LISTENING TO THE GOSSIP
Singer and songwriter MICHAEL MARRA describes the genesis of his song project Silence, commissioned and recorded by An Tobar in Mull.
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AN TOBAR commissioned me to write a new set of songs. They have made a number of these commissions and recordings on their own label, Tob Records. They did one with Mr McFall’s Chamber and Karen Wimhurst, but the one I listened to quite a lot before I did my own piece was Corrina Hewat’s Photons In Vapour, to see how someone else had treated the commission.
If you are writing a piece for the theatre the position is straightforward, you are going with the story that someone else has written. With this one the brief was less obvious. I think the series is called Interfaces, and the brief for me was Extremes.
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I went over there for two weeks in the first instance, and the day I arrived was the day the war in Iraq broke out. I didn’t write anything while I was there. I felt I was on the edge of writing something big about the war.
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My brief was Extremes, and here I was on this very beautiful island, and the war was going on. I couldn't really get that out of my mind, but I ended up writing nothing at all about the war. It was very strange. It was such a big issue that it was impossible to ignore, but in the end I just couldn't find a way in.
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I came home after the two weeks, and I started thinking about the gossip I had heard on the island, and began to work up some material from that. I was struck by two things in particular. One was the fact that gossip seemed to me very necessary in a place like Mull, but the other thing that I noticed mostly through gossip was racism, and specifically anti-English feelings.
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I felt that was particularly overt on Mull, and I thought I would throw that at them. It's like the Glasgow thing -- if you try to write about sectarianism at all, it is either going to have to be really great, or it is going to have be very subtle, like planting a thought. It's not looking to confront or cause trouble, it’s more like saying do you realise that you are doing this?
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One of the songs has a section about a cultural awareness class, which is to teach the local bairns about English culture. I've done it in quite a light-hearted way, but my hope is that people will maybe question their own attitudes through that.
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© Michael Marra, 2003 |
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