary for the alto to be heard. Working out the intermingling between instruments was difficult due to the program’s lack of balance in its playback, so I had to cut many scenes that I wanted to delve into more, such as Richard Dalloway’s flower scene, Elizabeth Dalloway’s desire for freedom, and the group scenes (such as the skywriting incident, or Clarissa’s party). This is fun, though. I’ll keep writing until it’s done.

As it is, though, the piece opens with Clarissa Dalloway on alto saxophone. The rest of the instruments soon join in for the introduction as she walks down the street, finishing with a timpani roll. The trumpet starts the fanfare, leading into body of the piece.

Peter Walsh comes in first on tenor sax, with Clarissa joining soon after, since it seems that Peter appears in her mind before she consciously intends to think of him. Then the trumpet fanfare resumes, announcing the motor car, and everyone responds in a Gershwin-like fashion.

My interpretation focuses on admirable Hugh during the motor car scene (not true to the book, I know), and Septimus overhears him and responds. Hugh’s pompous tuba fades and Septimus trails off into his own world while Rezia counters, trying to pull him back.

Next, we enter Septimus’s world. The narrator starts, providing a backdrop before the doctors bring in the madness. Dr. Holmes ominously trods in on first trombone, and Septimus struggles to be heard. Big Ben beats three times, showing Septimus’s feeling that he’s running out of time. Following Septimus’s first outburst, Dr. Bradshaw enters, harsher than Holmes, and Septimus continues to wail. Big Ben returns. As both doctors gang up on him, the narrator joins to assist, but Septimus is too far gone. He branches into his own cadenza, symbolizing his feeling of hopelessness. His cadenza ends with a downward glissando, representative of his fall.

Big Ben beats once more (for Septimus’s time is up) and all characters release a brief cry of mourning. All but three instruments drop out--Clarissa, Rezia, and the narrator--creating the only dynamic effect I could accomplish. Rezia and the narrator fade, but Clarissa remains, connecting to the memory of a man she never knew. Septimus’s ghost supplements Clarissa’s introspections, and the trumpet announces the party. The mood shifts back to the joy of the beginning, and concludes.

Things I learned:

• Musescore automatically groups the notes as if in 3/4 time even though the piece is in 6/8. It is also strongly resistant to change.
•  Musescore’s playback feature doesn’t recognize drum rolls. So you have to expand it into endless sixty-fourth notes.
•  The only way to bring out an instrument’s part in the playback is to use less instruments. And don’t counter it with an oboe.
• The clarinet and alto saxophone sound strikingly similar.
• Dynamics and Rubato sections are arbitrary.
• Don’t attempt to change the tempo in the middle of the piece. It gets confused.

Maybe it would help to find real people to interpret the parts.

Instrumentalists:
Big Ben: Timpani
Clarissa Dalloway: Alto Saxophone
Peter Walsh: Tenor Saxophone
Richard Dalloway: Flute
Hugh Whitbread: Tuba
Elizabeth Dalloway: French Horn
Announcer (of things like limos, skywriters, parties): Trumpet
Septimus Warren-Smith: English Horn
Lucrezia Warren-Smith: Oboe
Dr. Holmes: Trombone 1
Dr. Bradshaw: Trombone 2
Narrator: Clarinet

Beauty, Magic, and Secrets: Rochester's Madness

Secrets may by nature be hidden, but their presence is hinted at in their surroundings. Often, even the best-contained secrets are tinted with an aura of discomfort and laughter. But sometimes it can be hard to determine whether the uncomfortable laughter it a signal of a secret or if it is simply there, perhaps magnified by a paranoid mind. The trouble becomes, then, that if you are not “in the know” about a secret, how can you be sure that there’s truly one there? This notion of potential secrecy, I believe, is what prompts Rochester into madness in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, as he attempts to make sense of his new environment in the midst of unexplained laughter and untold stories.

Rochester is severely disoriented in Granbois. Although it is naturally beautiful, its vivid colors are surreal and intimidating in their contrast to industrial England. The unknown is suffocating and the beauty blinding.

