ON THE NILE: A MUSICAL LANDSCAPE IN 18 PARTS

The first two acts (side one of the LP, if you are listening on vinyl), begin and end with a variation of the same piece. Starting with the sound of a boat plying the waters of the Nile, "Among the Rushes" reflects the hypnotic, lazy nature of cruising up the river under the hot Egyptian sun.

The piece is written in the key of G minor, and scored for three cellos, viola, and melodica.

I recorded the pre-dawn call to prayer from the balcony of my hotel in Cairo and then used the muezzin's voice to create an instrumental motif. That motif is then set against a backdrop of African drumming.

The piece is in E major (because that's the key that the muezzin was using).

In 1335, a German pilgrim in Egypt recorded the following poem carved into the side of one of the pyramids at Giza:

Vidi pyramidas sine te, dulcissime frater,
et tibi quod potui, lacrimas hic maesta profudi
et nostri memorem luctus hanc sculpo querelam.

which, translated into English, reads:

I saw the pyramids without you,

my dearest brother,

and I shed tears for you

as I could here in sorrow

and in remembrance of our grief

I engrave this complaint.

The poem is long gone -- much of the exterior of the pyramids was recycled for other buildings in Cairo -- but the sentiment remains. 

The voices that form the looping background in this song are merchants arguing at the base of the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops). Perhaps they are arguing about seeing the pyramids without their brothers.

The piece is written in E major (to keep it in the same key as "Call to Prayer") and scored for bass, cello, and viola.

I didn't go into Khufu's crypt in the Great Pyramid, but my wife and some friends did. The underlying rhythm track here is the sound of them climbing up into the crypt as recorded on an iPhone. It is designed to evoke the compressed journey into the tomb and the wonder at being at such a famously sacred place. (Since I wasn't there, I'm actually basing this all on my own experience in other tombs; see track #17.)

The piece is in C major, scored for caxixi (a type of shaken percussive instrument) and old-school synthesizer patterns.

This piece samples "The Sphinx Waltz" by Francis Popy. (This specific recording is from 1915 and was made by Frank McKee and his Orchestra.) "The Sphinx Waltz" became very famous as it was (allegedly) among the popular tunes played on RMS Titanic.

The title comes from a piece of Egyptian history relating to the restoration of the Sphinx. Thutmose IV, before becoming pharaoh, had a dream while resting in the shadow of the Sphinx. In this dream, the Sphinx, depicted as the sun god Hor-em-akhet (Horus of the Horizon), promised him kingship if he would clear away the sand engulfing its body. Taking this divine message to heart, Thutmose ordered the excavation and restoration of the Sphinx, an act commemorated by the Dream Stele, a stone tablet placed between the Sphinx's paws

The piece is written in the key of Eb minor (because that's the key of Popy's waltz) and scored for piano and oboe.

The bird call you hear throughout the track is that of the Eurasian hoopoe, a bird found along various parts of the Nile River. I encountered my first hoopoe in the Garden District of old Cairo as I recorded the array of birdsong and street noise in the neighborhood. In the end, I filtered out the sounds of traffic and people talking and concentrated on writing a piece inspired simply by the sound of the hoopoe.

The piece is written in Ab minor in a waltz time,  scored for clarinet, bassoon, cello, and flute. 

It is made up of discrete musical phrases punctuated by the hoopoe's call. Cairo's Garden District is a neighborhood of large, old mansions -- some still occupied, others in various states of distress -- almost all of which are surrounded by imposing walls. Though the neighborhood exists as a cohesive whole (like this piece), you also very much experience it as a series of standalone mini-fortresses (which inspired my use of brief, standalone musical phrases).

With the beginning of Act 2, we hop up the Nile to Luxor and the famous temple of at Karnak.

Though the pyramids and the Sphinx are amazing (the Great Pyramid isn't a wonder of the ancient world for no reason!), the temple at Karnak was staggering. Many times on this trip, I felt like I'd stumbled onto a film set, which I'm sure is what influenced the style of this piece, which sounds like it could be from an adventure movie.

