This is an interview with Glenn Daniel Marcus author of Variations on a Noble Theme.
Glenn discusses his three loves, his love of literature, his love of music, and his love of The Enlightenment. The interview centers on how Glenn's loves of writing, music, and the rational view of man shape his novel.
The following is a link to his book Variations on a Noble Theme
https://glenndanielmarcus.com/
Happy listening and happy reading!
This is an interview with Glenn Daniel Marcus author of Variations on a Noble Theme.
Glenn discusses his three loves, his love of literature, his love of music, and his love of The Enlightenment. The interview centers on how Glenn's loves of writing, music, and the rational view of man shape his novel.
The following is a link to his book Variations on a Noble Theme
https://glenndanielmarcus.com/
Happy listening and happy reading!
Hi, you're listening to the One in the Many, and this is an interview with Glenn Daniel Marcus, author of Variations on a Noble Theme. Glenn, thank you for joining me and it's an honor to have you at One in the Many.
Speaker 2:Thank you, arsjeck, I'm so excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Oh, I share that excitement as well. I recently announced that I will have the interview with you on the occasion of your book Congratulations. I mentioned to my audience that I was fortunate to read the book last year and I want to thank you for that feeling that you generated in me while reading the book that I couldn't put it down. It was like not only a page turner but I was like fully emotionally engaged, and I haven't had that feeling for more than 30 years. So thank you so much for being able to generate that emotion in me while reading.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess your audience should know, Arsjeck, that. Well, thank you so much for saying that. That warms me. Can't begin to tell you. Your audience should know that we've known each other for more than 20, a little bit more than 25 years, right.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So everybody should know that. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you were my mentor back then and some of the Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I've brought up your name in interviews with Ron Pissaturo, that I had a series of them previously on the podcast, so some of the listeners will remember your name.
Speaker 2:And Ron is in the acknowledgments of my story, my novel. I call it my story. He's the second person in the acknowledgments after my wife, Nicola and Nicola Huntley. That's right.
Speaker 1:Well, that's great.
Speaker 2:My best friend. We've known each other. This September will be 56 years?
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, wow. Well, you don't look 56 years old. How is that possible?
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Whatever you're doing, keep doing it, you look great yes. Well, I guess that's something we can talk about actually down the line. But this is, it's important in a way that work doesn't make you keep young, but it has to be a certain type of work that you love and you are fully engaged with it and really energizes you. So the idea of writing a book it's a humongous effort and you have to be able to psychologically project down the road that you're going to be working for a long time, very hard.
Speaker 2:Can you talk about that a little bit?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sure, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
Speaker 1:I apologize if I interrupted you, no no, no, I think, because your title speaks to that as well. I mean, there will be variations, but the team is constant, the integrity is constant. What?
Speaker 2:happened to me is I didn't study literature much as a young person. Let me give a little history of that and then I'll talk about how my I call it my story because I'm telling a story. My story took over my life and it became my life's work. I never would have thought of that. So I have training in mathematics and engineering and been a college professor of mathematics and electrical engineering, but I really view myself as a teacher. And then my best friend, ron, who was interviewed by you many times. He decided in late 1970s and 1979 to start a private high school and I thought it was the greatest idea. It's going to be a wonderful thing to do with my life.
Speaker 2:I was in graduate school and the more I worked on the school the less I liked working on my dissertation, to the chagrin and ultimately frustration, and somewhat reasonably so of my thesis advisor. And I did finish my dissertation and chose to work on the school and I was the headmaster of the school and the chief educator. Ron was the founder and the CEO and when we didn't have enough teachers we were so small I had a kind of pinched teach and of course I taught some math classes and a little physics best as I knew how I know math a little better than I know physics. In 1987, 88, I taught English 11 regular not the honors class, but English 11 regular In room 11, I see it in my mind's eye. You walk up the stairs and it was on the right the room and I realized, wait a minute, I love teaching this subject more than any other subject I've taught. I'm so surprised. I love this because it's art and it's philosophy and action. Right, it's so beautiful. And we taught Shane for two months and the Scarlett Letter and some other things and Anthem by Ayn Rand, if I remember correctly.
Speaker 2:I'm pretty sure I did that and I fell in love in a deeper way than ever with literature and at some point I wrote a short story by hand. It's in my attic someplace. And then I wrote another thing and then I thought of this idea in 2005. I wrote a long short story and I kept working on it and working on it and working on it and it kept growing and growing and growing and it took over my life. I would get up in the morning, brush my teeth, wash my face, check the news, check my email and write Lunch, write Dinner after dinner, write Weekends, morning, day, night. Write Saturday, sunday, holiday, write we're on, take a trip. Take my laptop, write just all the time.
Speaker 2:Not only that, I lived my story wherever I went. I would be thinking about it as a way of life, almost like dual reality in a certain way. I had off the web. I got pictures of what I thought my characters looked like a little bit. I had on my screen pictures of people from that era Benjamin Franklin, george Washington and others. I had bus on my desk. I would read a little bit of Mozart's letters, like his letters to Haydn they're so beautiful. I would go listen to music in symphony halls and I would imagine myself in one of the venues of my story. In the first chapter I have one of the characters touch a wall of a symphony hall. I did that. I touched it and I remember how it felt. I was trying to concretize all the abstractions of my story. I just lived it, morning, noon and night. I lived with my characters.
