Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch: On Combining Her Passions to Write a Guidebook

Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch earned a bachelor’s degree and Master of Music from the Juilliard School and has performed as a classical violinist in top venues around the world including Carnegie Hall, Boston Symphony Hall, and the Ravinia, Verbier, La Jolla Summerfest, and Aspen Music festivals. She has toured with such legendary artists as jazz trumpeter Chris Botti and Sir James Galway. Declassified is her first book. Find her on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

In this post, Arianna discusses discusses how her life’s passions led to her guidebook-memoir hybrid, Declassified, what surprised her in the publishing process, and more!

Name: Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch
Literary agent: Becky Sweren, Aevitas Creative Management
Book title: Declassified: A Low-Key Guide to the High-Strung World of Classical Music
Publisher: Putnam/Penguin Random House
Release date: October 11, 2022
Genre/category: Guidebook-Memoir Hybrid
Elevator pitch for the book: offers a backstage tour of the industry and equips you for every listening scenario, covering: the 7 main compositional periods (even the soul-crushingly depressing Medieval period), a breakdown of the instruments and their associated personality types (apologies to violists and conductors), what it’s like to be a musician at the highest level (it’s hard), how to steal a Stradivarius (and make no money in the process), and when to clap during a live performance (also: when not to). Declassified cheekily demystifies the world of High Art while making the case that classical music matters, perhaps now more than ever.By combining a charming voice and compelling story with informative and often hilarious explications, Declassified cheekily demystifies the world of High Art while making the case that classical music matters, perhaps now more than ever.

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It seems so obvious now that I’d write a book like this—because it’s really the culmination of the major passions and influences in my life: My mom is a writer; my dad is a pianist; I’ve always loved to write, and I’ve spent most of my years studying music and building toward a career as a concert violinist. Writing (short stories mostly) was one of the things I did for fun on all my tours.

But actually, it did require quite a lot of prompting for me to get here—because at first, I was so stuck on the idea of becoming a violinist that I couldn’t imagine writing professionally—and later, once I did start to write more “seriously,” I was stuck on the idea of writing fiction.

Even when I was at Juilliard, though, I was always searching for ways to bring classical music to a wider audience. I remember brainstorming with my “Business of Music” professor about how I might achieve this; back then I wanted to make an ensemble blockbuster movie about a competition—to showcase the less-seen side of the industry, which I think is simultaneously more normal and more shocking than most people would expect.

Eventually, I started to realize that I wasn’t happy on the performer’s track and writing became an escape. Much of what I’ve published is music-related, but much of what I spent my time working on was more escapist. I wrote a whole first-person novel set in 1920s England—about a missing archaeologist and an Egyptian curse and a fancy-dress ball—it’s kind of a P.G. Wodehouse rip-off—but the only person I ever showed it to was my mom.

Anyway, there were a few key moments, some of which I get into in Declassified, that sort of led me to the idea of writing a guidebook. After I quit the violin and got some distance and perspective, I started toying with some funny short stories about musicians. Then I started working on a longer novel about a violinist, with that same goal of humanizing and demystifying classical music in mind, and suddenly I realized a guidebook like this—with lots of voice and plenty of disarming anecdotes—might actually be the most direct way of going about it.

It will have been two years and 10-ish months from the time I started thinking about this project to pub day. And, yes, the idea definitely evolved!

The proposal my agent and I worked on together actually had a lot do with food. There was much less of my story, and there was this food metaphor woven throughout the sample chapters and supplementary material. The whole memoir aspect of the book only came in after I started working with my editor, Michelle. (Each chapter of the book, as it is now, is framed by anecdotes from my life, and they’re mostly chronological.)

I expected the editing process to be more aggressive. You see these movies where the evil publisher comes in and basically rewrites and rebrands everything—so I thought, when I handed in my manuscript, that it would undergo a huge transformation.

But my editor was tremendously respectful. She did want to take out some sections and she had some great ideas for tightening, etc., but I was surprised at how much stayed the same.

My copy editor was also very restrained in her corrections. I’d read Dreyer’s English and so I was expecting all of this red ink everywhere—especially because the writing is so voice-y (and, therefore, not always perfectly grammatical). But while she invested a lot of work in fact-checking and formatting the book’s many musical titles and so on, she mostly left my writing alone.

What this meant was that I actually started second guessing a lot of my choices quite late in the process; stupidly, I hadn’t thought of them as being “final” when I’d handed them in.

The whole thing was a surprise! I’d written that first-person novel, but that had been for fun, without any kind of organizing timeline. I definitely didn’t have a reliable “process” or anything in place when I started working on Declassified. So, I felt like I was just figuring everything out as I went.

I think the thing I was least prepared for was how busy my mind got sometimes. There were so many ideas swirling around—so many choices—and this was partly because, for the first time, I was writing something I knew people were going to read. (I’d written all my earlier articles and short stories without having that guarantee.) My brain was much more anxious, I guess, as it tried to calculate the best approach.

I hope my book gives readers the feeling that they have a right to this music—that they’re welcome and even on the inside—that their opinions and thoughts about these pieces are valid. I hope they also see, from the tone of the book and the various anecdotes I’ve included in it, that classical music isn’t a museum piece or anything to be revered from afar, but a thing to immerse yourself in and to experience in whichever way feels most comfortable.

I hope it awakens curiosity—or, for those who already had that curiosity but didn’t know where to turn, lights a path (or several possible paths) toward listening. I also hope it will entertain!

Remember to hydrate. I don’t know!

I’d say “take breaks to free up your creativity”—because I sometimes sat there for hours trying to crack open a passage and then I’d stop and take a shower and suddenly the solution would appear to me—but I feel like that’s not good advice for everyone. For me it is—because work ethic isn’t an issue and I’m pretty obsessive.

But there are probably lots of other people who just need to sit themselves down and put in the fricking work. Hydration feels like good advice for everyone.

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