The historical-fiction author Dan Brown has so many readers that Time magazine once credited him with single-handedly keeping the publishing industry afloat. But he has his haters, and they have nothing to do with the Christian denominations who saw his 2003 mystery thriller, The Da Vinci Code, as an attack on the Catholic Church.
Brown is a composer as well as a blockbuster author. Orchestral timpanists, who literally beat his drums, have an issue with Bouncing Kangaroo, a lively number from his Wild Symphony. The piece requires them to trigger the “boing” kettle-drum effect commonly used in cartoons by use of a foot pedal, over and over again.
“They have to play every quarter note for three-and-a-half minutes, and if you’re doing that you better have very strong calves,” says Brown, on the phone from Costa Rica. “In fact, when we recorded Bouncing Kangaroo, the timpanist had cramps.”
Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, but it cannot relieve a muscle ache.
Brown is taking a break from working through the final edits on his latest novel (featuring the Robert Langdon character from The Da Vinci Code and four other books) to appear with the Sistema New Brunswick Children’s Orchestra for its performances of his Wild Symphony in Moncton and St. Andrews on June 11 and 12. More than 100 children from across the province are involved.
The Wild Symphony project consists of not only symphonic music, but an illustrated picture book, poetry and a phone app. The book came out in 2020. Two dozen musical portraits drawn from the animal kingdom, from Bouncing Kangaroo to Wondrous Whale to Brilliant Bat, are featured.
The symphony has been performed by orchestras worldwide, including the Seattle Symphony, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and, this spring, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Calgary Philharmonic. In New Brunswick during three school concerts and one evening presentation for the general public, Brown makes a rare orchestral appearance as the production’s on-stage narrator.
“I can’t travel all over the world to read these,” says Brown. “But for what Sistema New Brunswick is doing, I would have travelled there from anywhere.”
In 2009, the New Brunswick Youth Orchestra (NBYO) partnered with El Sistema, a music-education program founded in 1975 by Venezuelan educator, musician and activist José Antonio Abreu. Sistema New Brunswick now engages more than 1,100 children daily in Moncton, Saint John, Richibucto, Edmundston, Miramichi, Hillsborough, Tracadie, the Elsipogtog First Nation and Fredericton.
Ken MacLeod, president and CEO of the NBYO and founder of Sistema NB, came across Wild Symphony two years ago on social media. He saw that the composer had a highly common name.
“I thought that it couldn’t be Dan Brown the author,” MacLeod says. “What caught my eye was something described as his personal passion, which was to get kids and families in halls to hear live orchestral music. In an instant, I thought, ‘What a great fit for us.’ ”
Brown’s passion project was decades in the making. He started working on it in 1986, after graduating from Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he double majored in English and Spanish, played squash and sang in the glee club.
“I was out for a walk one day in the woods and heard a bunch of bull frogs,” Brown says. “It sounded almost like a fugue.”
Using a sequencer and synthesizer, he set 10 poems for 10 animals to music. He made copies of the text at a Kinkos store and sold cassettes at a local bookstore. “When they were gone, they were gone,” he says. “I never gave it another thought.”
From those cassettes, fast forward to a publicity tour for his 2017 thriller, Origin. An interviewer pulled out a copy of the initial, homemade Wild Symphony purchased on eBay and read one of the poems.
“It was,” recalls the author, “quite a surprise.”
Soon after, Brown’s publishers in China and the United States wanted to publish Wild Symphony. Brown went back to work on the blast from the past, writing 10 more poems and music pieces, arranging it all for orchestra. The children’s poetry book tells the story of Maestro the Mouse as the rodent gathers a group of musical friends from the animal kingdom to play in his orchestra.
The accompanying music is lively and colourful.
“I like big, bombastic music,” says the author/composer. “I loved Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 when I was a little kid. I believed I could conduct the fourth movement, Ode to Joy, and I did – with a mixing spoon, in my living room.”
Paul McCartney once compared songwriting to solving a puzzle. “I just fiddle around and try and follow the trail, try and follow where it appears to be leading me,” said the Beatle. Brown, a mathematician’s son whose novels are treasure hunts often involving cryptography, sees music as numbers.
“Mathematics is a symbolic language, as is music.”
He also considers the songwriting process as similar to writing books in the attention to structure and pacing. A writer can no more have a car chase in every scene than a composer can place a triple forte in every measure.
“Dynamics and tension and release are part of successful music and successful storytelling,” Brown says. “In that way, musicians and authors have a natural synergy.”
