I worked on this composition as a part of my class project, "Costa Rica Landslide Awarenss Project" and it was the first time make a serious composition after almost 20 years (if I remember correctly)! .
To explain a bit about the background why the idea of composition popped up, there was a severe landslide occured in Escazu, Costa Rica (near its capital San Jose) in early November and that killed 28 people, 4,900 people were displaced.
The class decided to cover this natural disaster with the means of media, since we major in Media and Conflict Studies. We already have quite a few people in our class who used to work as a journalists, and they all showed their professionalism which really impressed me. That made me think that I also would like to contribute this project with my profession.
This is the consequesnce of our class project on the "Costa Rica Landslide Awareness Project", please have a look! You can find various interesting perspectives through reading them.
Regarding the music composition, the main aim I put was to connect our class project with the local Costa Rican people.
First of all, I needed to feel this tragedy with my heart not my head. Ingmar and Tatiana's pictures helped me to know what really happened to people in Ezucas, and feel how people are suffering from it.
Then, I extracted some of the essence of the world music that I asked the classmates to send me in advance and synthesise these elements to the basic melody that came from my impression when looking at the pictures.
Therefore, you may find some parts of the melody sounds like ethnical music with "the 4th and 7th lacking scale" from Icelandic music, "glissando" from French traditionl music, and "tremolo" from Pakistani traditional music. It was also advantage for the cello to play "glissando" and "tremolo" because the cello as an instrument is good at describing these technics. This composition was composed for cello and piano duet, needless to say.
Let me also note technical aspects.
The composition was set as h-moll (B minor). Firstly, 4 bars of motive (A) that came from the impression from the pictures was made, and it was expanded to another 4 bars (A'). Then, in order to transit the tune to D-dur (D major), 7th code was implemented (in this case, it was A7). 2 motives of 4 bars in D-dur were followed (B and B'), and it transitted back to the initial tune: h-moll (A'').
The second part was made for piano, and the cello which played main melody for the first part now becomes the accompaniment for the piano's main melody. Starting with h-moll, it transitted to g-moll. After all, it came back to initial h-moll as the third part of the composition, and had 2 motives of 4 bars (A''' and A''''), it ended with the picardy terminate in order to show the hope at the end.
The flow of the tune was
h-moll (B minor) --> D-dur (D major) -->h-moll (B minor) -->g-moll (G minor) --> h-moll (B minor) --> H-dur (B major)
The flow of the code was
Bm-->A-->Fsharpm7-->Bm-->Bm-->A-->Fsharpm7-->Bm
Bm-->A-->Fsharpm7-->Bm-->Bm-->A-->Fsharpm7-->Bm
A-->D-->A-->A-->D-->D-->A-->Fsharpm7-->Bm
Bm-->A-->Fsharpm7-->Bm-->Bm-->A-->Fsharpm7-->Bm Bm-->Em-->Fsharp-->Bm-->Fsharp7-->Gm-->Cm-->Dm-->Gm-->Dm-->Gm-->Dm
Gm-->Gm-->Cm-->Gm-->Gm-->Cm-->D7-->Gm-->Cm-->Gm-->Cm-->D-->D7-->Gm-->
Gm-->Gm-->Cm-->Gm-->Gm-->Cm-->D7-->Gm-->Cm-->Gm-->Bflat-->Emdim7
D-->Eflat-->F-->Fsharp7
Bm-->A-->Fm7-->Bm-->Bm-->A-->Fm7-->Bm-->B
