‘Come into these pages, I want this book to say. Meet the people who live here. Come and stay with them, understand their lives and their loves and their secrets …’ Kirsty Gunn’s The Big Music is a novel like no other, in the style of 20th-century modernism, with bagpipe music at its heart. It’s a novel that takes on a real, physical life too, as the author tells us here.
‘The hills only come back the same: I don’t mind …’ begins Kirsty Gunn’s The Big Music, a novel that takes us to a new understanding of how fiction can affect us. Hugely original and ambitious, with music at its heart – it follows the structure of piobairechd, the formal music of Highland bagpipes – the author’s aim is for readers to have the experience of living another life within the pages.
Making that fictional world even more real, the novel’s afterlife includes a very real archive of material featured within the fiction, plus artworks, music and film. Kirsty Gunn can explain it better than we can:
Where this novel came from … Where it is going …
‘I wanted to write a book that gave the reader an experience of entering a world: a story about family and family life, about mothers and daughters and fathers and sons. I wanted to structure that story using the piobaireachd, a beautiful musical form that should play a larger part in our cultural life but is, on the whole, ignored. More than anything, I wanted to create a place where the reader can live.
The Big Music
Come into these pages, I want this book to say. Meet the people who live here. Come and stay with them, understand their lives and their loves and their secrets …
Like a room in an art gallery through which you might wander, moving through the space to emerge from it changed and altered by what you have seen there – so The Big Music is made up of pages and files and stories about the Sutherland family that, I hope, will come to affect you in ways that are mysterious and yet undeniable.
As real as a dream – this is what I hope my book feels like for the reader. For here are the people who live in ‘The Grey House’, here in this book. And here are their lives – displayed in the documents and materials of the House that are part of that book – in notes and appendices and additional pages … From this, I hope – a whole world opens up.
A film … Music … An exhibition …
So then, writing the opening line of my story, as I did, eight long years ago – “The hills only come back the same, I don’t mind” – was only the beginning of a process that is now reflected in works of art, the creation of music and of film, and the establishing of an archive of papers and documents and materials that relate to the book … All of which make The Big Music an imaginative enterprise that is ongoing and increasingly collaborative and collective. The actor Brian Cox reads from the opening pages of my first chapter in a film made by Gary Gowans that is full of music and imagery … The artist Merran Gunn has created artwork and installations that refer back to the world of The Grey House – where the book is set …
In these ways and more I hope The Big Music will continue to play on in the reader’s mind and imagination long after the book has been closed and put away on the shelf. I hope the world of it, the experience of it, will continue to resonate.’
- Kirsty Gunn, July 2012
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