Po

Composition Sketch

Po the second of five compositions completed in Spring of 1992. As I stated in the earlier post “Hun”, these original recordings were lost in a move to Chicago. I had been mastering all my tracks to Sony Betamax, but in 1992 I had just purchased a Tascam DA-30 and started recording with it.

Recently I found a DAT tape of the compositional sketches for these five pieces I had lost. The second one: Po, are the ideas for the upper end of the music and the bottom drone, that needed to be further development. The plan will be to expanded that low end drone and re-create the upper parts with their intended effects, The piece will be extend to it’s original length of about 15 minutes.

I believed the instruments I used to create this were: Roland D-70, Roland S-770, Yamaha TG77, Yamaha TG33 and an Akai S-900.

Hun (‘cloud-soul’) and Po (‘white-soul’) are types of souls in Chinese philosophy. Within this ancient soul dualism tradition, every living human has both a hun spiritual, ethereal, Yang soul which leaves the body after death, and also a po corporeal, substantive, Yin soul which remains with the corpse of the deceased. Taoism proposes a soul structure of “three hun and seven po“. Hun and Po are “two pivotal concepts that are key to understanding Chinese views of the human soul and the afterlife”.