Composing ‘Tsunami’

By Candace Long, NLAPW President (2014-2016), Member-at-Large

At 13, I began writing songs, strumming a ukulele that fit my small hands. I accepted the composer’s pen and spent the next 27 years developing my craft as a Nashville songwriter.

In 1985, the voice of a young Black woman auditioning for a musical with no Black actors stopped me cold — and an inner voice redirected my pen: “Write a musical for undiscovered talent like hers.”
Though the musical premiered in 1989 to racially mixed audiences and rave reviews, reverse discrimination shut down efforts to market it further. The pen was silenced for 11 years.

By 2000, times had changed and doors were open to restage the musical. Our premiere date: the ill-fated September 11, 2001. The music inside me died. My pen was broken.

After three years of seeking God in silence, I heard a new voice that pierced my grief and awakened the composer’s pen once more. While attending a meeting of the NLAPW Atlanta Branch, the late letters and music member Frances Patton Statham recited a poem she had just written following the tsunami that had devastated Sri Lanka in 2004. The room fell silent.

What I “heard” in her poem overwhelmed me — overlapping layers of raw emotions: the horrifying crescendos of Earth’s eruption slowly overtaking the laughter of people innocently playing in the surf, leaving behind the eerie stillness of death.

I was moved to compose “Tsunami” to somehow interpret musically one of nature’s most horrific attacks on humanity.

When I studied the poem, I conceived the music as four separate movements — each reflecting a different aspect of the horror surrounding that fateful day. Each movement was composed, recorded, and mixed using my keyboard’s 16-track sequencer, then imported into Pro Tools, the digital audio workstation I used at the time.

Pro Tools’ volume mode offered me freedom to produce certain effects, such as the audio collision of movements #1 and #2 reflecting people frolicking in the ocean, oblivious to the eerie rumbling deep within.

Learn more about Candace Long at candacelong.com.

Tsunami
(The inspiration for the composition)
By Frances Patton Statham

Do not grieve for me

On wounded beach or ravaged sea,

Nor in the frond-stripped huts amid debris

Of broken dreams and sorrowed hearts;

 

Instead, look upward to the light

Of dazzling stars in moon-stirred night,

And know my soaring, winding flight

On zephyred wings as day departs.

 

Now I am one with earth and sky;

I am the love that will never die.

So take heed in remembrance of former things,

Yet sense the need that comfort brings

 

Of a world that continually sheds its sorrow,

In the keening promise of a new tomorrow.