Remix Meta: From Haydn to the Stump Serenade
I had so much fun doing the bsg_remix that I felt the need to meta. A lot. I divided it into handy sections if you're just interested in parts of the writing process (though I'll be amazed and chuffed if anybody is interested in any of it, really. ;) Also, I wrote this as I wrote "Farewell Symphony," and I haven't added anything to it since a couple days after I handed my fic in, so that's why I didn't really address anything specifically talked about in the comments folks left, though I read them all and will definitely respond there.
When I got my remixing assignment, I was at first thrilled to see trovia’s name because I enjoyed reading her fics so much already. Then, when it sank in what having to remix one of her stories actually meant, I felt more than a little intimated. Trovia is incredibly skilled at writing ficlets that pack so much story into such a tiny word count without seeming cramped at all, which is a talent that I do not have. I felt better when I decided to use our different approaches to fic to my advantage; I was never going to be able to do half as well retelling a story in a similarly short space, so I chose to focus on expanding one of her stories out into new territory instead.
Choosing a fic was daunting but fun: daunting in that there were so many good stories with potential, many of which I wasn’t brave enough to take on, and fun in that I had an excellent excuse to re-read most of trovia’s fic library. (I still haven’t read “Back to Earth”-need a good rainy day with nothing to do for that one.) Trovia’s voice for Hotdog is so unique and pitch-perfect that I knew I wasn’t the right writer to try to do “How to Live and Love…” from Hotdog’s perspective, though I’d love to see it done someday. There was even some indirect pressure to remix “How to Live and Love…” from lls_mutant and trovia in a comment conversation they had, though of course only lls_mutant knew to whom she was applying that pressure. ;) I also loved Chuckles and how trovia managed to give a background player such a distinct character, but I didn’t know where to take his story, especially since he died so early on.
“A Matter of Perspective” was the obvious choice and the one I instinctively thought I’d go for before re-reading most of trovia’s fics, and I still think it would have been fun to re-write the story from Sam’s perspective and lead into Dee buying him a drink and the subsequent conversation. Another less obvious choice, the AU “To See the Stars,” also intrigued me. It presented a tempting opportunity to write Felix as a cranky old man living alone next door to a potentially interesting family with at least one really sweet kid, and then to write him finally contacting Louis. I admit, I was already envisioning something like an m/m version of The Remains of the Day. (What can I say? Having recently watched most of The Lion in Winter again, my brain headed in weird, Anthony Hopkins-related slash directions.) But then I spotted this little ficlet that I’d never read before called “Recapitulation,” and something just clicked.
First of all, I’m a sucker for anything that ties music and BSG together. One of my favorite moments in the show is when Baltar first enters the Opera House in “Kobol’s Last Gleaming,” and I admit, though I liked Gaeta before, he really captured my attention and never let it go when he sang the “stump serenade” in “Guess What’s Coming to Dinner.” It’s probably not that hard to glean my BSG-music preoccupation from my fics, either: music is at the center of “Faithful Son,” implied in the last vignette in “Five Times Dee Didn’t Play Cards and One Time She Did,” and it’s very important to one chapter of Mathematics which I’ve held off posting because of some intersections with the remix piece. Anyway, I found trovia’s story especially intriguing because, though it’s interesting that Roslin and Anders (and judging from their expressions, Lee and Baltar, too) didn’t know that Felix could sing, the fact that Dee didn’t know stunned me. They’re such good friends that it was as startling to me as it was to Dee that there was such a large part of Felix’s character and past that she had no idea existed-and music had to have been a significant part of Felix’s life before GWCTD, because a person doesn’t just naturally sing like that without any background or training.
Another aspect of this short piece that really surprised and attracted me was that Dee was thinking and acting almost as if Felix was already dead, particularly her thought that she had believed they had time, but now she obviously didn’t. This is a very striking reaction for Dee, a character who is always so pragmatic, forward-looking, and resolute. Then I realized that Dee’s recognizing that she’d thought they’d have time meant, to me, that Dee realized how fearful she was that the old Felix whom she loved so dearly really had died in a way, and she was mourning that loss and regretting that she was never going to know that person better.
The final attribute that made this piece jump off the page and beg me to remix it was the title, “Recapitulation.” Pardon me for this pedestrian and likely inaccurate explanation of musical terms; in the interest of full disclosure, I was an English major, so my knowledge of music comes from my own uninformed love of classical music, Internet research, high school band and choir, and one music history/a bit of theory college class.
Anyway, a recapitulation is the last part of a movement in sonata-allegro form. What does that mean? First, most classical music, like symphonies, concertos, sonatas, and so on, are built out of movements. Movements are basically freestanding musical pieces that take on different texture, color, and meaning by being juxtaposed with one another.
