Inspiration
It was the fishes that got me.
In ancient times, the story goes that St. Thenue is unmarried, pregnant for reasons conveniently forgotten. And punishment is placed on the woman, her body. She is thrown down by the father king, falls down the rock in Fife, and sent out to sea to die. Oh how we resolve our violence.
But she is miraculously accompanied and led by the fishes and lands up in Glasgow, her and her baby founding a new community.
And so the natural world offers a mercy which leads to the generation of a new community, mother and child.
St Thenue in the Water
by Katherine Waumsley
The Glasgow gamelan arrived by sea, a gift in metal floating across the ocean, a “Spirit of Hope”.
We wonder about the sea. We are increasingly aware of the ice melting, the sea rising, it is the unavoidable tone ringing in the background of all human life now. As we grapple with our destruction both historical and current, the statue of the slaver Colson is thrown into the docks. A boat of childen and adults seeking asylum is lost at sea trying to reach the UK. Vans of fish rot at the border over brexit customs. Somehow we are thinking about borders more than the interdependency of life.
And a painful vigil reminds us of the risk to womens bodies, the violence.
We are working in samples now – mid pandemic and it isn’t safe to play together – so the instruments become code. We find ourselves re-using a sample of Muireann singing the traditional song “Chuir ead mise” in Gaelic, now shortened in code to “Fada” . It can be translated “They sent me to an island by myself, An island of the sea, far from land”. It is a remnant of previous Gamelan Naga Mas projects Sedna, the Woman under the Sea (2015) and Waves Livecode (2020), reworking Margaret Smith’s composition into a live coding performance.
There is an article written about St Thenue – Mother Glasgow. The muralist Mark Worst paints her and the fishes, under a scarf, on a Glasgow tenement, linking with the women lost at the Templeton Carpet Factory disaster.
I don’t know why it’s important to add – she is beautiful, in the mural, in her shawl of fish.
Some of us are clumsy, still, in Gamelan Naga Mas, with code, making music this new way. Yet we do seek to collaborate across waters and time zones – voice, code, gamelan.
Maybe we can remember “Mother Glasgow”, the fishes, the interdependency . The regeneration needed for us to deal with our destruction. Our Spirit of Hope.