Speaker 2:Now I don't call them characters, I call them personages. One of my two main teachers of literature is Aristotle. I dedicate the book to Aristotle. I consider him the greatest philosopher who ever lived and the greatest mind who ever lived. He's like my teacher. He reserved character from moral character. There's a Greek word that it means agent or personage. It's the people in the story. I call my characters my personages. It's more personal that way my wife and Ron, and my music teacher and the person I study body work and yoga with, leslie Kaminoff. We all call them personages. It's like they're my friends and I love them and they're real to me and I have to honor them. And so it became this Obsession is not the right word because that has a negative connotation but it became this passionate Life's work to write my story and honor and be noble, that my words are noble enough. I hope to do honor to my Personages. I think you do so. That's, that's um. That's how it got started and that's what I did for 18 years.
Speaker 1:Well, this is remarkable and I think listeners and viewers will notice how your mind works, even in an interview level, where you concretize, you visualize, and this comes through in the book even more powerfully, because readers are not used to that Explicit depiction. Without being the effort of the writing, the depiction it's, it's implicitly there, it doesn't bother you and you understand everything. You get everything, you get immersed into the picture of the depiction. You become part of the life, of the story and you do become a personage, you become one of the people in the story. You want to live with them the sorrow, the joy, the triumph, the disaster, and that's the emotion that the reader Gets and that's what I'm grateful To you to do. It would allow me.
Speaker 2:Let me get my my story. I would like to read this is to honor my teacher, aristotle. I have, after the All the intro things, the legal stuff, I have the dedication, which is in Greek and it's from the poetics, and I actually worked with an Aristotle scholar to Help me make sure that we translated it exactly correctly, and Different Aristotle scholars will disagree a little bit. There's optionality About exactly how to translate ancient Greek and I would ask it was Kerry, and beyond it, she's a, it was a professor of, of a philosophy and she's an Aristotle scholar. We danger Greek and I don't. She was very gracious with me, very patient and very gracious, very Aristotelian, and we, with her help, we looked at several different translations and I asked well, can I Say this part this way? Is that okay? And we would work together and I had even a little input into the translation. So let me read you the translation.
Speaker 2:At the time when he is constructing his plots and working out the proper diction, the poet should put the actual scenes as far as possible before his eyes. In this way, seeing these things most vividly, as if the actions were happening before him, he will discover what is appropriate and be least likely to overlook contradictions. Dot dot dot might went on a little bit more and Also, to the greatest extent of his power, the poet should even act his story With the very gestures of his personages. By poet he means the writer, right, the poet. I love that. I'm trying to be a poet, I'm not a poet. Aristotle poetics in the Becker number is 1455 a 2226. The Becker number, as you know, is for any translation tells you exactly where to look up the Aristotle quote, and that was my dedication to Aristotle and to try to live up to that. What you said is that I Try to not Tell the reader anything, but to show the reader, yes, the relevant facts and let them make the integrations, let them replicate the words into actual physical and maybe even Musical ways, and then they can Make the integrations that I want them to make. It's what I ran called slanted objectivity, that you want to be objective and only give facts, not tell the reader what to think or what to feel or what to conclude. You give facts, but the relevant facts, slanted from a certain perspective, literally slanted ultimately by the theme, by the theme, and Then the reader will make the integrations that the poet wants the reader to make and I had to live up to Aristotle and to Ein Rand, who was my other great teacher, and to my personages.
Speaker 2:And I, I Worked. It's my life's work, I wore it. It took my story, my story took everything, everything I had, and more it. It it demanded more of me cognitively, more of me literally, more of me musically and More of me morally for me to honor my personages. I love my personages and I. They're very demanding personages, and Rightfully so. And I had it.
Speaker 2:What is the modern vernacular? I had up my game, I had it took. I had to become a better person for me to honor my personages and I, every morning, I would try to rededicate myself to, to honoring them and and I would sometimes read my dedication. And I love Aristotle. I his bust is right here on my desk and it's on my other desk too, and I I Wouldn't say I loved every minute, because it was a struggle, but you can struggle. What did I? Ran say? You can struggle without suffering. And and I'm glad that I chose that as my life's work, it changed my life, it changed everything and I I'm glad I chose to do that. I'm very good, I chose to do that.
Speaker 1:I'm glad and grateful that you did that too, because and that I just wanted to emphasize this point because this is very important is that Presenting the facts it's perceived in modern culture as being dry and emotional, but presenting in the facts as as you present them, with the slanted objective, thematic.
Speaker 2:That's a term from iron Rand. Iron Rand explains that term in her masterpiece the art of fiction, which is a course she gave in her apartment in 1958, shortly after she finished her magnum opus, atlas shrugged, and she talked a lot about literary style. I read the art of fiction. I have a copy which is. I Read it many times, took notes, roll comments to myself. I read the poetics. I have notes from Aristotle, from his poetics. So I have, I've had Magnificent teachers and I try very hard. I try with everything I have, with all of whatever integrity I have, I try to be a good student.
Speaker 1:I'm glad that we are discussing this effort, that that there is an element of struggle in this. It's not. It doesn't come very easy right, it didn't come easy to me.
Speaker 2:I had not studied literature in school, I had not write written novels before, although I had the fortune I had that. I was fortunate that in the late 90s 1990s I gave a fiction reading seminar, my apartment, which you and your lovely wife Arman attended to, where we read aloud passages from. I ran the fountain head and all of that was shrugged, and all of anthem too, and boy did I learn a Tremendous amount. I mean I had studied on Rand, like I have studied some other novels. I've studied Shane In great depth. I read.
