The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, Part I: Death
The other parts of this ongoing music project can be found here.
The other parts of this ongoing music project can be found here.
When I began my musical project based upon the Bardo journey more than two years ago, I did not plan for there to be a section about Death. The Tibetan Book Of The Dead itself is about the journey of the Spirit after death through three different stages. So my original plan was to have a musical piece in three stages, beginning with The Clear Light. But after my Mother passed away in October 2017, it became obvious to me that, since there would be no Bardo journey without death, a requiem for her needed to be the real beginning of my musical piece.
The feeling of this section is very different from the rest. It is still based upon the Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows but it's much slower, and shifts the harmony into a minor mode.
In the months following my Mom's passing, I spent well over a hundred hours recording (mostly vocal) parts for this section. A lot of that material is full of very raw emotions, and I struggled to shape it into something that others would not find too depressing to hear. Although I made multiple “complete” mixes, they are too personal for wide distribution.
However, at the Requiem Mass my family held for my Mother, I had read a few verses from one of her favorite poems, Emily Bronte's “No Coward Soul Is Mine”. Those verses happened fit perfectly in the “instrumental solos” section of the mournful version of Tomorrow Never Knows that I had been working on. So I feel ok about limited sharing this short part of the ongoing work, called “Prayer14”.
This is the text:
Prayer14.mp3
Although “Prayer14” gives a general idea of the feeling of what this Part 1 will eventually be, it is a long way away from where I hope to take it from a musical point of view. As an illustration, buried in the background of “Prayer14” are two very short sections that I was working on to try to get them to where I wanted them to be, and they turned into “Prayer11” and “Prayer13”.
Prayer11 started as a 10-second loop that I was listening to in order to get a better mix for one of three sub-groups of vocals. My Mother was Irish, and I noticed how Celtic this sounded, so I looped it into something a bit longer...
Prayer11.mp3
Prayer13 is another "micromix" of a phrase from the fourth verse: "And love is all, and love is everyone. It is knowing, it is knowing". This is the kind of dense vocal harmony that I envisage for the rest of this section.
Prayer13.mp3
I am happy to share this with friends, but would prefer that this not be distributed widely in its current form.