Maria Savva's Blog - Posts Tagged "classical-music"

Thomma Lyn Grindstaff, is a talented author and also a gifted musician. I met her a while ago on BestsellerBound.com, and had no idea that as well as writing some great fantasy novels and stories, she has also composed some fabulous music. Recently, I heard about the release of her first album Womanspirit Rising and being a music lover, I decided to download it. I am so glad I did. The music on Thomma's album is beautiful. After listening to the album, I was keen to introduce her to all of you.




Here's my interview with Thomma:


As you write classical music, I've always wondered about the thought process behind giving the tunes a title. How do you come up with titles for your tunes, or do you come up with the titles or theme first and then write the tune around that?

That's a great question, Maria! I do think of my music as classical/neoclassical, but many of my compositions double as instrumentals and as songs. That means it can go either way. Sometimes I think of a title or theme first, and then the music comes to me based on that. Sometimes I'll put lyrics to the music once it's written. Other times, I'll write poetry / song lyrics first, then compose music for the lyrics. When I read poetry, I often hear music to fit its cadences, and when I do that with my own poems, they become song lyrics.

You have quite a few cats. I love cats and I know that many of my blog followers do too, Can you tell us a bit more about yours?

Hubby and I have four cats, all rescues, collectively known as the Ballicai. Why Ballicai? Well, the first cat who came to us we named Brainball, since he's a fuzzball with eyes -- a big, floofy, orange boy. Next came Dorydoo, a petite, sleek black cat whom we nicknamed Blackball. Brainball and Blackball -- a "Ball" theme, and that morphed into "The Ballicai." After Dorydoo came to us, a lovely, odd-eyed white cat showed up as a stray on our back porch. We named her Marilyn MonREOW and nicknamed her Eyeball. Our fourth Ballicus, a Snowshoe Siamese boy, also came to us as a stray. We named him MaoMao, since that's how he introduced himself to us: with a loud "MAO." His nickname is, of course, Maoball. Brainball and Marilyn are our two Venerable Ballicai, both of them around 15-17 years old. Dorydoo is going on eight years old, and MaoMao is going on six. Brainball is our Gentle Giant and Benevolent Alpha Cat, while Dorydoo is our intense kitty genius (if she had opposable thumbs, she'd take over the world). Marilyn MonREOW is a lapcat and love bug, while MaoMao is our comic (Charlie Chaplin in a cat suit).





Have any of your cats ever inspired a piece of music or a story?

Oh, yeah. One of my songs, "Lion Boy" (which I plan to include on my third album), was inspired by and written for Brainball, our big Alpha Cat. Collectively, the Ballicai all inspired Misty Laurel's love of cats in my novel Heart's Chalice (in that novel, there are two very interesting feline characters). MaoMao makes a cameo in my novel Patchwork Stained Glass. The heroine of Mirror Blue, another of my novels, also has cats, who are loosely based on Brainball and on a neighbor's kitty who sometimes visits our back porch.

Which came first writing fiction, or writing music?

When I was very young, maybe about three years old, I taught myself to read and to play piano by ear. Writing stories and writing music followed shortly thereafter. So I can't really remember which came first, but I do recall my mom telling me that I was singing before I was talking.

If you could choose any venue in the world to perform your music where would you choose, and why?

Madison Square Garden. That would be just plain cool. :) Or maybe Carnegie Hall, since it's such a gorgeous concert venue and, from what I hear, so acoustically perfect for performances.

When you finish a piece of music who is usually the first person to hear it?


My husband. We've been married for going
on sixteen years, and whenever I compose a new piece of music, I play it for him to get his impressions. Now that I have my digital piano and can record directly to a flash drive, I save arranged versions of my pieces, and he's the first person to hear those, also. He's always been wonderfully enthusiastic and supportive of my music goals and dreams.

Do you have a favourite song or classical tune?

Oh my goodness, I could write an endless list for this question. There are so many songs and classical pieces I love. I adore Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Chopin, Brahms, Vivaldi, and Tchaikovsky. I also adore Kate Bush, Led Zeppelin, Tori Amos, Peter Gabriel, Enya, Loreena McKennitt, Patti Smith, the Alan Parsons Project, Trent Reznor, and Jethro Tull. The composition standing out in my mind right now, though, is Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, played by my favorite-ever concert pianist, Sviatoslav Richter.

What bands/composers were your favourites when you were growing up and have any of them influenced your style?

