As a composer deeply invested in literature, I have long been fascinated by the figure of the musician in fiction, a lineage that stretches from the myth of Orpheus to the modern novel. In The Ghostwritten Variations, I inhabit the voices of four fictional composers, writing the music they "composed" within the pages of their respective books. Each variation draws its stylistic clues from the vivid musical descriptions provided by the authors, quoted below next to the corresponding movement.

The theme is introduced by the violin as an expansive, chromatic melody. Its presence remains a subtle, spectral thread through each variation, suggesting a single creative soul reincarnated across centuries, a nod to the central narrative of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

• Adrian Leverkühn (from Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus): "A swelling cantilena that numbs the mind"

• Robert Frobisher (from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas): “A rumbling cello lit by explosive triplets. Silence punctuated by breakneck mousetraps."

• Peter Els (from Richard Powers’s Orfeo): “A vast prolation canon—copies of a single germ, sped up or slowed down, pitched at various intervals. The tangle of lines gives way to pulsing chords."

• Johannes Wright and the Orchestra (from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Memory of Whiteness): “Music leads the mind thorugh starry night.”