'A beautiful work of the imagination, straddling history, memory, trauma and testimony
'In 1917, a young composer writes a suite of twenty pieces for piano. Each pass by like a gust of wind. They are short, violent and strange - the music of another world. In 1938, a young Jewish family flees Italy for Sydney, Australia. In 1942, another family, this time Polish, is nearly destroyed.
'Half a century later, a young man begins to understand the role the young composer's strange visions have played in everything that came before him and all that has come to be.
'In his first book, Simon Tedeschi applies elements - from history, memory and the body of the musician - to make a remarkable work of imagination and fractal beauty. He straddles the borders of poetry and prose, fiction and fact, trauma and testimony. Fugitive is filled with what Russian poet Konstantin Balmont called 'the fickle play of rainbows'.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph:
'Where do you come from?'
'I have wandered.'
Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions
'In And to Ecstasy and Fugitive, Marjon Mossammaparast and Simon Tedeschi testify to psychic realities concurrent with place, realities that overflow Australian and international borders. Both books hinge on altered states of consciousness. Both are arranged in segments self-described as “pastiches” or “fragments” (Tedeschi 20; Mossammaparast 87). The books are consentient in exploring migration, cultural lineage, and home, but they bifurcate in distinct destinations: art (Tedeschi) and divinity (Mossammaparast).' (Introduction)
'Tedeschi is equally impressive on the page as he is at the piano.'
'There’s this thing you hear in music – or, if I’m trying for precision, in the silences in music. It’s a reaching, a stretching. There’s a suspended wonder to it; a lazy sensuality, sometimes. It’s probably in lots of places if you know what to listen for, but I hear it most in classical music, since that is where I learned to listen, to count, and to keep time. And I hear it in Simon Tedeschi’s intimate book of fragments, Fugitive.' (Introduction)
'IN HIS NEW BOOK, Fugitive, the Australian pianist Simon Tedeschi describes the many faces of the child prodigy:
To his public, the child prodigy is a robot or a God.
To his rivals, he is a false prophet.
To his rivals’ teachers and parents, he is a demon.
To his society, he is a symbol.
But to himself, he is simply a ghost.
(Introduction)
'IN HIS NEW BOOK, Fugitive, the Australian pianist Simon Tedeschi describes the many faces of the child prodigy:
To his public, the child prodigy is a robot or a God.
To his rivals, he is a false prophet.
To his rivals’ teachers and parents, he is a demon.
To his society, he is a symbol.
But to himself, he is simply a ghost.
(Introduction)
'There’s this thing you hear in music – or, if I’m trying for precision, in the silences in music. It’s a reaching, a stretching. There’s a suspended wonder to it; a lazy sensuality, sometimes. It’s probably in lots of places if you know what to listen for, but I hear it most in classical music, since that is where I learned to listen, to count, and to keep time. And I hear it in Simon Tedeschi’s intimate book of fragments, Fugitive.' (Introduction)
'In And to Ecstasy and Fugitive, Marjon Mossammaparast and Simon Tedeschi testify to psychic realities concurrent with place, realities that overflow Australian and international borders. Both books hinge on altered states of consciousness. Both are arranged in segments self-described as “pastiches” or “fragments” (Tedeschi 20; Mossammaparast 87). The books are consentient in exploring migration, cultural lineage, and home, but they bifurcate in distinct destinations: art (Tedeschi) and divinity (Mossammaparast).' (Introduction)
'Tedeschi is equally impressive on the page as he is at the piano.'
