Folk music has always given me a deeply queasy uneasiness. It's not the woollens, or the beards, or the homeliness. It's a sense of a deeper sickness - a need in the folky to return to a lost utopia. An older, better, happier place of low technology and simple elemental honesty. No cars, no iPhones, no plastic. Also no confusing multi-culturalism, no votes for women, no antibiotics. No health and safety, unions, NHS or child help-line. A craving for the sickly, warm glow of ignorant nostalgia for a time and place never experienced but enshrined in song and nationalism.

That being said there is an enormous store of beautiful folk music that has been collected over the years and much of it telling tales of the hardship of life in the past. Some of that hardship is taken to the point of horror with all the adherent superstition of my poor uneducated forebears.

After a number of months on the lookout for an English folksong or folk story that I could retell I found The Drowned Lover in Cecil J Sharp's seminal collection from 1916 One Hundred English Folk Songs.

                The piece had an immediate impact on me on two levels.

Firstly the harmony is quite unusual for English music of the period. It's in the Dorian mode rather than a major or minor key. I've always found this mode particularly evocative and it has appeared frequently in British post-war popular music - for example at least 50% of Joy Division's music is in the Dorian mode. This mode also has much harmonic freedom built into it - it is very easy and natural working within this mode to shift into much more "modern" and dissonant harmony, something not lost on Miles Davis and John Coltrane for instance.

Secondly, as a native of Liverpool, the subject matter of the cruel sea resonates deeply with me. Generations of my family have suffered greatly on the Atlantic and I grew up with a grim-faced, wind-swept, salt-stung, numb-handed view out into the Irish Sea. Whatever mishap or hardship befalls a kid in Liverpool they are told: "Worse things happen at sea" - and they believe it.

                I based my setting of the tune on a central event - the moment the sailor is washed up on the shore. The first half of the piece is his drowning and floating in the sea - the second is his lover's recognition, lament and death.

In the first half the harmony has shifted away from the Dorian mode to the whole-tone scale. The 2 modes (or scales) have most of their notes in common but have very different expressive effects. The whole tone scale is unearthly in feel. There's no anchor for melody or harmony - it's all at sea. Our sailor drifts down through this harmonic cloud, and as he does so he remembers. To make these memories of the drowning man real I cast myself as the victim. Much of the music is made from a patchwork of tiny snippets of my music since I was a teenager, all modulating each other as if desperately trying to tune a radio to an emergency frequency. My violin playing, honed in the back ranks of the Merseyside Youth Orchestra, is twisted out of recognition as it drifts in and out of the seaweed under a sky of theremin seagulls. And then I hit land. Those few notes from the Whole Tone mode change to become the Dorian mode. The sea recedes and the low supernatural beat of mortality pulls the lover to the shore. As she recognizes her partly decomposed beloved the dry sound of the fiddle tells the tale of her lament. She dies so as not to be parted from him.

In many ways this is the most "filmic" of pieces in Horrorshow. It is packed with images and feelings but is not at all specific. Although I have a strong set of ideas and a narrative guiding the composition, an artist in another field could respond completely differently to the music - but equally validly

return to Intro

dir. Sandra Podmore