Movements themselves are usually made up of smaller musical building blocks or ideas, and composers use different structures, or forms, to arrange how individual musical ideas fit together in a movement. One of the most popular forms is the sonata-allegro form, which is often just called sonata form. The sonata-allegro form has three parts: an exposition, which introduces one or two major musical ideas; a development, which plays with and stretches those original ideas into ideas that are related to the exposition but that sound quite different; and then a recapitulation, which brings the original ideas from the beginning back in but in a slightly different way, providing a resolution to all the tension built up in the previous parts.
You writers reading this are no doubt thinking that sonata-allegro form sounds a whole lot like three-act story structure (or for those of you who were English/creative writing majors, Freytag’s pyramid), with exposition building to a climax and then settling into a denouement. That gave me just the hint I needed to figure out how to remix trovia’s ficlet: I decided to write the rest of the piece that trovia’s recapitulation fit into.
I love writing within unusual story structures and incorporating allusions (my adoration of Willa Cather and Cowboy Bebop is in part to blame for this, I think), so I decided to write a songfic, of a sort, even though I tend not to be a huge fan of the type of songfic based on pop music lyrics. Instead of just writing my own piece in a sonata-allegro form, adding an exposition and development and tweaking Trovia’s recapitulation so they sounded like a coherent movement, I wanted to use a real piece of music as a sort of inspirational framework for the tone of each part of the piece. I started trolling through my music library and scanning Wikipedia for links to commentaries on various pieces, looking for a piece that I could live with listening to many, many times over the course of the next two months. At first, I thought I was looking for a piece with words or at least epigrams, thus making it more like a traditional songfic. Though I found some pieces that I know I want to go back to and play with someday (Brahms’s Ein Deutsche Requiem and Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antarctica, in particular-Antarctica struck me as a perfect fit for a Demetrius through mutiny story, but I can already hear that it will involve a lot of Kara, and the third movement is tricky, so it may take me a long while to get to that fic), the piece I actually settled on was a bit of a surprise: Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony.
Now before you go to iTunes or find a public domain recording online, let me clarify: Haydn’s music does not scream BSG, not even to me. It’s traditionally orchestrated and not anywhere near oppressively dark. What I thought made it a good fit for my purposes is that it’s tinged with sadness, frustration, longing, and maybe a little acceptance at the end, but it doesn’t dictate to me specifically what must happen the way, say, Sinfonia Antarctica probably would have. It did, however, force me to vary the pace and and tone at least a little bit from movement to movement, which I hope made for more interesting reading. The strongest reason for this piece, though, was its title, “Farewell,” which is exactly what I thought Dee was doing in “Recapitulation.”
My only qualm was that the “Farewell” Symphony is famous for its last movement, but the story I was going to tell for Dee didn’t fit that movement at all. Her story was definitely the first movement. So, I found myself with two choices: write Dee as the first movement and leave out the part of Haydn’s symphony that inspired me to use this particular piece of music in the first place, or expand from writing one movement to writing a full symphony myself.
If the ideas for my “Farewell Symphony” hadn’t tumbled onto the page so easily over the course of a few days, I would have gone with the former, but most of the slots in my outline nearly filled in themselves. I wrote around the theme I saw in trovia’s piece and in Haydn’s symphony: these stories were all about good-byes and all the different meanings the idea of a good-bye could embrace. BSG offers no shortage of good-byes for each of its characters, who lose almost everything and everyone over the course of the journey. The trick was selecting which good-byes best contributed to the overall structure and musical texture, for lack of better terms, that I wanted my piece to have. I decided to choose five characters, one for each movement, and give each one three brief stories about some sort of good-bye in keeping with the sonata-allegro form. Because of the form, I also wanted the first and third vignettes of each character’s movement to have very strong parallels and for the middle section to stretch the idea of what saying good-bye means into different territory.
And now you're thinking, "But kappa, there are only five vignettes in the story; what you're describing here sounds more like fifteen vignettes." Well, you're right. My ideas shifted a bit along the way...
Now I’m going to hop out of thought-process order to explain how the above-described idea turned into the final fic, before going back and talking about how I tried to make each “movement” of the fic match up with each “movement” of Haydn’s symphony. I had five movements, four with three vignettes and the final one as one long story, all outlined, and since I almost always write things out of order, I started blissfully writing away at whichever vignette happened to strike my fancy at the moment.
About 12,000 words in, I had a very, very big “oh, crap” moment. I read over what I’d written and what I had yet to write, and I realized I’d gotten so caught up in the exposition-development-recapitulation structure that trovia’s original piece had gotten lost in the shuffle. I had way too many stories going on for one piece.
Luckily, as soon as I let go of some of the dictates of the structure I’d built for myself, it wasn’t too difficult to cut loose the vignettes that didn’t fit. I’d outlined all the middle sections of each movement, all the developments, so they had some connection to music: Dee finding the sheet of music, then Felix re-finding the sheet music, Helo hearing the recording, and Tyrol hearing Hotdog singing to Nicky. Those four all seemed like they hung together cohesively, even if the plots themselves weren’t tightly related.