Speaker 2:A friend of mine, a Literature professor, a Shoshana Milgram, many years ago at the school gave me a copy of the of the, the, the literary criticism of Shane. I read it all and I taught it in at our high school Years ago in that in the class I taught. I did a little scene of it in acting class many years ago and I read it a lot. I know so much about Shane. He's such a magnificent writer, jack Schaefer. He does slanted objectivity beautifully, even though he may not have known the term. It's just magnificent, and I I Knew going in that this was going to be. Once I got in I said, oh, I need to just learn so much and I was willing to take whatever time I needed. I didn't have any. People would always say to me, when are you gonna be finished? And my answer is I'll be finished when my person to just say finished.
Speaker 1:Well, that reminds me of one of your personages in your story. I'm just saying that you have become one of your personages, right? You? You embody.
Speaker 2:About whom I'm like, because it's a little bit of a mystery, whom I'm like. I can talk about that. Would you like me to talk about the theme, because we talked about yes, we talked about variations on a noble theme. Well, every, every well-written story has a theme. It's the, it's the abstract meaning, it's the message, it's the integrating factor of the story. And the theme of my story is to achieve Udai mania, and I'll talk a little bit about what that means in a moment. One must lead a life of integrity. That's my theme. To achieve Udai mania, one must lead a life of integrity. Okay, yep. So what's it? What's who? Diamond a? Well, diamond a, is this all Encompassing joy in living, is all encompassing joy in living? It's a Greek word. It's not even completely translatable Today. Let's see if I can. I have where I work.
Speaker 2:I spoke with two Greek scholars about Udai-Menea, and with others as well, because I'm not a Greek scholar, and it could mean like human flourishing. Udai-menea, the ooo, means good or well, and Daimenea is like demon. It means soul. It means good soul, and Udai-Menea got taken over later by the Christians to view the pagans as devil worship and so it become like a demon. But it means good soul, it means you have this profound, all-encompassing joy in living, in your life, in every department of life. And, of course, the ancient Greeks, it's pre-Christian. There's no guilt, there's no sacrifice, it's they're so innocent by comparison and I'm talking about Christianity in its essential form not many Christians today, who are very noble people, I might say, and I admire many Christians, many Christians as well, because they have nobility and integrity. I'm talking about Christianity as a philosophy, you know, so that I make a distinction there.
Speaker 2:So how do you achieve Udai-Menea? Well, essentially through what's called arite, which is excellence, excellence in all things, especially excellence in thinking. And to be very precise, in my story I picked one virtue integrity, and I'm focusing on that. I'm going to laser beam on integrity and not to make any comparisons at all. But from my teacher, ayn Rand I say teacher in a metaphorical way, because I've read everything she's written and I've studied it and so forth. I don't claim any relationship to Ayn Rand, that's disrespectful to her. Her fountain head, the fountain head is all about independence. And I've studied the fountain and I said well, gee, let me write something about integrity, not in any way to make a comparison, but so that's the message that's the theme of my story is that and we know in reality, in order to be a happy, good person and have Udai-Menea, one has to be integrated.
Speaker 2:One has to display integrity right, to practice what you preach. Right To be consistent, to have the courage of your convictions. You can say this in a lot of different ways. Right, and at some point we can go into more depth about that. I wrote a lot of notes about integrity. I read Aristotle on integrity and Ayn Rand on integrity. I thought about integrity, I wrote on it and so forth in my own mind, and then, in a certain way, my characters are all variations on integrity. How much integrity do they have? How much do they want to have? If they don't have integrity, why not? What's the variation? On that? I say no more. No plot spoilers.
Speaker 1:Well, this is great.
Speaker 2:Well, that's see, this is an example. I had to learn about Udai-Menea. I had to learn about Arite. I had to learn about Megalith Tsuke being a great sold man. All of this from Aristotle right in the ancient Greeks. And I must say, it's not a plot spoiler. Certain personages do quote Aristotle in my story, yes they're allowed. I will just say that, without saying any more.
Speaker 1:In the same way that, so let me.
Speaker 2:My personages. Some of them understand and have studied Aristotle much more than I have. I'm rather ignorant compared to some of my personages and they're very gracious with me. They said that they would teach me and they understand that I don't have as much knowledge and wisdom as they have.
Speaker 1:Right, there is humor in your book as well. People should know that if they haven't got the sense of it already.
Speaker 2:But I have a little humor. You probably maybe saw more humor than I did. There is a little humor where the characters rib one another, like one personage he demands that another personage do something with him and he won't do something without the other one doing it with him. And the second personage says to the first I agree, you drive a hard bargain, and it's just they're ribbing one another because they all love one another so much that quote unquote the good guys, the heroes of the story.
Speaker 1:So in about the altar we learned that you love both fiction and music. So we kind of touched on the literature and the writing and the thinking behind the writing and all the dynamics of it. But what can you tell us about your inspirations in music, your love of music? How did that develop? How did you come to become music lover?
Speaker 2:I say in a quote myself, so I say it exactly right, then? Daniel Marcus has loved both fiction and music for as long as he can remember. So let me stop there and then we'll get to the other sentences there. Well, it started, I think, when I was six, in first grade I had Mrs Goodhart you can't make this up. Mrs Goodhart was at such a good heart, you can't make this up. It's true.
