Operetta: The Grand Meeting (from ‘Music for a Story-Telling’)

Written in 1991, 1994 and 1998 / Recorded in 1996 and 1998

Basically, as far as the music concerns, my conceptual work titled Music for a Story-Telling is a collection of re-workings of my past compositions written in 1991; either works I wrote for a band called Elegance, which couldn't exist long enough to perform it, and/or works for a students’ theatrical project called Zone. This long tune is based on various works I wrote for both occasions.

The very idea to write and play a kind of mini Rock Opera like thing captured my mind in the initial stage of the Zone project. By the time I made demo recording of my original tracks for the prospective performance, I knew that the director already gathered enough amount of musician-students to form several bands and one of his key concepts was that the performance was not going to be played in a conventional manner but to be played in plural stages or areas, each of them was provisionally called ‘zone’. The condition given enabled me to set up a scheme of performing a mini Rock Opera – or a Rock Operetta – and at the stage of making demo recordings, I stopped at only writing the main theme for the scheme and called it Operetta Theme, so that I could leave other performers to write their original materials to form the entire structure. Nonetheless, the director simply rejected my idea for the Operetta scheme and the theme was neither used nor performed in the project.

About a year later, when I began to convert some of my lost ideas for the project into my own musical work, I decided to place the very idea of the Rock Operetta at the climax sequence of the entire structure. The original Operetta Theme was made to be used as the same role in the operetta to provide its intro and outro, which is this time designed to contain several other tunes I wrote for the conceptual work in a form of medley. The demo version of The Grand Meeting was initially made to be only provided to my band Culotte, sometime in 1994, which didn’t feature any rhythm part, in order to leave a creative room for the drummer. Nevertheless, the drummer left the band in the following year before we could even rehearse the Operetta, and it was soon followed by breaking up of the band by the end of 1995.

After I was fired from the next band I formed called School in 1997 or 98, I finally gave up forming another band of mine. Instead, I decided to develop a recording scheme I have launched before the forming of School and began to make demo recording under the scheme, I personally called it The Soft Core Project. The audio materials gathered here are all recorded at this stage; either in Phase 1 (pre-School period) and Phase 2 (post-School period). For making this video, I tried to reconstruct the Operetta by putting together several tracks that were made separately.

In the storyline, The Grand Meeting is designed to depict the controversial meeting held by Kelp, the intruder, and his admirers in defiance of the authority. Wella, the convict, condemns the authority regarding the Brainwash punishment and Mikhi, the village girl, performs her initiation of Love (this may lead the whole audience to a grand orgy). The Peasant warns the audience that the soldiers are coming to arrest them all and encourages them to resist and fight. This followed by Imayya, the General Stuff, who confesses his soldiers’ defeat due to the moral corruption caused by the so-called performance of Love (or simply being involved in the massive orgy)... Oh, what a nasty story it is!