"On one side the wall of green, on the other a steep drop to the ravine below. We pulled up and looked at the hills, the mountains and the blue-green sea. There was a soft warm wind blowing but I understood why the porter had called it a wild place. Not only wild but menacing. Those hills would close in on you. […] Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger."

Rochester never settles into the land, though. Rather, he becomes convinced that there is something behind it all that he cannot grasp, but everyone around him has. “It was a beautiful place – wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I’d find myself thinking, ‘What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing.'" The most ambiguous part is that Rhys never reveals what exactly Rochester suspected the secret was, or even if a magical secret did in fact exist. Therefore it’s hard to judge Rochester as coping with unfamiliarity with paranoia versus being legitimately concerned about something in the atmosphere.

Even more, Rochester begins to associate the secrecy with Antoinette. “She trusted them and I did not," he remarks about her relationship with the people. This observation implies that Rochester senses that Antoinette understands something he is not privy to, which adds to—or perhaps results from—his feelings of alienation as the lone Englishman. It seems to Rochester that Antoinette is more closely aligned with the people there than she is with him—a feeling that causes him to envelop her into his interpretation of secrecy. Coupled with the fact that he barely knows her, Rochester drives himself mad imagining the secrets she may hide.

For this reason, Rochester feels affirmed by Daniel Cosway’s letter, which revealed bits of Antoinette’s past that Rochester hadn’t known before. “I felt no surprise,” he says. “It was if I’d expected it." After spending so much time being anxious, he was almost glad to know that his delusions were valid. But as the laughter of the servants—and even Antoinette herself—continues, his world becomes even more elusive. The most notable hint at the motives behind the laughter is given by Amelie, who laughs often. “Like Hilda she put her hand over her mouth as though she could not stop herself from laughing and walked away. Then turned and said in a very low voice, ‘I am sorry for you.’ ‘What did you say?’ ‘I don’t say nothing, master.'" I think this added mystery is what ultimately prompted Rochester to seek out Daniel Cosway. At the end of his visit with him, Daniel remarks about Antoinette,

"They fool you well about that girl. She look you straight in the eye and talk sweet talk – and it’s lies she tell you. Lies. Her mother was so. They say she worse than her mother, and she hardly more than a child. Must be you deaf you don’t hear people laughing when you marry her. Don’t waste your anger on me, sir. It’s not I fool you, it’s I wish to open your eyes."

When Antoinette tells her story for herself, Rochester still has this conversation in mind and remains unsure about what to believe. Thus the mysteries of the land become the mysteries of Antoinette.

Finally, Rochester goes mad with the notion of secrecy. The ambiguous nature of laughter causes him to worry so much that he becomes angry, and the way he speaks in his possessive anger towards the end of Part Two illustrates his insanity.

"So I shall never understand why, suddenly, bewilderingly, I was certain that everything I had imagined to be true was false. False. Only the magic and the dream are true - all the rest’s a lie. Let it go. Here is the secret. Here.
(But it is lost, that secret, and those who know it cannot tell it.)
Not lost. I had found it in a hidden place and I’d keep it, hold it fast. As I’d hold her."

The madness comes from his lack of control. Rochester’s prideful desire to be on top is thrown to the ground by foreign laughter. So he goes mad trying to regain control, leading to him renaming his wife to recreate her personality, and, when that fails to satisfy, locking her away in the attic for eternity.

"I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it. [...]
Very soon she’ll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot."

Rochester’s lack of ability to discover this potential secret of the land leads to his own insanity, as his confusion transforms into hatred and he strives to maintain power. I think Jean Rhys’s novel revolves around secrets that cannot be touched and the ambiguity of knowledge. While the novel hints toward Antoinette’s insanity, it is impossible to hold down whether it was caused by her secrets or by Rochester’s perception of secrets. But even as he pushes Antoinette into an isolated insanity, Rochester pushes himself into a madness of his own.