Speaker 2:I was in Mrs Goodhart's first grade class and we had music on Thursday afternoon at one o'clock. Now this is 1961 and I remember it like it was yesterday and I can hear Mrs Rabinowitz, the music teacher. I hear her before I see her because she's rolling her piano on wheels down the hall in PS 95 in the Bronx to come into our room to Mrs Goodhart's classroom to do music and we would sing, amongst other things, and I was a little excitable when I was six years old and I guess I would sing rather loudly. I had a very close relationship with Mrs Goodhart. I really loved Mrs Goodhart. She was this beautiful, kind person and I would be jumping up and down like this in my seat. I'm so excited by the music Because music does things to you right and I remember her putting her hands gently but firmly on my shoulders to keep me in my seat. And one time she said to me Glenn, you might consider singing a little less loudly, you're drowning out all the other students, all the other children. Oh, I'm so sorry, mrs Goodhart, I had no idea. So I meant it. I'd love music for as long as I can remember and I didn't get a lot of formal music training.
Speaker 2:And then we'll fast forward to 1984 or 1985. My best friend, ron. We're doing the school and Ron is studying acting. And Ron fell in love with acting. He's an actor now and a writer. He's written a screenplay and a stage play, edited my novel. I think he read my story front to back seven times, plus many, many, many conversations we had. He said Glenn, you should try acting, it's so much fun.
Speaker 2:So I went into acting class with the late Clifford David and this was a serious acting class. Clifford had been a professional actor, he was an actor, he'd been on Broadway, he sang on Broadway, he was in the movies. He did a scene in a movie with Lawrence Olivier and I hear his booming voice in class Like wow, I've never heard a voice like this. My goodness, this is enormous. It's such a beautiful voice. So I said, oh, I should have a better speaking voice. I'm just going to. I found out who his teacher was. The name was Miss Stephanie Scorby and I can't remember. I think I called her or I don't remember exactly, and in January of 1986, I went to have lessons with Stephanie Scorby to improve my speaking voice, because I'm a teacher. You want to project Right, and we started working and I fell in love with singing.
Speaker 2:I fell deeply, profoundly in love with singing and soon acting. I'm not a very good actor. I think I did some of the worst scenes in the history of acting classes in New York City. But to her credit, graciousness, stephanie Scorbite, she took me on as a student and I had no training. You know, learning music it's just like learning a foreign language. Little children can learn it. It's nothing like I know. Arshak, you speak Bulgarian, armenian, english and you now understand Russian right.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Okay, but I don't know about you. But if you and I went to Thailand with a four-year-old in two years, that four-year-old, speaking only English, would speak probably perfect Thai and I would barely be able to say very much with a very thick accent. I think your brain changes when you're around 12. And it's true for foreign language Anybody by and large approximately after 12, it won't be like a native language. It can't be right. Singed is true in music. It's.
Speaker 2:The saying in music is learn all the music you can before you're 12, because things change after you're 12. And I was started with Miss Scorpi when I was 31. So now I have to learn music painfully and slowly and differently than everyone else I have. I had one teacher. We used to tease him that English was his second language, that his native language was music Right, beautiful. So all of my music teachers are bilingual in English, maybe other things and music. So I started studying singing and I realized I needed to improve my music.
Speaker 2:And, long story short, I started working with a wonderful musician, maestro Ettinger. He's a classically trained conductor and a blues pianist and a double bass player and a pop singer and our lessons often would start at the common. I kiss him on the forehead, I say hello, maestro, and Maestro means master it's a respectful way of addressing a conductor or a great soloist like a pianist or violinist and he taught me so much about music. He loved music. He was so Maestro Ettinger, and then, when he left to become a professional juggler, he became one of the Karamazov brothers, and Nicola and my wife and I saw Maestro Ettinger perform as one of the Karamazov brothers near where I live in Fairfield County, and Maestro Ettinger wrote all the music for them. I asked Maestro Ettinger to help me find another teacher and he got me my current teacher, so Kyle Adams, whom I've been studying with for 25 years.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's great and Professor Adams also helped me so much with my story. He's in the acknowledgments, professor Adams, and much of what I know about music almost all of it I've learned from Maestro Ettinger and Professor Adams, and I guess you would call me a lyric baritone. My voice type is a baritone and now, with the help of Maestro Ettinger and for 25 years, I studied with Maestro Ettinger for seven years and with Professor Adams Kyle for 25 and a half years now. And Professor Adams, he's a music theorist and he's a professor at Indiana University and there is literally nothing I can't ask him about music that he will just start telling me about. And once in a while he needs to look something up or something really like. Once in a blue moon he'll say oh, let me ask my colleague so-and-so, he's a Brahms scholar or he's a Mozart scholar and I've learned so much from these great musicians and I now sing an aria by Verdi.
Speaker 2:I sing five pieces by Mozart. Wow, I sing three pieces, three arias by Puccini. I sing something by Handel. I'm going to learn something by Haydn, franz Joseph Haydn, whom I love so much Papa Haydn, they called him All in Italian and love it. And I do sing in English too. Now you heard me sing a little bit many years ago. You wanted a very few people. Who's heard?
Speaker 1:me sing.
Speaker 2:I made a New Year's resolution that people are going to hear me sing in 2024. Cool, I'm at. After now. It's been 36 years of studying for me to debut a little bit maybe in my apartment or we'll see but I'm going to sing a little bit.
Speaker 1:Or maybe do it.
