Water from the Moon

Program note:
Water from the Moon is a phrase coined by Christopher Koch in his Novel “The Year of Living Dangerously’. While an invention of Koch’s, it purports to be a traditional Javanese phrase meaning ‘anything impossible’.
When Black Swan Theatre Company commissioned a stage adaption of Koch’s novel for the 1999 Festival of Perth, I joined traditional Javanese musicians in exploring a shared musical language that combined both Western and Javanese musical traditions. This work is an amalgamation of some of the score from that theatre production, and contains sampled gamelan instruments and a recorded performance of an old Javanese folk song of loss sung by Bambang SP.