Jerre Tanner

Jerre Tanner has spent most of his adult life in Hawai‛i composing music, contributing to the small but growing repertory of classical works based in Hawaiian culture. Several of these works have met with success including Boy with Goldfish recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra (1979, among the first digital recordings made), Suite from The Singing Snails Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra and Aukele (the Swimmer) Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra. But Tanner was also busy writing, his scenarios for operas from Hawaiian mythology being especially good preparation for the novels to come. In 2018 his first novel, Boy with Goldfish, emerged, the second volume in the series Children of the Godlight coming the next year. And then in 2019 he began the monumental The Novices, spreading over four books. Set in the ruins of 2170 Vietnam with death and extinction all around, the result of climate change, a handful of young Buddhist novices struggle to stay alive and keep faith. True to the author’s musical roots, this work is like a grand opera in four acts: sweeping and lyrical, full of deep feeling. One leaves the ‘opera house’ with the soaring lyric flights still resounding in one’s head.