Speaker 2:I work so hard on my music. It demands everything I have for me to honor Mozart as best as I know how, in Puccini and Verdi, and it's hard to describe what it's like for me. I have trouble. I don't really read music very well. I can't read treble clef at all, the main clef from most people. I read bass clef, which my music, my opera music, my arias are written in bass clef because I'm a baritone and I can read bass clef haltingly and my teachers say, glenn, don't worry about that, it doesn't matter, it's all good, don't worry about that. Some of the great opera singers couldn't really read music Itziopinza, maybe, pavarotti, michael Jackson I was told by a musician in Grand Central Station. I stopped listening to these young people playing in Grand Central Station in New York and I talked with him and the young man told me oh, don't worry, you can't read music. Michael Jackson couldn't read music either. So I love music, I love it. I love it with this overwhelming passion and it's so different than anything else and we can talk about that. It's so different than literature.
Speaker 2:I chose to integrate my love for literature. I always loved and I really realized this when I taught 11th grade literature, english literature 11R in 1986, 87. I realized that, even though my training is in mathematics and I can talk about why a little bit later, why I love literature and music so much, because they are art, they're fueled for the soul and I love them both. So, and I try to integrate my two loves with one more love in one story. So that's what I tried to do, I think with a lot of help, kyle. Oh, he helped so much. He read my story, oh, back to back, maybe four or five times in hundreds of emails.
Speaker 2:Kyle, what about this thing in music, how does this work? And this other thing, how does that work? And, oh, my goodness, can I say this sentence this way? Is this right? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. And he was so gracious and kind, because he's such a gracious and kind person and so knowledgeable, and so I'm very fortunate that my teachers in so many different departments and we can talk about that too a little bit my other editors and my teachers all had to go in, because I'm creating a whole universe, right? Yes?
Speaker 1:well. It's amazing how your passion for writing and music comes through and I really love the way you describe music with words and letters. And I'm not a musician, but I bet any musician reading your book will understand it Like they'll be able to hear the description in their head through the experience of whatever they've played, because that's a very accurate, in a way, description to them. To me, who is not a musician, I had to put a recording on to listen to.
Speaker 2:That's a wonderful thing to do, because you're what I always thought on. My teacher said you're putting the very actions before your eyes, the reader, the reader should do similar things to what the writer did, right, you should. What Ron explained to me in a paper that we wrote about reading fiction, theory and practice was concretize all the abstractions, replicate the concretes, every concrete replicate, put it before your eyes in some form so you can, as you said, live the story with the personages, right, yes, but I give credit, not a hallucination. It's as if you are one of them, experiencing what they are, or you're standing next to them, watching them, rooting for them and trying to figure out how to help them succeed or, in the case of the bad guys, how to overcome them.
Speaker 2:So, absolutely, and music is like that too. In music unlike literature, literature the first thing you do is you read, and it's thinking right, it's cognitive. And with music, the first thing you do is you fear and feel, yes, right. So it's very different and I had to do both. I did a lot of work. I have a huge Excel file with all of my thinking about all my topics. I listened to all kinds of music. We can talk about that. I have what my personages, my composers, what their music sounds like, a little bit from this composer, that composer and that composer, my personages who are performers. Who do they look like? I have pictures. Whom do they sound like? I have all of that to concretize it. Not that they look like anybody in particular, but I have three or four for all of that. So I did a lot of that. I would listen to music all the time and imagine, oh, that's so-and-so playing this so-and-so piece, sort of, and this is what this person sounds like and this is how they feel about the music, and absolutely.
Speaker 2:It's very interesting I was such a joy to do that, to listen to some of my most favorite musicians Vladimir Horowitz or Ezio Pinza or so many others Slava Rastropovich, the great cellist, and Gil Shaham, the great violinist, who live today playing. I've heard Gil Shaham play live multiple times. I've heard him play with his wife, who's a pianist. His wife is a violinist like he is. I've heard him play with his sister, who's a pianist. It's just magnificent.
Speaker 2:I've heard many times one of my favorite pianists, richard Goode, play. He's, I think, the leading interpreter of Beethoven in the world. I've heard him play Beethoven in Carnegie Hall. One of my teachers studied with Maestro Goode. I got to speak with Maestro Goode a little bit after one of his performances. For one or two minutes I could talk about one of the most important things I learned about music. I learned from Maestro Goode After he played a Beethoven piano sonata in the 92nd Street White. He came out to talk to his audience and I spoke to him very briefly about something he was so kind to me and then he turned to speak to a little girl and she said to him she must have been about 10. She said oh, who's your favorite composer? And Maestro Goode. He's this tremendous intellectual theorist about music. He studies music so much to then perform. Maestro Enger said to me every note that Maestro Goode plays is intelligent whatever that means.
Speaker 2:And then he turned to the little girl and he said this week it's Bach. In other words, it's okay to change your mind as you listen to music and you grow and you learn. I thought that was so beautiful. Yes, so I listened to so many of my favorite musicians. Pavarotti is my favorite lyric tenor. I listened to him all the time. At Opinza is my favorite bass. I listened to him. I listened to Leonard Warren and Dmitri Farristovsky we call him Dima, that's the nickname for Dmitri. He passed away a few years ago very sadly. He had a brain tumor.
