"The Swirl of my Music" Story 27 part B

Psyche Monroe participates in a film as an extra and dances a waltz with her boyfriend, Theo. The music is composed by Theo and incorporates motifs from Tchaikovsky and Liszt. The dance becomes intense and passionate, but eventually ends. Psyche reflects on the experience and wonders about the meaning behind the title of the poem. She also notices Theo's connection with the soprano. Psyche then dances with another partner and discusses the poem's title, realizing the significance of the forgotten waltz. The experience leaves a lasting impact on her partner, despite the consequences it has on his marriage. This is another Psyche Monroe story, it's the second part of her adventures with her boyfriend Theo, and it's called Swirl of My Music. Theo, said Psyche, it's you. He smiled, acknowledging with a nod that it was indeed him, and made forwards as if to hug her, but was held back by the super frock she was wearing, which described a protective radius around her. Psyche was inwardly busy with coping with how pleased she was to see him after all. Then they both spoke together. You look fabulous, gorgeous, and laughed. Just like a scene in a comedy romance movie, he said. True, she said, but it is a scene in a movie, potentially, for it was. Psyche had signed up as a film extra. Many had applied, though few had been chosen, for you had to be very pretty, be able to waltz, and to manage convincingly a great swirl of frock. This mainly applied to the young women, but not exclusively so. The day before had been dance practice, and the present had been occupied with the even greater fun of costume-fitting. Famous film names had been vehemently affirmed to have been seen getting into taxes. In this big old house that had somehow fallen into county council ownership, set-dressers were still busy up ladders, removing fire-exit-this-way signs, and putting up great swags of dried hop-flowers and artificial vines. A substantial orchestra was provided for by tight-packed music-desks. A harp tensely awaited its harpist. Bored timpani drummed their fingers for their percussionists. A set of tubular bells hung around awaiting their tubular bellist. A player or two were already in place, squawking on reeds, or finding convenient heel-dents in the parquet for the spikes on their double basses, and firm ground for their barstools. Members of a full choir began to filter in, some with scores in hand-held folders with little lights, more with iPads. Mikey was puzzled that while the dancers were attired for the 1920s, the choir were allowed such 2020s equipment. Then, in a rush, he put it together. They were not going to be in a film so much as a film performance, with dancers. Of what, Theo, had to be to do with him? A many-branched art-deco electrolier was being hoisted to the ceiling. There had evidently been a hitch. Theo had excused himself, and was moving away, pointed to places where six bearers of fake candelabra might stand for best effect. Two of you over by that window. He came back her way. Have you written the music, Theo? Yes, though it quotes some motifs from Tchaikovsky. Not the big ballet music. You might recognise things from the waltz Sentimentale, Op. 5. Sure, I'll look out for that, said Psyche, but the young man was too absorbed in his own creation to catch her dry remark. To be honest, at the play-through there was more from Berlioz than I was really aware of. Well, it may use waltzes. I'm not setting up as a waltz king. It's really a cantata. The title is Valse Oublie, setting words by the late John Heath Stubbs. I'd noticed the quiet, said Psyche. Tchaikovsky has a singy waltz, hasn't he? Theo set her a sharp glance, and said, Titles from Liszt, must dash, gorgeous. The director is going to want the dancers over there. And he was off, turning his back, and so missing the wonderfully expressive thing she'd do with her eyebrow. Right, boys and girls, said the director, you don't have to be perfect. We're not aiming for a New Year's Day concert from Vienna with a hundred smiles all flashing at once. Dance as naturally as you can, as if you were young people at a costume ball. Don't shuffle. Boys, don't back your partner into a cameraman. If you bump into another couple, don't try for making snappy remarks. This isn't a 1950s movie nightclub scene. As you will recall from yesterday, you waltz at tempo while the music is loud, and slow to a halt when it fades. You keep very quiet for the solos from the singers. Nobody should show off. You've paid to be extras. You're not auditioning to be stars. It's more about mass movement than individual couples, but at any moment you could be in the camera's focus, so stay on it. We don't have the time or money for many takes. We do it today. The orchestra were all poised ready. The choir stood, opening their scores or turning on glowing screens. The soloists came in, the orchestra leader and the maestro for the day. The audience were shook, and music stands tapped. It began with a sonorous male voice speaking. And as we came down the staircase, and the music started, flurries and slowings of sound, into which a waltz insinuated itself, growing in power till it was almost drowning the narrator's voice, but then came to an