Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

This music work is from the film Water Vessel (2013) a film directed and produced by Iqbal Barkat and Vincent Tay. The Water Vessel was a collaborative project with Singaporean-Australian director Iqbal Barkat that draws on South-East Asian and Arabic references significant to the director's migrant cultural background in South-East Asia. The Water Vessel score evolved using dissonant sonorities. The music is rooted on a thriller-based tension that is interlinked to the film's themes of memory, remembering and death. Tension develops in each theme and leads to unity. This tension operates through juxtaposition of minor-major seventh chords, chromaticism, rhythmic development, and extended techniques. In retrospect to the film's Arabic and South-East Asian cultural settings, this tension is enhanced through the nawa athar makam and miyakobushi pentatonic minor scale.

Work Details

Year: 2012

Instrumentation: Clarinet in B flat, Percussion (1 player: 3 Southeast Asian gongs, water gong, marimba, darabuka (Turkish goblet drum) tapan (Macedonian double-sided drum), bongos).

Duration: 13 min.

Difficulty: N/A - Not for live performance — Advanced, changing meters, extended playing techniques

Commission note: Commissioned by the director for the film, Iqbal Barkat.

Official selection for the 2014 Asian Pacific Film Festival in Los Angeles.