Zorna

Zorna

For soprano saxophone, live electronics and three drummers

The first stimulus to the composition of Zorna came from a BBC television documentary by Tom Mangold shown last summer [1974], on the global structure of drug trafficking and addiction. I was particularly struck by the irony of the situation revealed in the film whereby people in high places contrive with immense profit to transform the crops of the Thai or Turkish peasantry into means of killing people on the streets of New York.

At about the same time as this film was shown I happened to make the acquaintance of the Turkish oboe (the zurna). Ever since then I knew I must write a piece in which these two stimuli would fuse into a single monochrome musical paroxysm. This eventually became Zorna.

I have always been stimulated by the act of transcribing unfamiliar musical phenomena. The transcriptions can serve as musical models which are subjected to very radical processes of transformation. In parts of Waste Land Music I refer to a piece of Japanese gagaku music. In Spectral to the song of the hump-backed whale, and in World Music to material from Ethiopia and Bali.

In the case of Zorna it is worth pointing out that the ‘source’ for my composition was a certain track on a Turkish record from the Argo ‘Living Tradition’ series. This is relevant here because I have not slavishly imitated it, as if I were putting an exhibit into a glass case. I have taken as a starting point the extraordinary ‘sound’ of this particular track rather than the music’s pitch structure or its rhythms. What impressed me most about the recording was the way in which the zurna creates a single melodic line of unflagging intensity; often sounding as though two or three intruments are playing at once, not quite in unison.

This suggested to me the use of a tape-delay system in conjunction with the soprano saxophone whereby the instrument’s own sound can be mutiplied by a controllable number of times. In composing my paroxysm (NB the German for anger is Zorn), I was concerned to achieve a form which is at the same time strictly unitary and constantly evolving.