Piece 2: Firewall
I’m a lot happier with how this piece turned out, and I feel like what I’ve made is a finished product. If I had to describe it in three words, it would be “China meets Hendrix”.
This song’s main inspiration was the “Studio as a Musical Instrument” lecture, largely due to the discussion around that inspiring Brian Eno video. The moral was that everyone has something cool and unique inside them to tap into, and that got me thinking of what that was for me.So I thought to myself, what’s unique about me that I can write something about? The answer I came up with was the fact that I’m Chinese, but grew up in the UK, and so I wanted to reflect this fusion of the musical cultures I’ve been exposed to. I also came to the realisation my music has to be as live as possible; music from my heart will always have a strong element of performance, which allows an organic spontaneity that comes from not just playing your instrument, but almost also letting the music play itself, if that makes any sense.
The song has excerpts of the Chinese classic called ‘Yellow River’. It’s a song I played and loved as a kid learning piano, so I bought a new copy of the score and tried to integrate it into this composition. Luckily, the copy I bought also happened to contain a preface which talks about the very interesting background to the song, which ended up being one of the main sources of inspiration for the theme of the song as a whole. The sources for all below quotes come from the book I bought on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/3795771528, and Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood.
The piece is based on a patriotic poem by Guang Weiran that was written to inspire the Chinese to “resist their Japanese invaders”. The river is the “cradle of Chinese civilisation” in the same way that the Nile was the cornerstone of Ancient Egypt; it “symbolizes the spirit of the nation”. During the second Sino Japanese War, June 1938, the river itself was even flooded by the Chinese to halt the Japanese forces, in what’s been called “the largest act of environmental warfare in history” (although it should be noted that this was a very controversial move, one which my Dad says was a mistake that cost more lives than it was worth). The composition was completed shortly after, in April 1939, and is widely regarded as the composer Xian Xinghai’s most important work. It’s a very patriotic song, and this sense of national identity made it hugely popular within China.
Decades later, In the 70s, the piece saw a revival within the Chinese general population, and at the same time western music was banned because of the cultural revolution. Pianists especially suffered, as “the piano was suspect in the eyes of the ruling Communists, who saw it as a bourgeois instrument”. To help get around this, the Central Philharmonic Society of China invited a musician’s collective to prepare a piano concerto based on the piece, allowing the piano to “enter the official world of Chinese music through was was effectively the back door”.
So in a way the song acted as a protest against the regime of the government at the time, and after some thinking I saw the parallels inside the modern day, with an equivalent being the internet censorship in China, known as the ‘Great Firewall of China’. My favourite live performance of all time is Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock, and I decided to make my song have a meaning in a similar way, using Yellow River as the catalyst instead. I’m hoping that it ends up telling the story of an uprising and battle that gets ‘censored’ in the dying moments.
I used excerpts of the concerto within the start and end sections of the piece. They’re taken from the second movement, my favourite, but are actually my own arrangement. This is because the best bits of the movement (in my opinion) are the sections that the orchestra plays, and not part of the piano score. I also arranged it in the key of D major for a cultural reason being that classical chinese instruments like the guzheng are tuned to play only notes in the D major pentatonic scale; this also works well for the guitar, as drop D lends itself very well to heavy rock music, which is exactly what I’m after later in the song.
Half way through the first piano section, I move into my own melody, and at that point I start mixing in a little bit of guitar feedback and also some found sound. The sound is actually taken from a video of the recent Hong Kong protests against the government, which contains a gunshot and the resulting chaos seen in the streets. I positioned the gunshot just beforethe big growing note that acts as the transition into the meaty guitar section of the song.
The mega heavy guitar part has the same notes as the piano melody, but are played in a more upbeat rhythm; I really like it when musical ideas are used in different contexts like this (close to a leitmotif), so I did it myself inside the same song. There are 2 electric guitar parts which are separated by the left and right channels, and also EQ’d to give them their own separate space in the mix. I’m hoping it works as a kind of metaphor for a battle or struggle between 2 sides of a conflict.
I got the tone by running my electric guitar through an MXR Micro Amp boost pedal and then a Fuzz Face (the order is important; running a boost into a fuzz makes it go nuts). I then ran this straight into the audio interface inside the main computer in the music tech labs, to play back loud and proud through the 4 speakers in the corners. This way I recorded straight into the interface, which really suited me because I didn’t have to wear headphones when recording along to another part as there was no microphone to worry about bleeding into the overdub. The whole section is also partly inspired by a song by Jake Shimabukuro called ‘Third Stream’ (link: https://youtu.be/wAbWVQQoYcM) where the climax at the end builds upon a repeated riff.
You’ll notice that feedback is a big theme in the piece as well, and that is completely due to how good it sounded through the speakers in the room. I spent a fun day finding the right spots in the room where the guitar would sing for me to record some cool feedback noises. It’s a very Hendrix idea, and I love it because it feels alive; to me it sounds like an organic energy that you can’t really replicate anywhere else, and it’s different for every room or set of speakers. As a side note, the ‘roar’ of the guitar before the main riff comes in is actually supplemented by audio of a real lion roaring to make it sound as menacing as possible, which was inspired by the fireworks idea used by Jon Hopkins in ‘Abandon Window’.
It then fades back into an excerpt of yellow river on piano again, but this time for the very last couple of bars it also transitions into the Chinese national anthem, with the bitcrusher effect added, which represents the digital grip that China is placing on media. Just as it becomes almost completely smothered, the piece ends on a single repeated note, which is played in the rhythm of SOS in morse code, to reflect the music ‘trapped’ inside attempting to get out.I’m pretty happy with the result and I hope it tells the story it’s trying to.
The one thing I’d maybe change would be to play and record the piano part live, but the Yamaha midi piano in Cubase really does sound surprisingly good already. It’s a composition that’s become pretty personal, and hopefully it shows through to create something unique that shows what music means to me.
willplayforlove 