Atonal music is an acquired taste. One, I admit, I never quite acquired. Even the name of it makes me cock my head in wonder. Music is rhythm, harmony and melody. If you take “tone” out of it… well, you have rhythm. Which, isn’t actually the definition of atonal music, but the lack of audible structure to it never settles in my ear, in my soul.
Back in college (way back, way way back, further than some of you have been tapping your feet to music), I had to write a piece of atonal music for my music theory class. Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, or twelve-tone serialism, or “god, what IS that?” sound. It’s mathematic. Structured. Set up to be an even distribution of all twelve tones in a musical scale–including chromatics.
Like my character Emmett, I am a mathematic type of musician. Give me a piece of music and I’ll make it my own. Toby is the composer, taking notes from the air, from his soul and mixing them together into something beautiful. Emmett prefers a script; Toby likes to improvise. So, I saw this mathematic assignment as something I could tackle since composition in and of itself was not something I excelled at.
I took my rules, my charts, my piano and a notebook of manuscript and got to work. I called it Daddy’s Hands because I have always loved my father’s hands and imagined what they might look like if he were a pianist. It was…. bad. So terrifically bad. And I got an “A” because I followed the rules and the structure and go Lynn!
To my ears, music isn’t math. But some love it. Toby’s friend Malik most definitely does not. And as for Toby, well–he prefers to use it as a ring tone that cannot be ignored.
Cacophonous piano chords clanged through the small space, and Malik groaned. “What the hell is that? I’ve been hearing it all day.”
“My phone.”
“Answer it maybe? Who puts that ugly shit as their ringtone?”
The atonal Schoenberg piano concerto finally stopped, and Tobias shoved a stack of papers into the trash. He looked up at Malik and grinned. “I put that ugly shit as my ringtone so I will answer it and make the ugly shit stop.”
Black Dust is now available for pre-order from Interlude Press. For my readers in US and Canada, if you order before May 7, you will get a free e-book package, using the code BLACKDUST.
“I never expected you to be.” Emmett’s gaze was like fire through Tobias’s skin. “I’m not that boy anymore either.” 
I grew up in a home filled with music. If it wasn’t a record player spinning (oh god, I’m about to age myself) James Taylor and Carole King, The Beatles and Neil Diamond, it was my mother sitting in the back bedroom of our house playing those same songs on the piano. Songs from church, from the radio, from Mom and Dad’s youth, and from Broadway. Dad sang along in his beautiful, rich baritone. I loved singing along, learning the words. When I got older and was left home alone after school, I would make a stage of our eat-in kitchen and its enormous picture window and put on shows with neighbors and babysitters alike. “You be Donny; I’m Marie,” or “You can be Tony; I’m Dawn. Both of them.”
those unexpected intervals that made rehearsals such a drag because my god our ears and voices would not cooperate and make it right. You’ll see those in Black Dust because for this author, they were my favorite times.
Their dedication to their craft can run along the lines of obsession. In Chef’s Table we often see Evan at home, fussing and stewing (I should apologize for the pun) over old recipes from his youth or new ones he is perfecting. And in Black Dust you will witness our itinerant pianist sitting down to his keyboard at every chance, to deepen a conversation, to manipulate the man he loves, to find the places in his heart that have been hidden away. And all the while, he’s whittling down to the core of the music that is inside of him.
oundations of rhythm, harmony and melody, those improvisational trials would end up in cacophony. Even in his improvisational way of life in Black Dust, Toby has to learn to rely on the realities around him and of his past to improv his way back into Emmett’s life. It’s a theme of the book: Toby prefers to improvise; Emmett needs a script and a score. Emmett is organization of sound and Toby is the creative soar of art and together… well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.
