Music

The music for Keening – Song of the Stranding was created by Alex South (clarinet) in collaboration with Nerea Bello (voice) and Katherine Wren (viola), drawing inspiration from calls made by long-finned pilot whales, the sounds of their environment, and Calum Johnston's performance of the traditional Gaelic lament Pill iù Pill ill ill ill Eòghainn. This song, recorded in Barra in 1965 and accessible online through the Tobar an Dualchais website, was reportedly used in formal keening for the dead. John Purser, in his Scotland's Music, speculating on the reasons for this, noted similarities between the vocables used in Pill iù Pill ill ill ill Eòghainn and the calls of the redshank. Purser linked the coastal habitat of this bird with the symbolic threshold between life and death, making its presence in mourning music deeply meaningful.

In this project the symbolism of the shoreline as liminal zone is reversed, because the pilot whales who were stranded could not survive out of the water. Testimonies collected from those present at this event do not confirm whether or not the stranded pilot whales were calling to each other, but beneath the waves their complex social lives are mediated through a large vocal repertoire of calls and whistles, sometimes produced in patterned and repetitive sequences.1 In addition, the whales use echolocation clicks to sound out their surroundings and possibly each other.

During the development of the music, Alex, Katherine, and Nerea listened to recordings of pilot whales provided by Elizabeth Zwamborn (Cape Breton Pilot Whale Project) and Heike Vester (Ocean Sounds). They experimented with ornamentation used by these marine mammals both to generate imitations of pilot whale 'contact call' sequences, and to structure short melodic fragments based on the harmonic mode found in Pill iù Pill ill ill ill Eòghainn. In performance, the three musicians improvise together on these materials. Nerea's voice, rising from its Basque soil and heavy with memory, is supported by the rich and melancholic tones of viola and clarinet, instruments frequently employed by composers wishing to evoke mourning.

1. Vester et al. (2017) The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 141, Zwamborn & Whitehead (2017) Bioacoustics 26, Zwamborn & Whitehead (2017) Behaviour 154.