The Bassanda Podcast is a space for riffing upon history and upon speculative fiction, for world-building, for comedy and dialog and badinage, for bad jokes, historical ironies, and the imagination of a kinder, gentler, richer and more creative universe. It starts with Bassanda, a mythical nation that originates in the fertile musical and ancillary imaginations of my friends Roger Landes and Chipper Thompson (find their links below), and then it opens outward. When, as a friend of the General and the Reverend, I was first playing with the idea of a fictional alternate-universe identity for my own TTU Celtic Ensemble, I realized that perhaps I didn’t have to invent a world, if the lads were willing to let me borrow Bassanda. They were, and here we are.
The first novel set in this universe is THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE FOR BASSANDA; the 2nd and 3rd are BASSANDA AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION (Eastern Theatre and Antipodes, WWI, 1917-1921) and NEW WORLD A-COMING (the USA West Coast and Bassanda, in the Progressive 1930s and 1960s)
I began with material I’d authored as part of the fictional backstory for the Elegant Savages Orchestra, the alter ego of my own Texas Tech University Celtic Ensemble, and in a future episode I’ll have more to say about why I wanted to do that. But for right now, suffice it to say that the ESO’s backstory (and the alternate-biographies I wrote for those student participants who wanted them) was kind of the birth of my corner of the Bassanda Multiverse.
Practically speaking, the ESO/Bassanda frame provided a kind of rationale for why a “Celtic” ensemble might play a much wider range of repertoire, on a much wider range of instruments, than is expected in the folkloric traditions. Perhaps in a future pod I’ll talk about that decision–the decision to write for a full “folk orchestra” of winds, brass, strings, percussion, SATB vocals, and dancers–but for right now I’ll also just observe that Texas audiences love dress up (see, the phenomenon of the Renaissance Festival), and that “the music of Bassanda” is/was no more or less of an invention than is the marketer’s term “Celtic” itself.
As I’ve said on the podcast, I’ve been inspired by several different kinds of world-builders, and I’m happy to talk to some of them in the future episodes, but my root inspiration is probably the historical fiction novels of George MacDonald Fraser. I loved the stories, the characterizations (Victorian racism and misogyny duly noted), but what I really loved was the way that Fraser used the conventions of (a) historical fiction–e.g., fictional characters embedded into known historical contexts–and (b) scholarly and journalistic writings–the footnotes in the Flashman books, for example, are a pretty damned good education in the historical and social contexts in which they’re set.
Beyond that, there’s the idea of building imagined spaces in which learning can take place, whether teaching undergraduate music students about the contingency which led to the premiere of Satie’s Parade in WWI Paris, or which might (in an alternately contingent timeline) have led away from that event. As my Vernacular Music Center colleague (and citizen of Bassanda) Roger Landes astutely observed, as teachers–especially as teachers of vernacular traditions within the confines of the neoliberal university, “we create immersive environments as spaces in which learning can happen.”
As we’ve already established on the pod, for GREAT TRAIN RIDE, the first and most primary 1906 POV characters is Cecile Lapin, a young ethnographer and translator, who is joined on the Ride by the Bassandan assassin Ismail Durang, who begins as her protector, and becomes her lover. Theirs will be an epic love story and adventure, but there are also heartbreaks along the way, because that is how history works.
Others who will enter the tale include:
James Lincoln Habjar-Lawrence; he’s a scion of New England clipper ship money: there’s a bit of a thread there to my own childhood, and the clipper captains who built Salem and Gloucester’s wealth–but who also brought back, to the New England Transcendentalists, some of the first North American awareness of Hinduism and Buddhism. There’s a marvelous book chronicling this history of transcultural encounter, How the Swans Came to the Lake, by Rick Field RIP. So, in James Lincoln, there’s some of those 19th century “scholars of the East” and proto-Buddhists: a little Thoreau, a little Emerson, and more than a dash of William James. His back-story, which we encounter as an entry, in GREAT TRAIN RIDE, in the Dictionar of Bassandan National Biography, helps explain his extended family’s circuitous route toward a Bassanda connection. We also learn that, though he is a father, he’s also a widower, and that there is sorrow in his past. He’ll join Cecile and Ismail on the Ride.
We also meet another member of the Bassanda brain trust: the woman scholar, adventurer, and freedom fighter Algeria Main-Smith: another Anglo with some ties to the late 19th C Transcendentalists, and an eastern explorer, but slightly less crazy or egocentric than the Theosophists who are her rough contemporaries. There were interesting, privileged, but simpatico Anglo scholars, folklorists, and advocates in this period, many of them women, who saw the study of Indigenous cultures as a way to circumvent the Ivory Tower’s glass ceilings. As is often the case with materials in the Correspondence, historical tales I’ve encountered in my musicologist / music historian “day job,” and in other projects (including a big one, about music, sound, colonialism, empire, and climate crisis, with my brother-in-scholarship Tom Irvine), have a way of finding themselves into the Multiverse as well. We subsequently learn–in passing, and not as a major plot point–that Algeria is gay.
There’s a tricky task for someone like me who wants to write from anything other than a white/male/cis POV: how the heck do I diversify the voices in the fiction in a way that avoids either appropriation or ventriloquism? It’s not simple, and I’m not sure it’s ever really solved, but one thing I continue to learn is to show experience rather than describe it–have characters (of whatever positionality) experience things, and feelings, rather saying them.
That becomes even more important, in these chapters, when we meet one more character, out of the timeline entirely: a young African American scholar and Vietnam combat vet named S. Jefferson Winesap (whose splendidly double-barrelled name comes courtesy of the Reverend Colonel). The goal in GREAT TRAIN RIDE is that eventually all those experiences, and timelines, will converge.
But if I’m going to play games with timeline–or time juxtapositions, electromagnetism, and quantum experience, then I need to set that up fairly soon as well; so Chapter 5 gives us both the scholar and combat vet S. Jefferson Winesap, and his meditations on the paranormal capacities of the 1952 photograph of the Bassanda National Radio Orchestra.
The other thing that I felt really needed to happen, by Chapter 4 in this narrative, is some kind of major action set-piece: something that could show the deadly danger that Cecile faces, and show the ruthless deadliness with which the Colonel, and Ismail, and Algeria, and one more protagonist can deploy in the face of that danger. And that’s where the tale picks up, after a late-night salon from which the Colonel and Cecile sally forth to walk home, through some of the dicier neighborhoods of 1906 Paris. That’s “Ambushed in Montparnasse.”
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Find Chapter 4, “Ambushed in Montparnasse,” here: https://open.substack.com/pub/smithscribe/p/the-great-train-ride-for-bassanda
And find Chapter 5, “Winesap on the ‘52 Photo,” here: https://smithscribe.substack.com/p/the-great-train-ride-for-bassanda-d88
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LINKS:
Chris Smith SFF serial fiction: www.smithscribe.substack.com
Roger Landes: www.rogerlandes.com
Chipper Thompson: www.chipperthompson.com
CONTACT:
Search #BassandaPodcast, send to BassandaPodcast@gmail.com, or find me @ChrisSmithMuso.