My beloved writing mentor encouraged his students to leave campus once a week and sit in on the Monday night jazz concerts at the Kuumbwa Jazz center. He said that writers can learn from listening to old standards and what musicians do with them.
Well, I don't like jazz music, and I never got around to testing my potential appetite for jazz as a professional business expense. But I do like country blue grass music, and this blend of American and European folk music that I love is congruent with the kind of stories I write and the stories I like to read.
A good story is like a good string band. The ideal string band, in my opinion, has two fiddles, a banjo, a bass, a rhythm guitar, and the all-important female vocalist. I know this is not orthodox, but it's my favorite.
The two fiddles are the protagonist, sometimes playing with herself, sometimes split in two, or more than two parts, wondering about life. The banjo is the conflict to the protagonist. Fiddles are strings resonated in a wooden box. The banjo is tuned completely different, and its strings resonate over a drum: very different origins, very different method of sounding the strings. The banjo is plucked, and for the most part the fiddle is bowed. I've heard fiddle players who could play as many notes as a banjo player, but this is not the usual case, They sound best together, of all the instruments, although they are very different. Two voices making beautiful music.
The guitar has to be a rhythm guitar, for most of its apperance, and strummed. Sometimes the guitar can be plucked like a banjo, and the sound is completely different. In the best string band, guitar drives the plot along, it is the pacing of the story. The story has to deliver, in time, what it promises.
The bass is the element of the erotic. You can't have a story that's all bass, even if it's an "erotic" story. The bass is generally very boring, and very, very full of expectation. It should deliver everything it promises. If it's not there, you notice, and if it's there too much, or badly played, everything is wrecked. Not all stories have to actually depict sex acts, but they should have some hint. A good story has good sex in it just like life.
You noticed perhaps that I haven't mentioned the mandolin. I don't like mandolins. As far as I can tell they are tuned like a fiddle, and are morphologically like a fiddle, but not as versatile. Mandolins are made superfluous by the fiddles and banjo. Mandolins are just tools for showing off, as far as I'm concerned. I don't like stories that just show off either. If you want to show off, take it to your writing group. Don't perform it on a stage. I don?t like tricks. Mandolins are all style and flash, doing nothing that other instruments can't do better.
The vocals can be sung by anyone in the band, but they have to have at least one female voice. Maybe this is because I'm lesbian, what do you think?
String bands play old standards, they cover popular tunes, and they write originals. A good set has lots of songs with an A part and a B part, and maybe some solos, and improvisations, but then they come back and play the A part and then the B part and then the A part again for a big satisfying finish.
String bands are usually white people, at least in the region where I see music performed. I know there is influence of non-european cultures-- the banjo is African-American, for one. But I suspect that string bands play white people's music. This may be why many people don't like it. All the cool people listen to music from Africa-American culture, and I love that too, but I am white, and theress something to that even beyond the obvious. I'm a pagan too, but I avoid elements of Native American religious practices because they don't belong to me. Same with voodun, and santeria.
But European is what I am, and although the bass may not be as loud, the Europeans were just as mystic, just as estatic, and just as "roots"as any other indigenous people. They had a longer influence under European patriarchy, so it's hard to see it. And it's hard to see the coolest elements of our own culture, when everyone around you is seeking cultural expressions from far-off lands.
All that said, I'm not a musican. I'm a writer. So I take my cultural values and they inform my writing. They inform my reading. A good story, one that I read, or one that I am happy I have written, is like a string band.