The Music Sessions

Written by Marijke F. Jansen

I'm not the first author saying that music inspires me - that whenever I listen to good music and close my eyes, I see all the battles, romances, scenes, playing out like a movie before my eyes... Last weekend at the Himalaya Film Festival at XL de Ateliers in Dronten, I wrote after watching a documentary as my inspiration for the first time. And this week, I suddenly got the idea to use music instead of a documentary and to see what would come out.

Lindsey Stirling

An artist that I've discovered recently and whom I find incredibly inspiring is Lindsey Stirling. Her magic isn't just in her music - she herself is part of the spell. The first time I saw her playing her violin was in the clip of Pentatonix's interpretation of Radioactive. Lindsey was playing so animatedly that it intrigued me and drew me in. And while watching her solo movies, I felt this buzz in my body, causing a spontaneous smile to grow on my face. That's when I knew I just had to have that CD. It's the first CD that I purchased through iTunes and I am still very happy with it.

Music stories

In the next few weeks, I plan to use one track of my Lindsey Stirling CD for "The Music Session" every week. If everything goes according to plan, each track on the CD will result in one chapter of a story inspired by Lindey's music, so that eventually a story will emerge consisting of 12 chapters. As the artist herself is English, I'm playing with the idea to translate each chapter into English to make The Music Sessions accessible to a wider audience. To summarize, it is my intention that a weekly Music Session will take place for the next 12 weeks, and that the result of those sessions will be published on this blog, on DeurenNaarDromen.blogspot.nl and marijkefjansen.nl (the latter two in Dutch, the original language). When those 12 weeks are over, I'm going to reread the novel as a whole and do a big edit. The final result will be published as a novelette for enthusiastic readers (although I’m not sure if it's easy to do that for the English version as well). So, keep an eye on the site!