abrupt diminuendo. You paused and said. Psyche and the dancer slowed. A pale-faced soprano then sang lines about the moon, and was answered by a tenor. The narrating spoken voice resumed. Let us go down into the lighted ballroom, where they are expecting us, for the dance begins. And Theo's waltz pastiche built a bit sound again. Psyche was rotating round and round, her frock crushed against her partner's legs. His hand was on her waist, of course, and her left hand on his shoulder. He was a reliable partner, Psyche found, and not a show-off. But then he did let her down, though reluctantly. Thank you so, so much for the dance, it was lovely, but I am instructed to hand you over to the composer. And Theo stepped in with a, May I? Then. You dance well. I have barely started, said Psyche. I see you are taking over at the steering. No, I hope it's the swirl of my music that takes you over. Let's get down and—three-four-time boogie. He now whirled her out of the main body of the dancers. You are good, she said, laughing a little, exerted, excited. I think anyone who composes should dance as much as possible, and formally. Professional advancement by forward, side, slide together, back, slide, side together. He missed the slight barb in her comment, taking it seriously, without noticing an emotional component. Professional advancement is always like that. The music had become heady, tumultuous, unbearably intense, dictating to the circling bodies, the dance-partners now fully joined together as one, and lost in it all. Nobody was making careful box-steps any more. They were waltzing. But then it whirled away, as if its sound had been thrown centrifugally outwards. The pale-skinned soprano was now lit, standing by a window, and after the lines about the moon in her first solo, she now sang about how once, as a child, she was called to a window to see a wolf out in the snow. The spell was now fully wound up, and the full music was led back by a violin solo, and flutes, harp, full orchestra and choir, a faltering march out of which emerged a musically glittering waltz, the dancers in dizzy rotation, Psyche and Theo back in their midst, Plume and Swansdown waving. And he steered her back to the edge of the dancers, and the tenor sang about, an eye caught in the candle's shadow, and the curve of a mouth going home to my heart. OK, and won back over, thought Psyche. If a girl can't surrender for this, what can she possibly be expecting from life? But then the tenor sang the folly of it, emphatically set by the composer, and while he finished with another going home to my heart, Psyche was already reconsidering her late position. Music dwindled to an eerie pulsation of sound by the choir, then just the sound of a celeste. Suddenly French windows were opened by black-clothed and masked stagehands, and snow was thrown in, blowing in by handfuls past the soprano, who sang the last main section. Always in my dreams it is thus, always in my dreams, snow and moonlight, snow and the dark pines moaning, fur over my body and my feet small, delicate and swift to run through the powdery snow, and my sharp mouth to the ground, hungry, hungry, and always onward, onward, alone, alone. The dancers were almost entirely still, but their bodies moved insensibly closer, the young women, and one or two boys huddling tighter into their dance-partner's arms. The tenor voice asked Theo's question for him, and those same last two lines, also, were Psyche's question for him, and it all ended with a slow shiver on cymbals. The electrolier relit itself, everyone relaxed, cheers and whoops came from the exultant dancers, the orchestra started their professional applause for the composer, and Theo turned away from Psyche and walked towards the players and singers, gesturing his reciprocal applause for their performance, bowing as he walked, then swirling round to take the hand of the black-browed soprano, who threw a meaningful look at Psyche. What did you think then, Psyche? Psyche assumed the winsome expression she tended to use when she was about to push in a verbal skewer. I was really struck by the way the orchestration blew hot and cold, so to speak. She looked at him, and saw that though he raised a smile he'd felt the point, the soprano Cosima smiled thinly. You're as career-focused as Theo is, thought Psyche, then checked that some thought-bubble hadn't formed over her head, legible to the young woman, so she kept her next thought deeply buried. Fancy preferring wailing werewolf girl to me. Psyche disentangled from the happy pair and found her first waltzing partner. He'd been rueing his fortune, but fortune is a fickle dame. His luck was turning, but first to attain his heroic moment he had to pass a test. That was such fun, said Psyche, and... Why do you think the poet gave his poem that title? Venus surreptitiously fed the right-wrong answer to the unknowing hero. The forgotten waltz is the one we used to dance to the moon. When we dance a waltz we are a quadruped again treading out its wild dance. His night with Psyche was something he never forgot, though to his chagrin it was the waltz that stayed most vividly in his memory, and though it cost him the peace of his marriage for a marriage he had, he never really regretted it.