Speaker 2:I listened to so many singers and musicians for my story and it made me a better musician. It was so wonderful to do that. Yes, maybe on the website I'm gonna put a lot of that, like this person who just sounds like this. I'm not sure, because I don't wanna prescribe to people what they should hear. I have to think about that. So you can ask me about the people I listen to, but I don't wanna prescribe to any reader what they should hear, and I don't expect musicians who are better than I am to hear what I hear. They're gonna hear more and different, and that's what I wonder.
Speaker 1:Right. I don't think you should prescribe that. I think the way you have it it's marvelous In. Another aspect of it is that the story itself it's a suspense story. So part of that suspense on the reader's part is to figure out who to listen to. Like my wife was listening to Rachmaninoff, I was listening to Vivaldi. So you know.
Speaker 2:And I would listen to lots of Mozart and Haydn.
Speaker 1:Right. So I mean, since I have you on the podcast and we're doing an interview, I'm delighted to learn who the authors, composers or performers are to listen to while he was writing. So this is delightful, but it's not a prescription for the reader. The reader will find their own sound.
Speaker 2:I listen to a lot because my story is set in the late 18th century, equivalent to the Haydnian classical period. I listened a lot to Haydn and to Mozart and to selected Beethoven. So for Beethoven I like his quieter, lyrical music. So the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata is very. I listened to that. Kyle and I studied that piece together. Kyle helped me understand the structure of it so I'd hear more.
Speaker 2:And it's in what I call the haunting key of C-sharp minor. The keys themselves have personality. Yes, some people even agree on the personalities. The flat keys for me are softer and quieter. And then C-sharp minor is this very dark, dark key. And the Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata is in C-sharp minor, if I remember correctly, and Chopin's posthumous, the posthumous nocturne, is in C-sharp minor. That was, if I remember correctly. I think that was played in the pianist, the movie, if I remember correctly. I might have it mixed up. And then I love the parallel major to C-sharp minor, which is D-flat major. I love that key and I gave that key to some of my personages to sing in because I warm up sometimes in D flat major. So there's a little bit of a personal Easter egg, they call it in my story and there's one inside joke that only three people are going to know, and that's myself. Nicola, my wife, and Kyle, my teacher, are going to know some inside joke which I'm not going to say. That's what.
Speaker 2:So I listened also a lot to singers, because I sing. I listened to lots of peborotti, I listened to Renata Tobaldi, probably my favorite soprano for her beautiful ringing voice. Um um Toscanini, the great 20th century conductor. He had Renata Tobaldi after the war, the Second World War. Renata Tobaldi sang at the, I think, the inaugural concert at La Scala, the famous opera house in Milan, in Italy.
Speaker 2:It was damaged, I think, in the war and in 1946, approximately they gave like the debut concert after they rebuilt it I think I don't remember all the details and Renata Tobaldi sang under Toscanini's baton and Toscanini called Harry, said that you vote shade the angel, a voice of an angel Right. And listened to Renata Tobaldi many times because one of my personages is a soprano and I have sopranos, I have baritones, I have mezzo, I have the altos and, like a mezzo-soprano, I have basso's bass, I have baritones. I have all kinds of singers in my story, yes, and so I had to listen to all of them to get it just right, what I thought I would hear when my baritone sings or my basso sings or my soprano sings, etc. Etc.
Speaker 2:So I had to make sure not to use the term mezzo-soprano because it was. It was that's, that's an anachronism, because that term wasn't used. So one of my, one of my music teachers said oh no, no, no. So we use the term alto, but that's just a detail. That's just a detail to get it music, to get it historically accurate. Except when I chose not to. All right, did I answer your question? I went on with a little soliloquy, yeah it's, it's fine.
Speaker 1:You know what. What I mean to that regard you reminded me of I was reading recently, um, the, I'm reading Will Durant's Life of Grease and in that section of the music he actually points out that you know, there's the Dorian music, gleedy music, uh, phrygian music, and they all have the. You know, one is like more march-like and dance-like for military purposes and another one is a soft and romantic and, um, and and and that even to these ancient people spoke to them that certain sound make you do certain things. Right. I mean, you were very excited at age six in your chair because of that music. You couldn't hold yourself right. And I remember when I was six and measuring music in so fast class, uh, like you want to speed up because you're excited, and she's like, no, no, no, no, keep the tempo. Oh, keep the tempo.
Speaker 2:Uh, it makes you, makes you feel, yes and um, that's the first thing you do is you hear and you feel, and then later you think about what you heard and what you felt. But it's immediate, it goes. What did I'm going to say? It bypasses your rational faculty and it goes right to your emotions and your body. It goes right to your body and you will see, well, popular musicians will move, and then rock musicians much more. They'll be moving all around and dancing and so forth.
Speaker 2:But you watch popular music, art musicians, what we call classical musicians they move too. They'll, they'll, they'll sway and they move, they have to and um, I think that's part of why I love music so much. It just immediately can make you feel something. So I know certain pieces that can make me feel certain things and I can just put the music on and then it's overlaid, as I talked earlier, that I lived my story for 18 years and I still do. It's overlaid that, oh, that's a piece that reminds me of this personage in my story doing this and oh, he's such a lovely person and I love him so much and I look up to him. He's such a hero. I want to be as heroic as he is, if I can, and so forth, yeah.
