Thursday 23 August 2012

What is your soul's theme tune?

I adore music. It's why, when devising The Peacock Book Project , I couldn't help slipping in a theme song for each chapter and adding links to songs that reflect the mood of a particular scene - all of which add up to a personalised soundtrack for my novel. The Peacock Book Project may be an interactive creative writing programme, but it features sound and imagery too. Because it can. Because free technology makes it possible.

Maybe you're like me. Maybe particular songs speak to you at particular times. Over the years, I've realised there's one piece of music that could possibly called be the theme tune to my soul. What I mean by this is that its vibrations touch me on every level, every time. The energy it emits corresponds so exactly to something buried inside me that whenever I hear it, I forget the stresses, screw-ups, traumas and difficulties of life, and reconnect with the pure energy from which we're all originally made. Seriously, within two minutes of listening to the 11-minute first movement (moderato) of Rachmaninov's piano concerto No. 2 in C minor, opus 18, I am changed.

The movement begins with dark, deep, rich chords that build and swell. Unashamedly passionate, outragiously opulent, the sounds thrill and rejuvenate me. Somehow, Rachaminov's harmonies and lyrical themes inject me with the frequencies of freedom, power, infinite possibility, happiness. Recently, I've been listening to the moderato at night, lying on the floor of our sitting room, spread-eagled on the Persian carpet, while the old floorboards creak with the music's vibrations and my one-year-old daughter climbs all over me. It's as if the cells of my body are thirsty and need to drink in the sound. This is therapy of the quickest, most pleasurable kind. Not bad for 11 minutes at home alone - and all I needed to do was press 'play'.

What, I wonder, is your soul's theme tune? Feel free to share it on the the Peacock Book Project's Facebook page. And look out for the Rachmaninov in Chapter 5, appearing next month...