Composing TSUNAMI by Candace Long

At 13, I began writing songs strumming a ukulele that fit my small hands. I accepted the composer’s pen and spent the next twenty-seven years developing my craft as a Nashville songwriter.

In 1985, the voice of a young black woman auditioning for a musical with no black actors stopped me cold and an inner voice re-directed my pen to “Write a musical for undiscovered talent like hers.”

Though the musical premiered in 1989, to racially mixed audiences and rave reviews, reverse discrimination shut down efforts to market it further. The pen was silenced for eleven years.

By 2000, times had changed, and doors were open to re-stage the musical. Our premiere date was the ill-fated September 11, 2001. The music inside me died. My pen was broken.

After three years of seeking God in silence, I heard a new voice that pierced my grief and awakened the composer’s pen once more. In a meeting of creative women, listening to them share their work, the late Frances Patton Statham stood to recite a poem she had written, following the 2004 tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka. The room fell silent.

What I heard in her poem overwhelmed me, overlapping layers of raw emotions. Inside of me, I heard, “The horrifying crescendos of earth’s eruption, slowly overtaking the laughter of people innocently playing in the surf, leaving behind the eerie stillness of death.”

I was moved to compose Tsunami to interpret musically one of nature’s most horrific attacks on humanity. When I studied the poem, I conceived the music as four separate movements, each reflecting a different aspect of the horror surrounding that fateful day. Each movement was composed, recorded, and mixed on my keyboard’s 16-track sequencer. Then, imported into Pro Tools, the digital audio workstation I used. Pro Tools’ volume mode offered me freedom to produce certain effects, such as the audio collision of movements #1 and #2, reflecting people frolicking in the ocean, oblivious to the eerie rumbling, deep within the bowels of the earth. The sad moans of an acoustic guitar formed the core of the final movement that underscores the reading of the poem.

The video of Tsunami is available at More About Candace Long. It shows the improvisational layering technique I developed to produce it. The composition ended up as part of the auDEO album published in 2006. In 2020, I won first place in music at the National League of American Pen Women Conference as that year’s top Artist, Writer and Composer.

Link to more of my songs

Candace Long - Screenwriter (vimeo.com)

Tsunami by Candace Long

Candace Long President,

National League of American Pen Women (2014-2016)

Writer | Producer | Radio Host of Lessons in the Ladder Days

Founder, auDEO Media Group, LLC | (770) 298-0843 www.candacelong.com | candacelong@me.com

POEM by Frances Patton Statham

Do not grieve for me

On wounded beach or ravaged sea, Nor in the frond-stripped huts amid debris Of broken dreams and sorrowed hearts

Instead, look upward to the light Of dazzling stars in moon-stirred night, And know my soaring, winding flight On zephyred wings as day departs.

Now I am one with earth and sky I am the love that will never die.

So take heed in remembrance of former things, Yet sense the need that comfort brings

Of a world that continually sheds its sorrow, In the keening promise of a new tomorrow.

© Frances Patton Statham

Alice Coltrane Swamini Turiya & Radha Botofasina - October 20, 1990