Waiting for Music

Publishing as an industry is obsessed with new – books yet to come out… but what about the brilliant books that have already been published? Each month we spotlight a different author whose book was published more than a year ago, which you might be yet to meet… This month we hear from Simon Mundy about the brilliant Waiting for Music…

Shuffling the Shelves: Waiting for Music by Simon Mundy

Insofar as a poetry collection is ‘about’ anything, what is Waiting for Music about?

A collection is of course, just that: the accumulation of poems written over a certain period of time – in this case approximately 2009–18. One could describe it as a theme with variations. I have spent much of my life around classical music, whether writing about it, putting on and managing concerts, and hanging out with musicians, artists and dancers. My mother was the very fine abstract painter, June Hainault. The book draws some of this together.

Can you explain how the collection came about, and the background of the pieces?

Over the years composers, musicians and in one case here a chorographer have asked for words to go with their work. Not all of them got round to using the poems in the end (hence the title) but the poems stand and take their cue from the briefs my collaborators set. Among them are the poems to go with the late piano works of Brahms (taking a detail for each piece from past relationships) that David Owen Norris asked for, the poetic history of London the dancer and choreographer Nathalie Harrison requested, and the Scena – 'Venetian Serenade' – for Roxana Panufnik that was meant to be for soprano, dancers and period instrument orchestra but which has never quite happened because of problems with the orchestra's planning.

There were some collaborations which worked very well too. 'Scrolling' was a project with the violinist Manja Ristic which had performances over several nights in Belgrade in 2009. 'Angel Match' was written because Cecilia McDowall needed a 'fast' angel poem for her song cycle Flight of Angels at the Presteigne Festival in 2015, and 'Seven Poems for Blood Orange's Exhibition' were written to go with an experimental show in Brussels curated in an old factory space by the artists Debra Welch and Sarah Simmonds in 2012.

Angel Match
Fallen vs. Unfallen
Facing defeat, three–nil,
Losing by a trinity, the Angels
Change tactics, forget
Clever nutmegs, subtle practice.
Time for the long ball, the strong ball,
Wrong ball in the box,
Fox the Devils, the rebels,
Wing backs hurling forward,
Wings unleashed, unfurled,
Passing wide, cross wing
To wing, cross to the D,
Strike first touch,
Volley straight in, avenge,
Goal, GOAL, GOOOOOOAAAAAALL!

Haloes up now, Angels surge,
Devil shoots wide, slides
Into a tackle. Red Devil, red card,
Penalty, missed wide? No!
Three–two; final minute,
Last attack; who dares
Rule an Angel offside?
Three–three; heavenly honour
Saved. Virtue complete.

Slotted in between these are other poems from the period, chronicling my first visit to Chile, where my father was born, and several Italian excursions, including one to Elba to make a video with the late (tragically) Sally Caton-Byrne for an exhibition of Helen of Troy poems at the Chelsea Arts Club and Presteigne Festival in 2012.

This was published slap-bang in the middle of the Pandemic; does this play a part in the collection, which is so concerned with live music?

Purely accidental – the book was finished in 2018 – but the absence of live music during the COVID years certainly made the collection more timely.

Is music an important part of your life, and writing process? Or is it just an inspiration here? (Could you recommend a playlist for the book?)

I do write prose with music playing but not poetry, oddly enough. Somehow it requires a different level of concentration. So there are certain pieces that help me get my brain into gear. A playlist for the book would have to include Brahms' Op. 116 – 119, Corelli's Concerto Grosso Op. 6, No. 4, – which are referenced directly. Indirectly, Vaughan Williams' A London Symphony and Elgar's Cockaigne Overture could accompany 'Llandian' and, in the absence of Roxana's music, 'Venetian Serenade' could fit with any of Handel's secular cantatas from the early 1700s.

from Venetian Serenade
I arrive for him early, while the sun
Still shoots late spring darts across the water,
Hawkers sell their tourist junk without enthusiasm –
They have languished at their stalls
While other men siesta. Every purchase of glass,
A bauble, a hook-nosed mask, a pottery saint,
Requires the energy for a forced smile,
A tilt back of the hat.

Travel, while not making the title, also seems to be an important preoccupation of the pages. Is this true of your work in general, or a result of a time yearning for getting about while confined between walls?

For some reason I very rarely write about where I live (though there are exceptions). Travel stimulates me and I find the dislocation that a train, boat and plane offers gives me a cocoon that allows poetry to break out.

You don’t just write poems, but also novels, biographies of people (and orchestras), essays, reviews, plays* – the list goes on. Do you feel more drawn to one genre/form than another? Or is this crossing over of music and words in various forms central to your work and life?

Poetry was my first love, from the age of sixteen, but I soon found myself studying drama at university and writing for the stage. I began writing novels in my twenties but failed to finish any for another couple of decades. Now I'm hooked and trying, in my seventies, to finish as many as possible – sorry Will! Biographies, interviews, podcasts and reviews are bread and butter, always commissioned but necessary and they do mean that I have the chance to hear new recordings and cover festivals around the world – so I would never want to give them up, even though they do slow the production of novels down.

What do you want the reader to be left thinking about as the baton drops at the end of the piece?

Words, music, dance and the visual arts are inseparable. I hope my poems do something to show that and inspire readers to explore the positive collisions in their own exploration of all the arts.

And can I ask… what’s next for your poetry?

Who knows? There is a new collection coming together but not yet quite complete. There will be more places, more music, more politics too. Fundamentally, as in all my work, an awful lot of these will be about love in its never-ending forms and the forces that get in its way.

* For Simon's full oeuvre see his author page here.