The expositions and recapitulations, or beginning and ending vignettes, of each section weren’t necessary to tell the music-related story, but I still really liked them. Because expositions and recapitulations are closely related to one another, since they’re (sorry for mixing my musical metaphors so very, very badly here) variations on a common theme, each pair stood on its own pretty well, as a study in contrasts. I decided to break those eight vignettes off into their own fic cycle, which became “Companion Pieces,” which now I can reveal has a double meaning: each story in each pair is a companion piece of the other, and “Companion Pieces” as a whole is the companion piece to “Farewell Symphony.”
Now, back to my remix. After figuring out how to split what I’d written into two fics and stitch them both back together, I had my second “oh, crap” moment: of the 12,000 words I’d written, only about 5,000 of them-which was half of Gaeta’s section and almost all of Hoshi’s-were from the sections I would now be using for the remix; the other 7,000 words were Dee, Tyrol, and half of Helo’s sections for “Companion Pieces.” That would be the time I sent a pleading email to the lovely remixing mods,rose_griffes and lls_mutant, begging for mercy and an extension. Thankfully, they granted both.
I had one last “oh, crap” moment before I was through, though. Looking back over what I now had for “Farewell Symphony,” I noticed that the one section that was almost completely done, Hoshi’s long section at the end, didn’t have any musical element, which I was now using to tie the whole piece together.
Enter my amazing beta,brennanspeaks, to totally pull my butt out of the fire. She brainstormed two ideas of how to tie music in, one of which I used literally and the other of which ended up inspiring me in terms of tone and theme at the end. I owe brennanspeaks so, so much for coming up with the idea of Romo, strange man that he is, finding the sheet music in Dee’s effects and then handing it off to Hoshi, realizing its past and figuring Hoshi needed it. She also talked a lot about the idea of it perhaps being okay if there wasn’t a strong musical element in the last section, if the reflections on loss and saying good-bye in the previous sections then showed up in this final section as the loss of the music itself. I kept that in mind with Hoshi’s reaction to finding the music, and later to hearing Hotdog singing it to Nicky: it’s not the perfect resolution to his sadness and loneliness (which made me especially happy, because then the sheet music doesn’t step on the sweatshirt as being a way of remembering, and I really wanted to keep something especially tactile that Hoshi could take on and off), and he doesn’t understand what it meant to all those others who came before him, but in the end the music isn’t completely dead, either. It’s allowed to take on new meaning on Earth.
After that, things went pretty smoothly. Brennanspeaks’s comments proved invaluable, and I just barely managed to finish coding the fic and sending it in under the wire.
All right, now that I’ve gotten my harrowing and-that’s-when-the-bottom-dropped-out-of-my-stomach story out of the way, back to the music and fic connection. Though there are some aspects of each movement of Haydn’s “‘Farewell’ Symphony” that drew me toward certain characters to feature, I think it’s more accurate to say that each movement sounded like the kind of story I wanted to tell about the character it’s associated with rather than that the movement actually sounds like that character him or herself to me.
Because I knew Dee’s story, since that was trovia’s fic, Dee fit immediately into the first movement, allegro-assai. It’s strong, but stormy; the first part reminded me of something one would expect to hear as the background for a silent film at the point where the distressed heroine is in melodramatic danger. But then, the music develops into something much less sturm und drang and much more complexly and subtly conflicted. That dichotomy seemed to fit trovia’s original fic well: Dee being upset about Felix’s condition is stormy and emotional, but when that sheet of music appears, all Dee’s feelings about whether she’s really saying good-bye to the person she thought she knew in Felix become so much more complicated without losing any of their potency.
Felix also fit easily into a movement. The second movement, adagio, starts out very serene, but it acquires a darker, sadder edge and turns more reflective as it progresses. It’s not tragic, but I hear a sense of quiet longing in it. It’s a good-bye to Dee, obviously, bringing up the sheet music again, but it’s also Felix saying good-bye to a part of himself in letting go of the music and Dee’s things. Also, though the tempo is far too fast, the little stuttering hops in the violins remind me of someone shuffling around on crutches, which sadly fit Felix all too well.