The classical masters cited above were all major influences -- both listening to their works and playing them myself. Other influences while I was growing up were quite diverse: Led Zeppelin, Kate Bush, and George Winston all come to mind. I'd have to say that my style was influenced the most by classical music, since as a child and a teenager I studied with a wonderful teacher (a professor at the University of Tennessee), I and played various works of Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and contemporary composers. Other music influenced me as well, whether classic rock or new age.

Which classical composer would you like your music to be compared to?

I'd have to say Ludwig van Beethoven. The emotional range and intensity of his compositions is simply mind-blowing.




I have read your short story, Deadfalls, and really enjoyed it. It's a fantasy tale. Do you only write fantasy, or have you written other genres?

As an author, I consider myself a genre-buster. My debut novel,Mirror Blue, is women's fiction and is marketed by its publisher, Black Lyon, as a Literary Love Story. Heart's Chalice, one of my indie-published novels, is magical realism, while Patchwork Stained Glass, my other indie-published novel, is mainstream fiction -- perhaps book club fiction -- and quite philosophical in nature. "The Saddle of Private Lucius Gray," another short story, is literary fiction.

I enjoyed your short story collection, Ripples. I understand it is based on characters from your novel Heart's Chalice. That's a very interesting concept and perhaps one that other authors would have fun with, working with their own characters. What inspired that?



A good friend of mine encouraged me to try my hand at writing flash fiction. Up until that point, I had mainly written long tales. I had such a good time writing the flash fiction that I started regularly participating in flash fiction weekly challenges. I'd still be doing that if I weren't so busy! ;) At the time my friend encouraged me to try flash fiction, I was writing the first draft of Heart's Chalice, so I used the flash fiction as a means by which to get to know my characters better and explore their lives in timelines that lay outside the scope of the novel.

Misty Laurel, one of the characters in Heart's Chalice, has second sight. Have you ever had any premonitions?

One thing that stands out in my mind was when a great uncle of mine died. I'd dreamed of him just the night before the very morning he died, even though by that time, I hadn't seen him in ten years. An interesting experience, to be sure.

I must find time to read your longer works. Tell us a bit more about those.

Mirror Blue is a May-December love story. At a book signing event, Aphra meets Isaac, the author she's idolized since her teenage years. He's twenty years her senior. She winds up redesigning his web site, and the two of them fall in love. From the beginning, it seems everything is against them. Isaac's ex-wife decides she wants back in his life and wants Aphra out of the way. Isaac's son naturally wants his parents back together, so Aphra feels, more and more, that this relationship simply cannot work out. Mirror Blue is a story of love faced with tremendous obstacles and what happens when people's greatest enemies to love and happiness aren't even other people per se but themselves and their own preconceptions.




Heart's Chalice is a wild, woolly magical realism ride. The tagline I use for the story is "Destiny rarely gives a woman a second chance at love, especially not with a man who died twenty years ago." Misty Laurel -- who goes by Laurel -- misinterpreted a vision when she was eighteen, and her first and only love, Nate, died as a result. Now, twenty years later, she finds herself pulled to an alternate reality in which he lives and they have two children, but a reality in which she has died. The story of Heart's Chalice is how Laurel -- in one reality -- and Nate -- in another reality -- try to bring their two worlds together to get a second chance to share their lives and have a family together. And the pressure is on in both realities. One of Nate and Laurel's children, in Nate's reality, is clinically depressed and has attempted suicide. And in Laurel's reality, she has an estranged, soon-to-be ex husband who's a fanatic and control freak and is, as he's faced with losing control over Laurel, becoming increasingly deranged. It's a dark and edgy story, to be sure, and it asks the question, how much would you do, how much suffering and hardship would you endure, if you had lost the love of your life and got a second chance to be with him/her?




Patchwork Stained Glass is a story that asks the question, "Can love and friendship triumph over differences in ideology?" Romilly, a college student and atheist, falls in love with Ernest, who is not only the graduate instructor of her Comparative Religion class but also a preacher in a little country church. Though Romilly and Ernest share common ground in that they are both open-minded and tolerant, the people around them are less so. Ernest's family think Romilly is a heathen in need of salvation, and Romilly's friends think Ernest is out to convert her. Tensions mount and nearly tear them apart. When Ernest is diagnosed with a chronic disease that threatens his life, labels become less important, but has their mutual awakening come too late? The story explores how people of different philosophies can come together to find common ground whether in friendship and in love, and what happens when they allow rigidity and intolerance to divide them.



Who are your favourite authors and what do you like about their writing?

