DAVID FYANS

MA, BA (hons, First Class)

The Cocytus River Boat Song

(3’22”)

Concept:

Song and music imprint themselves on our intrinsic sense of identity. This piece explores the idea of a song with very personal connection becoming trapped in the liminal space where memory and self start to break down. The underlying structure remains but nuance and texture are lost.

Execution:

The piece came about as a form of tribute to my Grandmother, an inspirational, fiercly strong and independent woman who has had an enormous impact on my life and recently suffered a stroke and has lost all of her mental faculties. She is currently phsycially alive but in a medical sense only.

I took a recording of The Tay Boat Song from the Scottish Archive, a favourite of hers throughout her life from the time during the war where she worked on a farm near Loch Tay. I layered different audio treatments of the song with a view to obscure some elements, build dense ethereal textures, degrade others and allow some of the detail to remain in the form of the structure and occasional identifiable moments.

The title comes from the original song but transposes it to the River Cocytus, one of the five threshold rivers encircling Hades which separate the Underworld from the realm of the living in Greek mythology. River Cocytus or River of Lamentation in myth is where the unburied were doomed to wander about its banks for a hundred years, a mirror idea of the liminal state which my Grandmother currently inhabits.

The Cocytus River Boat Song also exists on a literal level, using archive material, itself a form of collected memory and creating a reversion from it.

The piece exists solely as an audio recording, it is recommended that the listener considers the value of their ability to create and recall memories and the personal structures that we build around us, something we often take for granted.

 

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