The third movement was by far the toughest fit. It’s a dance, a minuet-allegretto, which doesn’t seem to suit the idea of a good-bye, let alone the sort of good-byes BSG’s characters undergo. However, the movement has a sort of straightforwardness and uprightness that reminds me of Helo, and I liked the idea of Helo “dancing around” so many angry, bitter people with axes to grind, since he’s always trying to play the peacekeeper. Admittedly, using Helo, someone who makes it to the end in pretty good shape and with his family intact, probably detracts from what I tried to do in the fifth movement, but I decided Helo had to be here. For one, Helo is one of Trovia’s primary ficcing characters, so I wanted to include him. Perhaps more importantly, I had the confrontation between Helo and Gaeta over Kara’s tape planned out and my heart set on including it almost as soon as I had the idea for writing this piece as a multi-part symphony, yet it wouldn’t work from Gaeta’s perspective. Helo’s good-bye is a good-bye to Felix, though he doesn’t realize it until later, along with Helo finally realizing that he’s lost some of his own drive to always do the right thing-or naiveté, however you want to look at it-and is mourning that a little as well.
Chief was the last character I picked. The fourth movement is intense, frantic, and, to me at least, angry. Chief tends to respond to emotional situations with strong physical expression rather than words, and he has a bit of a temper, too, which made his stories fit in perfectly. His section obviously became a good-bye to humanity as he loses his last strong human connection in Nicky.
I did my best to make the fifth movement something a little different. As I mentioned earlier, the fifth movement (I’ve seen people list it as part of the fourth movement, but to my ears, it’s a creature unto itself) is what makes Haydn’s piece so special. Symphonies-especially in Haydn’s day-almost always have four movements. “Farewell” sounds like it’s that kind of symphony, too, until the last five seconds or so of the fourth movement, when the notes that sound like they’re leading into a final resolution go in a completely different direction and lead into a slow, contemplative fifth movement.
There’s quite the story behind this fifth movement. Haydn was the court composer for the Hungarian Prince Esterhazy. Every summer, Esterhazy would go live at his summer palace, and of course he took his court musicians, Haydn included, along with him for entertainment. One year, Esterhazy was making the musicians stay longer than usual, and they were not happy about this because most of them had left their families back home. Haydn wrote the “‘Farewell’ Symphony” to hint to the Prince that it was time to let them go home. The fifth movement is written so that various instruments finish out their parts of the piece at different points in time. When each musician finished, he took up his candle and walked out of the room as the rest of the orchestra played on, until there were only two violins left on stage playing together. Esterhazy caught on, and they left for home the next day.
The final run of episodes of BSG felt like the last movement of Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony to me, with so many characters essentially taking up their instruments and leaving the stage early, whether by dying or by simply finally falling apart from the strain of life. I fell in love with the idea of Hoshi and Romo, Admiral and President and amassers of the detritus of others’ lives, as the last two violinists on the stage at the very end, carrying on the song for everyone else who had gone before them. Because Hotdog ended up having a bigger role than I originally thought, though, my "Farewell Symphony" has three musicians left on the stage at the end rather than two, but I'm still satisfied with how it worked out.
As much fun as I had with this, I did have a few concerns about my idea. First, I wondered if I was really “remixing” trovia’s original story, since mine expanded out so much farther and involved so many other characters but also essentially left a lot of trovia’s original intact, since there was no POV-shift. Eventually, I decided this was a remix, mostly because whether it really was or not, I was having too good a time with it. :)
I worried about the pairing, too. When I read “Recapitulation,” I thought it was gen. Then I went back several weeks later and looked at the tags more carefully, saw it was Dee/Gaeta het, and thought, oh crap (once more, with feeling :)), I don’t know how to write those two as a couple! I’ve always envisioned Dee and Gaeta as extremely close friends who never really consider a romantic relationship with one another because of the sort of people they’re attracted to (I don’t just mean in terms of sexual orientation-personality-wise, they both have a taste for really screwed-up lovers, though Gaeta at least learns a little by the end if Hoshi is any indication), and because at least one of them is in a relationship at any given point in the show, according to my personal view. In the end, I compromised; if you squint really, really hard, maybe you can see a bit of past feelings here and there in Dee and Felix’s movements, in Hoshi suspecting they might have been together at one point, and in Felix being angry at Lee Adama being accorded the rights of a grieving family member while Felix himself isn’t. Personally, I don’t-I see it as an incredibly strong friendship, or more accurately, something stronger than that word implies, because in many ways they’re closer to each other than they are to the people they’re frakking or want to frak. So yeah, I tried to make it as shippy as I could without it being shippy at all, if that makes any sense. Also, I felt a lot better after seeing trovia comment on her dislike of listing pairings at the beginning of fics, a dislike that I share in most genres, so I’m hoping you won’t take too much offense, trovia, that the romantic relationships in you Dee/Gaeta classified story are varied, but none of them are really Dee/Gaeta. I did the best I could, but the idea sort of ran away from me!
My last major concern, which truly was a concern rather than a fear, was that the fic I chose to remix didn’t really focus on trovia’s signature characters whom I love to read her write so much. Instead of choosing a different fic, though, I compromised and decided to give a few homages to other stories of hers that I’d liked but didn’t have any ideas for remixing, particularly by including a Chuckles cameo of a sort and a couple Hotdog cameos (and one with a list, even!).