Oh, there are so many. :) Let's see if I can limit myself (there again, as with music, I could write an endless list). I have always loved Carl Sagan's books, not just his wonderful nonfiction works but also his novel, Contact. I find him incredibly inspirational not only with his passion for knowledge but his reverence for the numinous, the awesome mysteries of the vast universe in which we live. I also love William Styron's works, particularly Sophie's Choice. I have never read a book in which an author combined tragedy and humor to such incredible effect, and the story shakes me to my core every time I read it (yes, I've read it multiple times). Haruki Murukami rocks my world. He's a Japanese author who is, like me, something of a genre buster, but he is particularly masterful with magical realism. His writing is also close to my heart because, like me, he has a passion for music and for cats. My favorite novel by Murukami is Kafka on the Shore, but I love all his novels that I've read. The Brontë sisters rock, and I have a particular love for Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. I also love J.R.R. Tolkien's works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which are masterpieces of world-building. Other writers I love include Madeleine L'Engle, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Victor Hugo, Khalil Gibran, Khaled Hosseini, Amy Tan, Manly Hall (philosopher), Alan Watts (philosopher and student of Buddhism and Taoism), Pema Chodron (Shambhala Buddhist), Jack Kornfield (Vipassana Buddhist), and Dogen Zenji (Zen master who lived in the thirteenth century).

Are you reading a book at the moment?

I'm reading The Roaring Stream, a Zen reader that includes teachings from Zen masters throughout the centuries. As Zen is my spiritual path, I'm finding The Roaring Stream to be wonderfully enlightening, pun intended. ;)

Do you prefer print or e-books?

I'm going to be wishy-washy here and say I like them both equally. It's kind of apples vs. oranges for me: each is great in its own way. I'll always have a love for paper books. I enjoy how they feel, how their pages turn, even how they smell. But I have also been won over by the sheer convenience and portability of e-books, since e-readers can store thousands upon thousands of great reads.

Where can people find out more about your music and books?

Here's my website, where I provide all kinds of information and links to my books and my music online:Thomma Lyn Grindstaff. I also maintain a Facebook Page for myself as a pianist and composer, from which listeners can stream all the pieces on my album and download some of them for free. I also have links to my music album and to all my books on my blog, on which I also feature posts that are accompanied by impromptu piano sketches.

Your new album is a collection of beautiful tunes, I really enjoy listening to it. I understand you've been writing music for many years, were these tunes all specifically written for one album or are they a collection of tunes you've written over the years? Which one did you write first, and which is the newest?

Thanks so much for your kind words, Maria! I'm so happy that you're enjoying the album. Those pieces were composed over a period of many years. I've composed, in total, around fifty songs and instrumental pieces, and I'm always composing more, so I don't expect to run out of material for future albums. :) On Womanspirit Rising, the title track, "Womanspirit Rising," is technically the oldest, though it's evolved quite a bit throughout the years. The newest composition on the album is "Sunflower Smile," written two years ago.

Do you have a favourite tune that you've written? If so, what makes it special to you?

All my pieces are special to me, but I'd have to say that "Sunflower Smile" is my favorite piece. It doubles as an instrumental piece and as a song (it has lyrics, and I'll be singing it on my next album). It's special to me because I wrote it to honor a dear loved one who passed away from cancer two years ago. He was a much-loved family member who taught me so much about joy in life and unconditional love. No matter what was going on, he always had a bright, loving, and brilliant smile for other people. He was unfailingly kind, selfless and optimistic, and he had the most delightful, shining smile I've ever seen, hence "Sunflower Smile."

What other projects are you working on at the moment?

On the music front, I'm preparing to record Finding Her Voice, my second music album. It will feature ten of my songs, with piano and vocals, and possibly some additional piano-only tracks. Yes, I love to sing, too. I also play guitar! I have a third music album planned, entitled Aurora Borealis, which will feature both instrumental pieces and songs. On the writing front, I'm writing the first novel in what I will call the Wandering Sage Series. The first novel is called The Renunciate, and it's something of a philosophical novel about a young woman nearing graduation who starts second guessing what she's been working toward all these years: a professional career, marriage, children, and the whole white picket fence thing. She decides, instead, to hit the road in search of adventure and other possibilities with an older friend of hers who is likewise wanting to start a new life. The novel, as well as the whole series, will be in the picaresque vein and very much about self-discovery and realization. Think of it as something of a combination of Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence and Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. ;)

Thank you for being a wonderful guest, Thomma, and good luck with all your future projects!

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You can listen become Thomma's fan and listen to her songs on Reverbnation at the following link!
http://www.reverbnation.com/artist/ar...