The song for the theme of Light was created by me and was rearranged with the involved musicians during the sessions. The aim of this section is to share a big hope for individuals, society and earth to recover well as well as hope for the future and its importance for trees. The lyrics goes as follow:
Once you realize that everything grows
and what you just need is to look at the sky with a different eye.
When your eyes can see all the magic within,
shining inside telling you just need some time, it will grow well.
At the end of this theme it was clear for the audience to respond in a clapping. This break was created musically and visually through the stage lights (listen to the end of the video Darkness and Light).
Darkness and light is reflecting about different realities of pollution, illness, nature, colours and wishes. As Prem reflects after the experiences shared:
In Nepal you were able to experience in real life how people are destroying nature, the air pollution of Kathmandu and how bad the river was. And suddenly when we went outside of Kathmandu, you realised how beautiful nature is. Within Nepal, there are so many places which are naturally alive and very beautiful. And most significantly, how people were connected with this nature. I remember you were writing about all these phenomena and there was something going on inside you for a long time. (Email conversation, June 2020)
This theme is representing so much Nepal, as well as our previous collaboration. Prem and I started to collaborate during our studies in Denmark in 2018. At that time, and especially on mothers day, we created a song that was titled Amaama (A mix of two words that both means mother in different languages with different accents). Later, it was in a session in Kallio Kuninkala (the Sibelius Academy facility for intensive workshops) when together with other musicians we recollected those musical memories and introduced them as part of this theme.
Because all the songs were interconnected I started by playing the previous section of Stages of Growth. Prem heard the link and proposed that the first groove of the song Amaama would be a great option. As I answered to Prem:
‘You made a beautiful relation of the mother’s role when we are facing some illness’ (Email conversation, June 2020).
This is a great example on how the session was emerging from the interactions with others and specially from our previous collaborations and band working. Prem’s idea was discussed, agreed by others and from there we continued building that section.
Darkness started, as you can hear in the video, as a dialogue that was interpreted for three of us, Zane, Noora and me, and was linking the themes Stages of Growth and Darkness. It was inspired by a music theater piece called ‘Time with people’ from Tim Parkinson’s (2015) in which we participated together with Zane as part of our studies. This dialogue was improvised and later fixed by Zane and me. Interestingly it connects with sharings from Zane and her Latvian traditions and the important role of the mother forest.
We worked on exploring the two different feels of the rhythm in five of Amaama that was creating the two different textures (Figure 1.10). The first groove was aiming to share memories of a green land as well as respect for the mothers (Amaama lyrics). The groove number 2, defined by the darkness character of the solos, was describing processes, such as unrespectful processes towards the trees and mother earth. (Listen minute 1:00 in the video) And this connects with the two first parts of the first structure (Figure 1.9) while the third one of hope would represent the next part of Light.
4 Darkness and light
In this theme, there are seven band members and they all had different roles during the process of creation. The theme Darkness and Light is understood as one, but clearly has two different musical parts one for Darkness and one for Light. In the first attempt to build a structure, there were three different parts (See Figure 1.9) that were connected with my memories of the field trip in Nepal and so much influenced by reading an article from Kathmandu and pollution titled ‘Trees could save Kathmandu. But can Kathmandu save its trees?’ (Taylor, 2019).