So, overall, the remixing experience was a lot of work, but it was a total blast. I loved it, and I would definitely do it again, though I think I might do something shorter next time. ;) I’m writing this before I’ve seen the remix done of my piece, so I’m anxiously awaiting that unveiling, too!
When I got my remixing assignment, I was at first thrilled to see trovia’s name because I enjoyed reading her fics so much already. Then, when it sank in what having to remix one of her stories actually meant, I felt more than a little intimated. Trovia is incredibly skilled at writing ficlets that pack so much story into such a tiny word count without seeming cramped at all, which is a talent that I do not have. I felt better when I decided to use our different approaches to fic to my advantage; I was never going to be able to do half as well retelling a story in a similarly short space, so I chose to focus on expanding one of her stories out into new territory instead.
Choosing a fic was daunting but fun: daunting in that there were so many good stories with potential, many of which I wasn’t brave enough to take on, and fun in that I had an excellent excuse to re-read most of trovia’s fic library. (I still haven’t read “Back to Earth”-need a good rainy day with nothing to do for that one.) Trovia’s voice for Hotdog is so unique and pitch-perfect that I knew I wasn’t the right writer to try to do “How to Live and Love…” from Hotdog’s perspective, though I’d love to see it done someday. There was even some indirect pressure to remix “How to Live and Love…” from lls_mutant and trovia in a comment conversation they had, though of course only lls_mutant knew to whom she was applying that pressure. ;) I also loved Chuckles and how trovia managed to give a background player such a distinct character, but I didn’t know where to take his story, especially since he died so early on.
“A Matter of Perspective” was the obvious choice and the one I instinctively thought I’d go for before re-reading most of trovia’s fics, and I still think it would have been fun to re-write the story from Sam’s perspective and lead into Dee buying him a drink and the subsequent conversation. Another less obvious choice, the AU “To See the Stars,” also intrigued me. It presented a tempting opportunity to write Felix as a cranky old man living alone next door to a potentially interesting family with at least one really sweet kid, and then to write him finally contacting Louis. I admit, I was already envisioning something like an m/m version of The Remains of the Day. (What can I say? Having recently watched most of The Lion in Winter again, my brain headed in weird, Anthony Hopkins-related slash directions.) But then I spotted this little ficlet that I’d never read before called “Recapitulation,” and something just clicked.
First of all, I’m a sucker for anything that ties music and BSG together. One of my favorite moments in the show is when Baltar first enters the Opera House in “Kobol’s Last Gleaming,” and I admit, though I liked Gaeta before, he really captured my attention and never let it go when he sang the “stump serenade” in “Guess What’s Coming to Dinner.” It’s probably not that hard to glean my BSG-music preoccupation from my fics, either: music is at the center of “Faithful Son,” implied in the last vignette in “Five Times Dee Didn’t Play Cards and One Time She Did,” and it’s very important to one chapter of Mathematics which I’ve held off posting because of some intersections with the remix piece. Anyway, I found trovia’s story especially intriguing because, though it’s interesting that Roslin and Anders (and judging from their expressions, Lee and Baltar, too) didn’t know that Felix could sing, the fact that Dee didn’t know stunned me. They’re such good friends that it was as startling to me as it was to Dee that there was such a large part of Felix’s character and past that she had no idea existed-and music had to have been a significant part of Felix’s life before GWCTD, because a person doesn’t just naturally sing like that without any background or training.
Another aspect of this short piece that really surprised and attracted me was that Dee was thinking and acting almost as if Felix was already dead, particularly her thought that she had believed they had time, but now she obviously didn’t. This is a very striking reaction for Dee, a character who is always so pragmatic, forward-looking, and resolute. Then I realized that Dee’s recognizing that she’d thought they’d have time meant, to me, that Dee realized how fearful she was that the old Felix whom she loved so dearly really had died in a way, and she was mourning that loss and regretting that she was never going to know that person better.
The final attribute that made this piece jump off the page and beg me to remix it was the title, “Recapitulation.” Pardon me for this pedestrian and likely inaccurate explanation of musical terms; in the interest of full disclosure, I was an English major, so my knowledge of music comes from my own uninformed love of classical music, Internet research, high school band and choir, and one music history/a bit of theory college class.
Anyway, a recapitulation is the last part of a movement in sonata-allegro form. What does that mean? First, most classical music, like symphonies, concertos, sonatas, and so on, are built out of movements. Movements are basically freestanding musical pieces that take on different texture, color, and meaning by being juxtaposed with one another.
Movements themselves are usually made up of smaller musical building blocks or ideas, and composers use different structures, or forms, to arrange how individual musical ideas fit together in a movement. One of the most popular forms is the sonata-allegro form, which is often just called sonata form. The sonata-allegro form has three parts: an exposition, which introduces one or two major musical ideas; a development, which plays with and stretches those original ideas into ideas that are related to the exposition but that sound quite different; and then a recapitulation, which brings the original ideas from the beginning back in but in a slightly different way, providing a resolution to all the tension built up in the previous parts.
