Praise

Published in Classical Music Daily (UK)
BEAUTIFULLY ARTICULATED
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JEFFREY NEIL finds, in Gillian Wills' novel 'Big Music', a drama that entertains, instructs, and makes you laugh

In Australian writer Gillian Wills' novel Big Music, we get to experience the all-engrossing politics at a music school in Brisbane, where big egos clash in the pursuit of prestige or simply to exercise their right to be dysfunctional. For anybody who has spent more than the recommended time limit in academia, Wills' novel will jolt you back to tactless confrontations between professors with low EQ scores; woefully inappropriate affairs; and vindictiveness paraded around as virtue. However, she mitigates what could have been unremitting shop talk by intertwining the story of a dying marriage and a budding romance. The writing is at its best when Wills pairs an experience in the life of her heroine with a musical reference. Whether incorporating music by Rachmaninov or David Bowie, Wills elevates her beautifully articulated musical descriptions by finding just the right moment for them. The music does not simply create the mood, but also expands and enriches the story.

Gillian Wills: Big Music
Gillian Wills: Big Music

The novel opens up with 'Performance', the first chapter in which Beatrice Snow, also known as Beat, is on a surreal bus ride to a competition with her students from Turalong Arts Music School. The chapter strikes a balance between lush descriptions and dialogue, plot-driven drama and reflection. For someone with a curiosity about the Antipodes, not just 'big music', Wills does not disappoint: traveling by bus to the concert, they pass 'a yard jammed with rusty cars, dismembered machinery, and a solitary goat. Farmland studded with pale brahman cattle silvered in the harsh light ... crows tearing furry strips off a rotting kangaroo carcass on the lip of the road'. A young cellist comically must persuade a leery bus driver to let her carry her two hundred year-old, on-loan instrument on board with her. The chapter presents the eccentricity of musicians set against the comic banality of the world, all the while not tipping into the absurd.

That is not, however, always the case, as the novel plows deeper into the travails - and sometimes the burlesque - of the newly appointed music school dean. Beat has a deadbeat husband interminably working on his 'dissertation'. When she is not herding students or corralling faculty, she lives on a farm with her beloved horses and dogs. But, mainly Beat is about her 'job': she is in her early thirties, talented but insecure, attractive but unceasingly mocked for not making herself up. She is a pianist, but she has not played in public for years. The diminutive 'Beat' captures her persona as naive, closer in age to her students than many of the faculty over whom she has authority - at least in theory. We witness her slow and painful, partial transformation, while colliding against one ego after another, getting snubbed and openly derided, and weathering what seems to be an endless series of debacles in her professional and personal life. Wills portrays Beat as sisyphean in her attempts to please or placate, but at other times she works up a sense of defiance. Regardless of which face we see, it seems her honest work to either take modern music out of the basement, bring the faculty together, confront gender bias, or attract real audiences to mixed-genre concerts with world class talent, is sabotaged, misconstrued, or just put down.

There are some memorable descriptions of performing, conducting, playing, or simply imagining music entering a scene. When they aren't politicking, the large ensemble of characters play music. There is a moment early on, for example, when teen prodigy Georgy misses her cue to play the piano, while wrenching off her shoes in front of the audience. The orchestra conductor Garrett Blue - did I mention every character has a cool name? - holds 'the silence in his upraised arms, like Atlas holding up the world'. The fantastic descriptions of music are not reserved only for explicit scenes of musical production. Shortly thereafter, the rekindling of intimacy between Beat, who 'longed for intimacy', and her husband is described in the language of music: 'lost in the familiarity, the certainty of the home key, awakening, modulating, a percolating urgency rising to a crest, the caress of retreating waves'. After this relationship has unraveled, Mendelssohn adds a stormy Romantic element to - of all things - a conversation between Beatrice and her lawyer: 'The ebb and flow of Mendelssohn's surging swells heightened, the spume of salty foam reaching for the sky.'

The novel is a bit of an education - or rather, an Almodovarian mala educación - for the reader about music school, or at least this music school: students are alternately coddled and belittled, or simply left to the wolves. Simon has an operatic meltdown - a psychotic break - which we later find out was induced by drugs sold to him ... by a teacher. Even though faculty may clash, we discover that doesn't mean they don't play well together. Musicians stand each other up, row ostentatiously, miss cues, and yet produce expressive, soulful music together - in spite of themselves. Wills hammers this point, and it does indeed seem miraculous when we read about these moments of imperfect, but expressive, clarity or soulful improvisation:

The audience was confused as Matthew skittered on, a driver without a car. Seething, Beat rebelled against the classical world's precious rules and perfectionism. Lifting her arms for maximum impact, she slammed them onto the keys with the force of a felled tree. She pinned the sustaining pedal down, and the beefy resonance of random tones drowned out the violin. Shock shadowed Matthew's face when Beat's fingers channeled Down Under and the fickle crowd happily belted Men at Work's tongue-in-cheek anthem. Her intervention had been empowering ...

