I wrote and recorded this track as part of a composition course at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 2011. I felt drawn to writing a long piece about water, flooding, emotion, grief, eventually peace and acceptance. The track is 10 minutes and 20 seconds long and it is based around a Chinese poem from the Six Dynasties era of the same name. The song is about a young woman who looks for an island that no longer exists where her lover used to live, and around the song there is a story of a great flood with tsunami sirens and other sounds.

I worked with Chiara Terzuolo who plays the Japanese koto zither and has lived in Japan. It was very spooky because the first day that we started to rehearse together the massive tsunami of March 2011 had just struck Japan, it was a terrible disaster with nearly 16 thousand deaths. We both felt very connected to it through the music we were working on about floods, love, heartbreak. It was also a reminder of the terrible 2004 Boxing Day tsunami where 250 thousand people lost their lives in Indonesia which is a very special place in my life. However the song is mainly positive I hope. Below you will find a description of some of the Japanese and Sundanese (West Javanese) scales used, as well as musical and recording decisions I made. N.B. for musicians or those with an appetite for detail!

“Song of the Western Islet”
The form of the piece is unconventional but not over-complex, and was designed with the idea that it could be performed live only with myself and a koto player with a drone and sound effects backing track. The overall theme of the piece is water and drones. One could classify this loosely as in “rondo” form as A-B-A1-C1-A2-C2-A. However a drone is played through the piece, and each “A” section is a variety of drones with improvised live sounds, of voice, keyboards, electronics, or guitar, sounds performed live.
The underlying constant layer is an experiment in drones, which lies mostly in the background during the B, C1 and C2 segments and becomes the main focus before, after, and in between the three over-laid acoustic performances, which mostly harmonise with the background drones. This drone layer is made on keyboards, also there are pre-recorded water drones, siren drones, and rhythmically repeated whispered words as a drone. Most of these were performed and recorded by myself but two of the water drones and a siren drone were downloaded from a copyright free sample site (freesound.com). All the drones were manipulated electronically through effects pedals and adding extra effects, reversal, special panning, pitch changing, time stretching, in the mixing process. On top of this constant layer there are three segments of acoustic music (B, C1, C2) that are self-contained but also belong to the whole piece with its theme of water.
The first segment is an opening piece written for koto. This was written in the ancient form of the Japanese Hirajoshi (平調子) pentatonic scale. Although notated in 4/4 timing, the tempo is loose and open to interpretation by the player. It was notated for Chiara Terzuolo, my koto player in a combination of western notation and tabulation (see score). This koto segment is written in A-B-A1 form with some variation in the final “A” section. The idea behind this originally was a koto player with a waterfall drone, suggesting a Japanese garden, followed by other variations on water such as floods and the sea. This water piece was conceived before the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Since then some adjustments were made to make the piece less cataclysmic, in order not to upset others, but to inspire healing.
The first experimental drone section comes in after the koto piece. There is a rhythmic ostinato in the whispered “Dreams, I'm dreaming” section. The idea of using whispers, came to me when recording Chiara. I had whispered something to her during the course of the recording and this turned out to be very much louder than expected. I then became interested in the concept of relative volumes between silence and loud sounds. The whispers had to be loud enough to carry over the drones, but the fact that they occupy a higher frequency range to the low drones enabled them to cut through without much amplification. I added reverb and delay effects to the whispers, panning the three layers to separate them in space from each other and the other layers. In order to create some variety of timbre I also added “ice cream truck” type sounds to synchronise with one of the whispering layers. The repeated whispered phrases are meant to suggest a dream-like relaxed state of mind, and to link into the next section which starts with the lyric “dreaming of the blossoms snowing”.
The backing drone is made up of layers of electronic keyboard sounds, modulating and sliding around an “E” note. I used a “wah” pedal, combined with chained effects, to create a pulsating drone with some harmonics, then this was put through more effects on the computer such as slow stereo rotate panning which makes the sound reverberate around the room, to create the illusion of an “Aum” meditation chant.
The next section carries the first two verses and a chorus to the song I wrote “Song of the Western Islet”( Part One). The idea of having the song was to have a “stand-alone” piece of music that was autonomous and yet still reflected themes and musical ideas from the whole work. The words were adapted from an anonymous classic Chinese poem of the same name from the era of the “Six Dynasties”, about a woman who searches for her lover in the sea, on an island that has disappeared. It is a dream-like poem and suited both the feel I wanted to achieve in the piece and the concept of water, grief and being lost at sea.
The guitar is tuned to a Sundanese kacapi zither tuning, (String 1. E: 2. B 3.F# 4. E 5.B 6.E), the sung melody and melodic improvisation on guitar in between verses and choruses use a scale for the Sundanese bowed tarawangsa. Both of these were taken from the key to a transcription made by Catherine Falk. The sung melody starts high to reflect the melodic outlines of Sundanese vocalists and suling players who always start their songs high up and then allow the melody to travel down the scale.
The harmony on the guitar is simple, using mainly barré chords in the verse and modulating the key in the chorus. The timing of the guitar playing is additive (1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2) with extra melodic improvisations and vocal parts in 4/4. The guitar passages in between the sung parts are semi- improvised. There are some repeated motifs in the guitar playing, the principal one being d# ~e e followed by f# ~ g# g#, with “~” representing an ascending “hammer-on” ligado. The open strings create their own type of drone that later harmonises with the underlying electronic /keyboard drones. The improvised lead guitar played on top of the arpeggiated open string “drone” was inspired by either the oud or a sitar single melodic lines played over a tanpura drone. However my guitar ornamentation is simpler to fit in with the finger-picking on the open strings and does not follow a set scale or raga.
The next section is a further exploration of harmonising drones. It is intended to represent floods and nature threatening to take control of our destinies, therefore the mood and texture are heavy. I recorded or downloaded the samples. As well as the keyboard drone, I have used one sample of a brook, and made several versions, treating them through filters, to emphasise high, low of middle range of frequencies. I then added different types of chorus, which at times makes the brook sound like people talking. A Hawaiian tsunami siren was also used, the pitch was changed to match underlying drones, the volume was edited so the track would not overload, and as both a wider stereo field and slow 360 degree rotate to the sound were applied. Although the volume on the siren is low it still cuts across the other sounds.
Every thirty seconds there is a gong. This is one of the SOAS Javanese Gamelan gongs. The original recording was muffled and in a non-western higher tuning. It was necessary to play around with the pitches, reverberations, panning and other elements to get the right sound. I also improvise on the electronic keyboards with random voices and wah pedal, this created some dissonance, so I put this low in the mix in order to keep an overall harmonic effect. This will also be experimented with live at the concert in between song parts. Due to having seven layers in similar frequency range, the texture is a bit “muddy”, I therefore panned and filtered the tracks moderately so they could be perceived individually.
The next and final section is part 2 of the song, a lighter mood prevails. Layered over the song and the guitar improvisations, soothing natural sounds have been placed, such as seagulls and the gentle lapping of waves. These had to be edited to make them quieter and less piercing, to fit with the mood. The background drones come to the forefront, before fading in both volume and suddenly cutting speed. Although the song is about grief, the poem places this in a picturesque dream-world and so the mood of the piece is also meant to be calm and colourful.