Speaker 1:So, um, I mean, we touched on on how your love of writing and music um kind of lives through, uh, how you live through in your story basically. But, as I mentioned, your story is suspense, it's it's very serious story actually and, um, it is very, um, you know, you hear the music. Yes, the music makes you move, but also injustice moves you in a similar way. Or justice moves you in a similar way when, when justice is served, you have a gut reaction, when, when there is injustice, you have a gut reaction. And that comes through in the story, that there is a connection between, uh, letters and notes, between ideas and actions, and it's very difficult for anybody to maintain that integrity of connection Absolutely and, um, um, so I wanted you to, if you will and could, talk a little more about this. How did you develop the suspense, like, how did you build up the suspense, um, in connection to your passion of writing and music?
Speaker 2:That was a struggle.
Speaker 2:That was a struggle so to concretize, and this is on my, in my story, um, I, I say this, I say it, um, the essence of my story is I can say it in one word and I know how to say it. I remember I walked around saying this I had stuff on the refrigerator, I had notes on the refrigerator. I worked hours and hours to get one page in Excel of everything I wanted to say about the story on the refrigerator. Okay, I had everywhere, my whole house, you know, I had busts of of all the people I admire Victor Hugo, shakespeare, aristotle, galileo, newton, benjamin Franklin, james Madison, thomas Jefferson, john Adams, you name it. All right.
Speaker 2:The essence of my story, what I remember we'll call the plot theme, the kernel of the story, is 18th century musicians defy the noble class to make music together. That's the essence of the story 18th century musicians defy the noble class to make music together. All right, so there you have some conflict. What I one of the many, many, many things I learned or tried to learn from In Rand is that when you write a novel, the serious writing begins only when you know the ending. You have to know the end and work backwards, like Aristotle's theory of final causation. You have to know the end. And then, and only really conscious beings, aristotle thought differently, but respectfully, I think he was mistaken. Even my teacher, aristotle, could be mistaken about certain things, but that's a detail. He was. What a hero. And it took me years. And what I realized later, the first number of years I was pre-writing, even though I wrote a short story and I wrote a lot at some point I said wait a minute, you know I'm stoking my subconscious and all that's all very nice. Now I have to walk away from that and be more conceptual, more analytical and more structure, like you have in music or in literature, and I love structure. I can get to that too, because that integrates my love for mathematics and philosophy and epistemology. I had to come up with the ending, the climax of the story, where the conflict comes to a head, what we call a climax, and it took a long time for me to engineer that, a long time to engineer that, and I had help from my team. I mean, it's my story, but I love that. I say make music together and I had people help. Now every word in this story is mine, is my responsibility, but I still, you know, I reached out for help from my musicians, from everybody I acknowledged and many other people as well. So it's eventually.
Speaker 2:I architected the most important scene, the climactic sequence. And then you work backwards, and then you go forwards, and then you go forwards and backwards all the time. Right, as in life. Right, you have to have a goal. You set your goal and that's what you're going for, right, or else you're going to be driving around and you go all around but you don't get anywhere, sort of right, you don't get anywhere that you want to go. So you have to have a goal, right, it's like driving your car to see a beloved friend. That's a simple example. But so, and then you use Aristotle's theory of final causation to enact that final cause.
Speaker 2:I have to work backwards and then start at the beginning and get there in an architected way, showing along the way, with a plot where every step depends on the previous steps, and I know that it's caused by the previous step and by the free will of my personages. They have to choose the next step, and I'm like the this is Van Goghly the God right Creating the universe, but at the end of the day, as Iron man explained, the universe is atheistic, I'm not in there, I just have my. I'm not there. It's the story and let the reader experience the world. And if I architected it, if I engineered it rigorously, objectively, correctly, in an integrated way, then I will have succeeded. And that's what I tried to do.
Speaker 2:And once I really had and it took me a long time to get see I didn't do that at the.
Speaker 2:I should have architected it in hindsight. At the beginning I didn't know enough to do that. It took me years of learning about my story, learning about how to write literature, learning about myself, learning more about music, till I could sit and work on the structure, and that was also a spiral. That was also. I went around and around, back and forth and back and forth, front to back, back to front, until I was said, okay, I have the structure and I have lots of notes on that, and then I could edit and make sure that I had what we call artistic integrity, that the story is one that it integrates into one integrated, consistent piece. Now to get back to the point you made about being difficult, I like what Norman Schwartzkoff said, something about that. Everybody knows what the right thing to do is doing. It is the hard part. He said something like that yes, better than he said it more eloquently than I remember. I wanted to talk just briefly about my third love.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, of course, please.
Speaker 2:And that's Glenn Dan. It's about the author. Glenn Daniel Marcus has loved both fiction and music for as long as he can remember and we talked about that. He chose to set a novel combining these two loves in the late 18th century because of his love for the rational worldview, the benevolent spirit and the beautiful music of the Enlightenment. I love the Enlightenment, the thinkers of the American Revolution, the great science that went on there Benjamin Franklin was a brilliant scientist the beautiful music of Haydn and Mozart and early Beethoven. The rational worldview.
Speaker 2:The American Revolution happened during the Enlightenment. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the forming of the finest country in history, the United States of America, and it was such a benevolent period. The beautiful music we talked about. But the people then were so optimistic because the Industrial Revolution had just started. So I mentioned in my story something about oh, I think I mentioned batteries that they're just starting to have a battery and people refer to, oh, the great science of Dr Franklin. He was called, and think of it.