You writers reading this are no doubt thinking that sonata-allegro form sounds a whole lot like three-act story structure (or for those of you who were English/creative writing majors, Freytag’s pyramid), with exposition building to a climax and then settling into a denouement. That gave me just the hint I needed to figure out how to remix trovia’s ficlet: I decided to write the rest of the piece that trovia’s recapitulation fit into.
I love writing within unusual story structures and incorporating allusions (my adoration of Willa Cather and Cowboy Bebop is in part to blame for this, I think), so I decided to write a songfic, of a sort, even though I tend not to be a huge fan of the type of songfic based on pop music lyrics. Instead of just writing my own piece in a sonata-allegro form, adding an exposition and development and tweaking Trovia’s recapitulation so they sounded like a coherent movement, I wanted to use a real piece of music as a sort of inspirational framework for the tone of each part of the piece. I started trolling through my music library and scanning Wikipedia for links to commentaries on various pieces, looking for a piece that I could live with listening to many, many times over the course of the next two months. At first, I thought I was looking for a piece with words or at least epigrams, thus making it more like a traditional songfic. Though I found some pieces that I know I want to go back to and play with someday (Brahms’s Ein Deutsche Requiem and Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antarctica, in particular-Antarctica struck me as a perfect fit for a Demetrius through mutiny story, but I can already hear that it will involve a lot of Kara, and the third movement is tricky, so it may take me a long while to get to that fic), the piece I actually settled on was a bit of a surprise: Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony.
Now before you go to iTunes or find a public domain recording online, let me clarify: Haydn’s music does not scream BSG, not even to me. It’s traditionally orchestrated and not anywhere near oppressively dark. What I thought made it a good fit for my purposes is that it’s tinged with sadness, frustration, longing, and maybe a little acceptance at the end, but it doesn’t dictate to me specifically what must happen the way, say, Sinfonia Antarctica probably would have. It did, however, force me to vary the pace and and tone at least a little bit from movement to movement, which I hope made for more interesting reading. The strongest reason for this piece, though, was its title, “Farewell,” which is exactly what I thought Dee was doing in “Recapitulation.”
My only qualm was that the “Farewell” Symphony is famous for its last movement, but the story I was going to tell for Dee didn’t fit that movement at all. Her story was definitely the first movement. So, I found myself with two choices: write Dee as the first movement and leave out the part of Haydn’s symphony that inspired me to use this particular piece of music in the first place, or expand from writing one movement to writing a full symphony myself.
If the ideas for my “Farewell Symphony” hadn’t tumbled onto the page so easily over the course of a few days, I would have gone with the former, but most of the slots in my outline nearly filled in themselves. I wrote around the theme I saw in trovia’s piece and in Haydn’s symphony: these stories were all about good-byes and all the different meanings the idea of a good-bye could embrace. BSG offers no shortage of good-byes for each of its characters, who lose almost everything and everyone over the course of the journey. The trick was selecting which good-byes best contributed to the overall structure and musical texture, for lack of better terms, that I wanted my piece to have. I decided to choose five characters, one for each movement, and give each one three brief stories about some sort of good-bye in keeping with the sonata-allegro form. Because of the form, I also wanted the first and third vignettes of each character’s movement to have very strong parallels and for the middle section to stretch the idea of what saying good-bye means into different territory.
And now you're thinking, "But kappa, there are only five vignettes in the story; what you're describing here sounds more like fifteen vignettes." Well, you're right. My ideas shifted a bit along the way...
Now I’m going to hop out of thought-process order to explain how the above-described idea turned into the final fic, before going back and talking about how I tried to make each “movement” of the fic match up with each “movement” of Haydn’s symphony. I had five movements, four with three vignettes and the final one as one long story, all outlined, and since I almost always write things out of order, I started blissfully writing away at whichever vignette happened to strike my fancy at the moment.
About 12,000 words in, I had a very, very big “oh, crap” moment. I read over what I’d written and what I had yet to write, and I realized I’d gotten so caught up in the exposition-development-recapitulation structure that trovia’s original piece had gotten lost in the shuffle. I had way too many stories going on for one piece.
Luckily, as soon as I let go of some of the dictates of the structure I’d built for myself, it wasn’t too difficult to cut loose the vignettes that didn’t fit. I’d outlined all the middle sections of each movement, all the developments, so they had some connection to music: Dee finding the sheet of music, then Felix re-finding the sheet music, Helo hearing the recording, and Tyrol hearing Hotdog singing to Nicky. Those four all seemed like they hung together cohesively, even if the plots themselves weren’t tightly related.
