The Daughters: A Novel by Adrienne Celt

Author:Adrienne Celt [Celt, Adrienne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2015-08-02T23:00:00+00:00

As a singer you have to be careful with your body the same way you’d be careful transporting crystal or glass. When the temperature varies too drastically, molecules shift and expand. Things shatter. The pen in my purse spills ink everywhere during altitude changes; and after plane rides longer than two hours, I need to avoid citrus fruits for a week, drink only herbal tea.

Travel, then, has always been dangerous for me. It can affect a performance in unexpected ways—hemming my voice in with static from the dry velveteen seats on the train into a new city, and desiccating it with the train’s hot, recirculated air. High elevation breaks sounds into brittle sheets of paper; the color and texture of grain bins in a city’s street markets bleed through into my tonal quality. Resonance comes from a barrel of smooth red quinoa seeds you can stick your hand in up to the elbow. Sharp color from hard, ridged bulgur wheat. Airiness from vats of flour that feels like silk when you lay your palm on top—if the frowning merchant will let you handle his wares so freely.

A voice is spongelike. It can absorb, and it can be wrung out.

When I step off a plane, I need to take a long walk in open streets to shake off the tin can aura of my transportation. Without the walk, without the wind to flush me, my lungs remain compressed and I can’t go onstage—I hear the atonal ding of the seatbelt sign when I should be hearing the key changes my accompanist is running through on the piano, and I become convinced that the audience in the recital hall will be populated by duplicates upon duplicates of my fellow airline passengers, shifting around their neck pillows and cricking their knees.

What I mean is this: sound is never described with the density or complexity that it deserves, because we imagine it as separate from the texture of the rest of our lives. Words like crystalline and booming, full and sharp, reduce music to decoration, something adjectival. When in fact it’s more like an animal. Living. Hungry. It sucks up atmosphere, emotion, experience. Pushes you to feed it by doing things you wouldn’t otherwise do.

It’s the whole of life, round and plump as a planet. Ample as a memory or dream.

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