This is the backstory to my latest music video on you tube, a musician’s meditation on tenderness …
It’s Spring in the southern hemisphere. Today I started composing music for a video, but on the 30th of September 2024, the 1st National Forum of Translators of Mongolia was convened in Ulan Bator (northern hemisphere), a collaboration between the National University of Mongolia, MONTSAME National News Agency and the Office of the President of Mongolia, and about which I have not been able to stop thinking, all day. This ‘thinking’ took the flow of my creativity in a different direction and down a different path.
As I searched for faces I knew in the crowd, I was overwhelmed, in a tender way. So many older-generation custodians of oral transmissions and learn-ed histories, many of whom I’ve had the privilege of meeting over the years since 2004 at other conferences and social gatherings in Mongolia auspiced by Zava Damdin, all now seated here, side by side in the main room. It brought tears of respect and gratitude to my eyes, to see again this (now) older generation of such kind and learn-ed Mongolian scholars who took it on themselves to maintain continuity during such difficult times.
At the conference, in addition to those promoting the use of artificial intelligence and other capturing technologies to translate [Mongolian] history through its “texts”, my colleague and friend Sodontogos Erdenetsogt offered a counter narrative. She speaks from the perspective of a career translator and multi-lingual interpreter at the highest level, with an insightful and cautionary voice that addresses the considerable limitations of turning to AI to generate cultural histories, literary translations and inter-cultural [re]interpreting of the transformation and history of [Mongolian] people and their ideas.
It is in this context, that I offer you a simple example, albeit in another modality of creative expression. It’s my latest interpretation (performed on piano, recorded live today and unedited) of Levitate (2021), a beautiful piece of music by the self-taught young Danish pianist-composer Jacob Ladegaard.
Musical notation, like words in Google translate dictionaries, offers us a language of visual symbols, and therefore a wonderful place to start articulating more nuanced interpretations. I thank Jacob, the composer, for sharing his original composition in its digital (PDF) yet nonetheless traditional western classical music notational form. I’ve been playing around with this piece for a while now, but today I felt I finally got my own interpretation and its technical articulation right.
As for the visual narrative of the above video? I decided to use the digitised representation of the music I played and that you are listening to, rendered and made visible on-screen by the DAW** software in my studio. It’s just a visual anchor. Whenever I listen to, or play this beautiful song, doing so transports me to people and places here, there and elsewhere. It touches my heart, and always in a tender way. And so I leave the other narratives to you, and your own heart-inspired imaginings …
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By the wind of time, comes Spring’s Goddess of Melodious Song
In the whole of space, echoing
In the Ten Directions, sentient beings’ hearts are happy.*
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Notes
* Quote from The Great Nenchen (2015) by Zava Damdin (1976- ). Translated by C.Pleteshner and E.Sodontogos (Zava Damdin Sutra and Scripture Institute in Mongolia). p45.
** A DAW is a digital audio workstation.
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End of transcript.
Please refer to the INDEX for other articles and music that may be of interest.
© 2013-2024. CP in Mongolia. This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Documents linked from this page may be subject to other restrictions. Posted: 2 October 2024. Last updated: 13 October 2024.