Speaker 2:Everybody in that era would just thought that everything was going to get improved. The science was going to improve and the world was going to improve and the culture was going to improve and the music was so beautiful and the art was so beautiful the painting and that lends a kind of ambiance to my story, right, that everything is going to keep improving because humans can keep improving themselves and then in the world, and that's why I set the story in my fate. One of my two favorite periods, three favorite periods in history the Enlightenment, my other two being the age of reason, the Renaissance and the age of reason after that, and then ancient Greece, and some of my percentages are Greek scholars. They study Plato and Aristotle and read Greek poetry and Greek drama more than I ever, and they read in the original Greek they do better than they do and I just love doing that.
Speaker 2:I just love having my personages no more than I do. And they quote different philosophers and I know a little bit about philosophy and I had to read more and get the quotes just right and so forth. So suspense and no plot spoilers. But several philosophers are quoted and I try to make it dramatic that they should be quoted, not just somebody's making a speech, but it should come up organically in the story and I hope I did that. We'll see, that's for everybody to decide.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's because of the period.
Speaker 2:It's just a natural way of talking back then, and so therefore, I integrated, or I tried to integrate, my three of my loves, which is writing, fiction, music and this historical period, and I have my personages mentioned Dr Franklin and mentioned Thomas Jefferson and others, because these were historical people, people who were still living in this story. So I envy my personages a little bit that they live in that world and then I go into that world myself for joy and I appreciate the story myself. Sometimes I just get immersed, even when I was reading it. I would read it sometimes and just try to enjoy it, and it helped me think about whether it's good enough. If I'm not enjoying it, it's not good enough. So that's true, that's right.
Speaker 2:That's what I spent 18 years doing and I went into hibernation for 18 years and I've come out of hibernation finally and I'm hoping that I can find readers like you are Shaq Now. I do know you for many years. We didn't communicate much for some time and I think I made a mistake. I enjoy your company so much and just doing this interview with you reminds me of how much I admire you and how much I enjoy your company. And while we were preparing, just setting up the microphone and so forth, just before we started I said I'm going to spend more time with our Shaq.
Speaker 1:Yes, please, yes. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:I want to honor his having me on his show and the things you said about my story that are on my website. That made me warmed my spirit, warmed me in my soul, and I'm hoping to find readers of all kinds. But I'm hoping also to find readers who had the reaction like you did, and thank you I would. It will bring me a lot of joy that others can enjoy my personages and their story, their lives, the number of years of their lives, what we can call a plot, which is a technical term in literature. But it's just a story and I love telling stories.
Speaker 2:I think that's why I like being a teacher. That's what I've done for decades, and decades is being a teacher. As a teacher, I'm telling a story of its mathematics or engineering or financial engineering or any kind of engineering. I'm telling a story. That's what I do when I teach. We teach mathematics or it's actually to me it's a story because I love it and we can talk about that later, maybe another interview, if you would have me back. I would love to come back.
Speaker 1:It would be such an honor to come back.
Speaker 2:Oh, honor is mine please you can talk about how I view myself as an epistemological engineer and how, being an epistemological engineer, I like to build things, and so I built this story and I'm eventually going to build singing in public, if I can have enough courage to do that, because courage, as we know, is an aspect of integrity. So I promise myself, I'm going to sing in public.
Speaker 1:I'm looking forward to that, to hear that, and I just want to show you something that I think you're going to remember, but let me see if I can get it on camera. Hold on, okay. Yeah, you remember those.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Stick to the beans, right? Yeah, stick to the beans to the units, to the units yeah, I have them on my desk ever since you gave it to me when we were studying epistemology and philosophy and math, and literature, so that's a term that I learned from Ron, my best friend.
Speaker 2:I asked him a question about mathematics. I said, after I had my PhD, for about seven years I was writing something, a lecture or some mathematics to be read, and I was drawing a graph. And I paused and I pen paused in midair and I said, gee, what exactly is a graph? Exactly, exactly down to the root. So I went to Ron. I said, ron, what's a graph, do you know? I said I don't know about that, and out of that came a two-part article on the foundation of mathematics that I co-wrote with Ron, and it was basically. He did some work on the philosophy of mathematics, which I must say I think is very important and brilliant, and I helped a little bit. I asked the question that I did a little editing and maybe some writing of the first part.
Speaker 2:One of the things we talk about in that article is sticking to the units when you think, in other words, concretizing your abstractions, and it comes through when you're counting. It's sticking to the beans, you're counting beans, and so it's very lovely, arshak, that you remember that, and I'm so touched that you have that on your desk and we could talk about that next time, about why I like to think of myself as an epistemological engineer, that I'm engineering things, but not building bridges and so forth, or designing circuits, but building a story, or building a concert or a recital that I would like to give. So we can talk about that. Yeah, absolutely, building a course that I might teach at a university or in the private sector or in my home, right with you and others, where I'm building something. That's what people can learn and get knowledge and wisdom. So that's how I think of myself in another way. We can talk about that maybe another time. If you're willing to have me, I would love to come back. May I take you up and have me back.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, yeah, yeah, I'm the one taking you up. I'm going to hold you to it because you're going to be very busy soon.
Speaker 2:I'm going to hold you to it. You've shaken hands, is that right? Yeah, absolutely, all righty Well, take care, arshak. It was a joy speaking with you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. I appreciate your time, and wisdom and sharing your experience and, most of all, thank you for writing such a brilliant story.
Speaker 2:All right, take care, arshak, we'll speak again soon, okay, thank you.
Speaker 1:Have a great one.
Speaker 2:Thank you again, bye-bye.