Reading this short novel radically impacted C. Within the realm of faerie, he begins to build a completely different way of engaging with the world and to adopt a whole new understanding of honor and even of self. I hope that for those who haven’t read the book the music will encourage you to do so, and for those who have read it the music will help you to see some of the beauty I see in Phantastes.What happens when a self-assured university student comes home as a “chivalric” English gentleman, ready to assume responsibility for his sisters and the family estate, but somehow wakes up the next morning as a stranger in Fairyland?Ĭome join us on an adventure in which the young Anodos is forced to reassess his assumptions about both himself and others–and eventually to deconstruct his entire concept of a hero. Partly because music and Anodos’ gift of song figure largely throughout the book providing ample opportunity to weave music with the story, and partly because there is just so much magic, beauty, and otherworldliness in the story, making it a deep fountain from which to draw inspiration. This story, as I’ve come to see after spending so much time with it, works particularly well as source material for a concept album.
It wasn't too long after that I decided Phantastes was the book I needed to put to music. When I read Phantastes the first time, I was so enchanted by the Beech tree that I found myself writing her song to Anodos. Reading MacDonald gets me high on beauty like nothing else.įor a number of years I've been wanting to produce a concept album that's based on a book for a variety of different reasons foremost I think that context and story make music significantly more meaningful and beautiful. I believe it was reading The Great Divorce that brought me to Phantastes I remember thinking to myself "I like Lewis, and Lewis seems to really like this fellow George MacDonald, so I'll have to check out MacDonald sometime." When I did end up picking up Phantastes, I had a similar experience to that of Lewis: a baptism of my imagination, and after finishing it I proceeded to devour all of his fairy tales that I could get my hands on.
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