MENI Theme- Helplessness and Resignation
Recording Transcript
Kandy: When you are home surrounded by your family, you feel like you have someone to fall back on. When you are all alone, far away from home, everything seems heavier.
But I couldn’t tell anyone those feelings, because I didn’t want my parents to worry or be disappointed with me. I couldn’t talk about these feelings with other Chinese students around me either, because I felt they felt the same way and it would get too depressing for everybody if we started talking about those things too much.
Later on, I thought about using the counselling service but then I thought to myself: “It’s English. I can’t even talk with people in simple English. How am I going to talk to the counsellor?” I mean, I want to go talk about my problem of talking to make myself feel better but then I would find myself not even able to talk about my problem of talking. How would you feel? Of course, worse. So I gave it up. So I gave it up.
So I had to keep all those feelings to myself, though I felt like the person in The Scream. The most I could do to was just torture my beddings in my room alone when it got too hard and I wanted to smash things to vent. I couldn’t even smash those hard objects because I was afraid that the sound would attract attention. It was a really lame way to vent but also the only way.
When I was alone in my room, I would just sit there and think about those embarrassing and suffocating moments when I couldn’t talk, and I just felt like I was not made to communicate in English with people. Then I started to close myself up. Do you understand that?
Composing Process
In composing music for this piece, I used both solid and broken minor chords to represent the depressing experiences described by the participant under this theme. I used the “stratosphere” sound to represent the overwhelming and engulfing feeling of helplessness experienced by the participant. Then I embedded contrasting vibraphone sounds to accent key descriptions directly related to resignation. Finally, I ended with a very slow lingering vibraphone melody to further bring out the participant’s