The expositions and recapitulations, or beginning and ending vignettes, of each section weren’t necessary to tell the music-related story, but I still really liked them. Because expositions and recapitulations are closely related to one another, since they’re (sorry for mixing my musical metaphors so very, very badly here) variations on a common theme, each pair stood on its own pretty well, as a study in contrasts. I decided to break those eight vignettes off into their own fic cycle, which became “Companion Pieces,” which now I can reveal has a double meaning: each story in each pair is a companion piece of the other, and “Companion Pieces” as a whole is the companion piece to “Farewell Symphony.”
Now, back to my remix. After figuring out how to split what I’d written into two fics and stitch them both back together, I had my second “oh, crap” moment: of the 12,000 words I’d written, only about 5,000 of them-which was half of Gaeta’s section and almost all of Hoshi’s-were from the sections I would now be using for the remix; the other 7,000 words were Dee, Tyrol, and half of Helo’s sections for “Companion Pieces.” That would be the time I sent a pleading email to the lovely remixing mods,rose_griffes and lls_mutant, begging for mercy and an extension. Thankfully, they granted both.
I had one last “oh, crap” moment before I was through, though. Looking back over what I now had for “Farewell Symphony,” I noticed that the one section that was almost completely done, Hoshi’s long section at the end, didn’t have any musical element, which I was now using to tie the whole piece together.
Enter my amazing beta,brennanspeaks, to totally pull my butt out of the fire. She brainstormed two ideas of how to tie music in, one of which I used literally and the other of which ended up inspiring me in terms of tone and theme at the end. I owe brennanspeaks so, so much for coming up with the idea of Romo, strange man that he is, finding the sheet music in Dee’s effects and then handing it off to Hoshi, realizing its past and figuring Hoshi needed it. She also talked a lot about the idea of it perhaps being okay if there wasn’t a strong musical element in the last section, if the reflections on loss and saying good-bye in the previous sections then showed up in this final section as the loss of the music itself. I kept that in mind with Hoshi’s reaction to finding the music, and later to hearing Hotdog singing it to Nicky: it’s not the perfect resolution to his sadness and loneliness (which made me especially happy, because then the sheet music doesn’t step on the sweatshirt as being a way of remembering, and I really wanted to keep something especially tactile that Hoshi could take on and off), and he doesn’t understand what it meant to all those others who came before him, but in the end the music isn’t completely dead, either. It’s allowed to take on new meaning on Earth.
After that, things went pretty smoothly. Brennanspeaks’s comments proved invaluable, and I just barely managed to finish coding the fic and sending it in under the wire.
All right, now that I’ve gotten my harrowing and-that’s-when-the-bottom-dropped-out-of-my-stomach story out of the way, back to the music and fic connection. Though there are some aspects of each movement of Haydn’s “‘Farewell’ Symphony” that drew me toward certain characters to feature, I think it’s more accurate to say that each movement sounded like the kind of story I wanted to tell about the character it’s associated with rather than that the movement actually sounds like that character him or herself to me.
Because I knew Dee’s story, since that was trovia’s fic, Dee fit immediately into the first movement, allegro-assai. It’s strong, but stormy; the first part reminded me of something one would expect to hear as the background for a silent film at the point where the distressed heroine is in melodramatic danger. But then, the music develops into something much less sturm und drang and much more complexly and subtly conflicted. That dichotomy seemed to fit trovia’s original fic well: Dee being upset about Felix’s condition is stormy and emotional, but when that sheet of music appears, all Dee’s feelings about whether she’s really saying good-bye to the person she thought she knew in Felix become so much more complicated without losing any of their potency.
Felix also fit easily into a movement. The second movement, adagio, starts out very serene, but it acquires a darker, sadder edge and turns more reflective as it progresses. It’s not tragic, but I hear a sense of quiet longing in it. It’s a good-bye to Dee, obviously, bringing up the sheet music again, but it’s also Felix saying good-bye to a part of himself in letting go of the music and Dee’s things. Also, though the tempo is far too fast, the little stuttering hops in the violins remind me of someone shuffling around on crutches, which sadly fit Felix all too well.
The third movement was by far the toughest fit. It’s a dance, a minuet-allegretto, which doesn’t seem to suit the idea of a good-bye, let alone the sort of good-byes BSG’s characters undergo. However, the movement has a sort of straightforwardness and uprightness that reminds me of Helo, and I liked the idea of Helo “dancing around” so many angry, bitter people with axes to grind, since he’s always trying to play the peacekeeper. Admittedly, using Helo, someone who makes it to the end in pretty good shape and with his family intact, probably detracts from what I tried to do in the fifth movement, but I decided Helo had to be here. For one, Helo is one of Trovia’s primary ficcing characters, so I wanted to include him. Perhaps more importantly, I had the confrontation between Helo and Gaeta over Kara’s tape planned out and my heart set on including it almost as soon as I had the idea for writing this piece as a multi-part symphony, yet it wouldn’t work from Gaeta’s perspective. Helo’s good-bye is a good-bye to Felix, though he doesn’t realize it until later, along with Helo finally realizing that he’s lost some of his own drive to always do the right thing-or naiveté, however you want to look at it-and is mourning that a little as well.
