Azure Miles Records ~ The Music of Michael Robinson
Michael Robinson
The Girl In The Photograph (Varunapriya)
1. The Girl In The Photograph (Varunapriya) (2010) 40.29
Meruvina: piano, rotating drum, synthesizer, tanpura
| The Girl In The Photograph |
The
Girl In The Photograph is based on Varunapriya, the twenty-fourth mela of Karnatic
music.
The Saturday I began writing this piece was unusual. Late in the afternoon,
I went for a walk in my neighborhood, and came upon an intense demonstration
by Armenian-Americans protesting the genocide committed by Ottoman Turkey. That
evening, I watched a searing account of the My Lai Massacre on public television.
The Girl In The Photograph was completed in a few days, and while listening
to my finished piece, I couldn’t help noticing that the music seemed to
be about one of the two tragic events I had become much more aware of.
Checking online, I found a photograph of an image from the documentary that
had especially haunted me. It is one of the famous My Lai photographs showing
a small group of young and old women with young children moments before they
were shot to death. The expression on the face of the young girl on the right
shows simultaneous disbelief, bewilderment and terror. There was no time even
for her innocence to die before she was murdered. She looks like a child I might
see here in Los Angeles or Hawaii on any given day. All this led me to write
the following three paragraphs:
Music for the young
girl on the right together with the other victims. A reactive urge to bring
her and her family back to life and defeat this unimaginable form of horror
forever.
Alain Danielou, the great French-born writer on Indian music and culture, stated
towards the end of the twentieth-century that the world was imperiled primarily
because the merchant class, which controls the politicians, who control the
military, had become recklessly powerful to the point of self-annihilation,
as witness the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.
Are there any people alive who are brave and intelligent enough to reverse this
sequence?
The Girl In The Photograph is the eighth of nine alap compositions completed
in 2009 and 2010 that share the same musical setting for the through-composed
melodic voice sounded by a piano timbre. The setting consists of a dramatic
composite drone first used on Gangadhara (Bhupali) from 2002, combined with
a single tanpura, Indian bells, rotating drum and rainstick.
The
process of selecting which precise tone to use for shadja (tonic) for each particular
raga is fascinating for me. Indian musicians use one tonal center for their
entire life, but given the nature of the meruvina, I have used all twelve possibilities
in my work. It is an intuitive process that filters the melodic personality
of the raga together with my individual temperament, and I frequently am surprised
where shadja turns up. The Girl In The Photograph is based on E.
- Michael Robinson, September 2010, Los Angeles
© 2010 Michael Robinson All rights reserved
