This is the story of Dame Lena Gaunt: musician, octogenarian, junkie.
Lena is Music’s Most Modern Musician; the first theremin player of the twentieth century.
From the obscurity of a Perth boarding school to a glittering career on the world stage, Lena Gaunt’s life will be made and torn apart by those she gives her heart to.
Through it all her relationship with music and with her extraordinary instrument – the theremin – endures, in this novel about how our lives are shaped by love, loss and the stories we tell.
Epigraph:
To see [her] play a piece of music on the theremin is to be reminded of a boy doing tricks on a bicycle. For, like a boy who rides with 'no hands', [she] plays this instrument without touching it - by merely waving [her] hands over it.
Epigraph:
I am electrical by nature, music is the electric soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, and invents.
Epigraph:
Astronomers say they have heard the sound of a black hole singing. And what it is singing, and perhaps has been singing for more than two billion years, they say, is B flat - a B flat 57 octaves lower than middle C...The black hole is playing 'the lowest note in the universe,' said Dr. Andrew Fabian, an X-ray astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at Cambridge University in England.