Chief was the last character I picked. The fourth movement is intense, frantic, and, to me at least, angry. Chief tends to respond to emotional situations with strong physical expression rather than words, and he has a bit of a temper, too, which made his stories fit in perfectly. His section obviously became a good-bye to humanity as he loses his last strong human connection in Nicky.
I did my best to make the fifth movement something a little different. As I mentioned earlier, the fifth movement (I’ve seen people list it as part of the fourth movement, but to my ears, it’s a creature unto itself) is what makes Haydn’s piece so special. Symphonies-especially in Haydn’s day-almost always have four movements. “Farewell” sounds like it’s that kind of symphony, too, until the last five seconds or so of the fourth movement, when the notes that sound like they’re leading into a final resolution go in a completely different direction and lead into a slow, contemplative fifth movement.
There’s quite the story behind this fifth movement. Haydn was the court composer for the Hungarian Prince Esterhazy. Every summer, Esterhazy would go live at his summer palace, and of course he took his court musicians, Haydn included, along with him for entertainment. One year, Esterhazy was making the musicians stay longer than usual, and they were not happy about this because most of them had left their families back home. Haydn wrote the “‘Farewell’ Symphony” to hint to the Prince that it was time to let them go home. The fifth movement is written so that various instruments finish out their parts of the piece at different points in time. When each musician finished, he took up his candle and walked out of the room as the rest of the orchestra played on, until there were only two violins left on stage playing together. Esterhazy caught on, and they left for home the next day.
The final run of episodes of BSG felt like the last movement of Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony to me, with so many characters essentially taking up their instruments and leaving the stage early, whether by dying or by simply finally falling apart from the strain of life. I fell in love with the idea of Hoshi and Romo, Admiral and President and amassers of the detritus of others’ lives, as the last two violinists on the stage at the very end, carrying on the song for everyone else who had gone before them. Because Hotdog ended up having a bigger role than I originally thought, though, my "Farewell Symphony" has three musicians left on the stage at the end rather than two, but I'm still satisfied with how it worked out.
As much fun as I had with this, I did have a few concerns about my idea. First, I wondered if I was really “remixing” trovia’s original story, since mine expanded out so much farther and involved so many other characters but also essentially left a lot of trovia’s original intact, since there was no POV-shift. Eventually, I decided this was a remix, mostly because whether it really was or not, I was having too good a time with it. :)
I worried about the pairing, too. When I read “Recapitulation,” I thought it was gen. Then I went back several weeks later and looked at the tags more carefully, saw it was Dee/Gaeta het, and thought, oh crap (once more, with feeling :)), I don’t know how to write those two as a couple! I’ve always envisioned Dee and Gaeta as extremely close friends who never really consider a romantic relationship with one another because of the sort of people they’re attracted to (I don’t just mean in terms of sexual orientation-personality-wise, they both have a taste for really screwed-up lovers, though Gaeta at least learns a little by the end if Hoshi is any indication), and because at least one of them is in a relationship at any given point in the show, according to my personal view. In the end, I compromised; if you squint really, really hard, maybe you can see a bit of past feelings here and there in Dee and Felix’s movements, in Hoshi suspecting they might have been together at one point, and in Felix being angry at Lee Adama being accorded the rights of a grieving family member while Felix himself isn’t. Personally, I don’t-I see it as an incredibly strong friendship, or more accurately, something stronger than that word implies, because in many ways they’re closer to each other than they are to the people they’re frakking or want to frak. So yeah, I tried to make it as shippy as I could without it being shippy at all, if that makes any sense. Also, I felt a lot better after seeing trovia comment on her dislike of listing pairings at the beginning of fics, a dislike that I share in most genres, so I’m hoping you won’t take too much offense, trovia, that the romantic relationships in you Dee/Gaeta classified story are varied, but none of them are really Dee/Gaeta. I did the best I could, but the idea sort of ran away from me!
My last major concern, which truly was a concern rather than a fear, was that the fic I chose to remix didn’t really focus on trovia’s signature characters whom I love to read her write so much. Instead of choosing a different fic, though, I compromised and decided to give a few homages to other stories of hers that I’d liked but didn’t have any ideas for remixing, particularly by including a Chuckles cameo of a sort and a couple Hotdog cameos (and one with a list, even!).
So, overall, the remixing experience was a lot of work, but it was a total blast. I loved it, and I would definitely do it again, though I think I might do something shorter next time. ;) I’m writing this before I’ve seen the remix done of my piece, so I’m anxiously awaiting that unveiling, too!