I particularly liked the well-placed bits of musical history (and wished there were more of them) as in the explanation of César Franck's 'Sonata' having been only briefly rehearsed before being performed by the composer himself preceding Beat's own ten-minute run-through of that piece with a colleague.

Wills' ability to capture sensory experience is not limited to sound. The descriptions of fashion, interior design, and even olfactory pleasures are lovely. Before Beat's colleague Connor takes out his viola and applies rosin to bow, we get to inhale his Imperial Leather soap with its 'higher register of lavender and lemon fragrances, middle notes of patchouli and geranium, and bass of musk and vanilla ... like a three-part harmony'.

Big Music features a very large ensemble of characters, and it is sometimes hard to keep them straight in spite of their unforgettable names. Wills has a Dickensian knack for smacking an apropos name to a character, as in, to cite just a few, the Machiavellian Marilyn Thorne, the snarky Rock Stream professor Winton, Polly the assistant with her parrot-like, irritating interjections, and, of course, Beat herself (misses a beat, off-beat, setting the beat, etc).

However distinct the characters' personalities, they all speak with a similar staccato wit. Wills could have been more economical with the snappy banter, because it starts to feel artificial. How can everybody be so unflaggingly clever, so flawless in timing a slight, so rapid-fire at punning, and never missing a beat to lodge a double-entendre? I found myself doubting the realism of these confrontational, devastating comments, as when a very minor character, the Major, denigrates Beat at a high-level meeting:

Beatrice, you're gorgeous ... ah hem ... if in need of a fashion consultant ... but since we're talking brass tacks, dearie, I'd say you're unsuited to a position where leadership and rational argument is essential.

While it's true this sort of barbaric display does now take place in the American Oval Office, it's hard to imagine it in the somewhat more civilized setting of a university council meeting. The second half of the novel is particularly stacked with dialogue - not always well-marked - and so I often had to count back lines to figure out who was saying what. The problem with this, too, is that the banter takes over completely - and we are left with little of the depth that must come through passages of reflection or even just exposition. Indeed, the chapters often end on the sharp note of somebody's barb or the cliffhanger of an unanswered question or opaque comment. There is little by way of synthesis or exploration of what is going on inside of our heroine.

The greatest flaw in the novel has to do with plotting. There are a number of Deus-ex-Machina contrivances - moments when a person or event seemingly comes out of nowhere and radically shifts the trajectory of the plot. One of these occurs when Dan makes a major decision that has a seismic effect on Beat's personal life and work. There is little to prepare the reader for how it happens. Likewise, Wills parodies the Brontë Sisters or Austen when (and I won't give this away) a major character turns out to have hidden his substantial fortune, even as he feigns penury to sponge off his romantic partners. It impacts the plot greatly and is glaring in its artifice. Finally, when we discover Beat's own desire for one of her colleagues - 'I like, I mean, I really like him' - it is as much of a surprise to us as to her interlocutor.

For professional musicians and academics, Gillian Wills stirs up a drama to reflect memories of the pettiness and the grandeur of life inside a music school. For the rest of us, it is an education, running through a repertoire of classical and popular music and finding a home for it in a drama that entertains, instructs, and makes you laugh.

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Gillian Wills' novel Big Music was published by Hawkeye Publishing Pty Ltd in October 2024 and is also available from Apple Books.

There are more articles here about fiction, classical music books, music education, Brisbane and Australia.

The background image on this page has been derived from a 2014 photograph of a view along the West MacDonnell Ranges from Counts Point on the Larapinta Trail in central Australia.

Jeffrey Neil is a lecturer for the Bay Area Writing Project at the University of California's Berkeley School of Education. He holds a BA from Yale University, an MPhil from King's College, Cambridge, and a PhD from UC Berkeley. His writing on music includes Tristan und Isolde's arias, Spanish Golden Age songs in Cervantes' plays and a forthcoming piece on the sound of radio jingles in 1930s Hollywood films. He studied voice with Jonathan Nadel.

– Jeffrey Neil Jeffrey Neil is a lecturer for the Bay Area Writing Project at the University of California's Berkeley School of Education. He holds a BA from Yale University, an MPhil from King's College, Cambridge, and a PhD from UC Berkeley. His writing on music includes Tristan und Isolde's arias, Spanish Golden Age songs in Cervantes' plays and a forthcoming piece on the sound of radio jingles in 1930s Hollywood films. He studied voice with Jonathan Nadel.