tion id="u99fe90e5-dfea-5d1b-9d01-e96ac859479c">
WHEN THE MUSIC STOPS
A Novel by Joe Heap
With Music by John Sands
Joe Heap
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Joe Heap 2020
Cover design and illustration by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Joe Heap asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008293208
Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008293222
Version: 2020-10-09
To my grandparents, John and Jean, without whose stories this story could not have been written.
Greek myth tells of Orpheus, who travelled to the underworld to win back his lost lover, Eurydice. His means of transport was music – music that made the gods weep to hear it, music that stopped the rivers and made nature pause. The Hymns of Orpheus are lost to us now, but their voices are still ours to use, that we may each bring back our own Eurydice.
Musicologists disagree about how many of these voices, called modes, there are. Some say five, or nine, or twelve. For this book, we will cover the seven commonly accepted modes used in antiquity. The number seven was important to the ancients – seven Olympian gods, seven days of the week, seven ages of man. Seven is a mystical number, a magical number, and perhaps this little book yearns to do something magical.
I do not believe in gods, but I believe in music. Music can draw the dead close to us, for a while. If we could meet them, in the sunlit fields of song, surely we would stay forever.
– Jack Shapiro, The Songs of the Dead
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
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About the Publisher