The hypostyle ("roof supported by pillars") hall features an array of columns, highly decorated with carvings and hieroglyphs, which are amazingly well preserved. It's a must-see.

The piece is written in F# minor and scored for bass, clarinet, synthesized choir, violin, rebab (a North African stringed instrument; here in a sampled loop), and a piano accompaniment that was created by sampling the voice of our tour guide and converting it into piano notes based on the timbre of his voice. (His voice can also be heard -- unadulterated -- toward the end of the piece, as can a fragment of track #9, "Sunrise.")

We visited the other major temple in Luxor just before sunset, as the warm glow of "Ra" (the sun god, and primary deity in ancient Egypt) set the columns aglow.

To follow directly on the previous piece, this is also in F# minor, scored for piano, acoustic guitar, and synthesizers.

(There was originally going to be a piece in between these two called "The Avenue of the Sphinxes" but it never got off the drawing board. It may appear as a bonus track somewhere down the line.)

Like many visitors, most of our experience of the Nile was via a river cruise (something that had been on my bucket list since I first read/saw "Death on the Nile" as a kid.)

Each morning, I'd go on the top deck to watch sunrise and inevitably would be greeted by the sounds of the town where we'd docked already coming to life. The streetscape recorded here is in Edfu at dawn.

Again, the piece is in F# minor, thus making  movements 7, 8, and 9 into a mini-suite.

The piece is scored for bass, cello, and glockenspiel.

Reeds and rushes are both types of grass-like plants often found in wetlands, but they belong to different plant families and have distinct characteristics. Thus, the piece that ends Act 2 (and the first side of the LP) sounds like the opening track, but it has been re-orchestrated, taking the cello, viola, and melodica parts and layering various synth parts on top of them.

The building of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s irrevocably changed the nature of the Nile River, nowhere more than in and around Aswan itself.

A number of ancient temples had to be rescued from inundation. Some were moved to museums (such as the Temple of Dendur now in New York City) and others were moved to higher ground in Aswan, such as the Philae temple complex.

In ancient Roman times, Philae sat just outside the boundaries of Roman control and so was a holdout of the old religion even after it had been banned. It was here on 24 August in the year 394 (CE) that the last known hieroglyphic inscription was carved by a priest of the temple named Esmet-Akhom.

This piece kicks off Act 3 (the second side of the LP) with a sample from "Gloria all'Egitto, ad Iside" from Act 2 of Verdi's Aida. Like its operatic forebear, my piece is a march, intended, perhaps, to evoke the solemnity of Esmet-Aktom as he carved that final epigram in a dying language.

The piece is written in Bb major (like the march from Aida) and scored for melodica, pizzicato strings, cello, and viola.

The felucca is the typical Nile sailing vessel that you see adorning the front cover of this album.

When tourists go out on felucca rides, they are often approached by young Egyptian boys who paddle up to the boat on homemade rafts and sing for money. The most ubiquitous song we heard was the French nursery rhyme "Frère Jacques." Since that song is often sung as a round, this piece also has a round-like quality. It also includes the voice of a woman counting down from 10 to 1 in Arabic. Another typical tourist destination in Aswan is a Nubian village, where a schoolmaster teaches visitors how to count in Nubian and Arabic.

The piece is in Eb major and scored for accordion, oboe, violin, and cello.

Agatha Christie spent a good deal of time in Egypt (before and after the success of Death on the Nile), first visiting for her health when she was just seventeen years old. She stayed in Aswan at the Cataract Hotel when working on Death on the Nile, and this piece evokes what I imagine the view might be from her suite as she looked out toward Elephantine Island. (I did not stay in her suite, as it is a cool $20,000 per night!)

While I occasionally use pre-recorded loops to guide/enhance my pieces, this is the rare piece that is entirely made up of loops.

It is in Ab major, scored for glockenspiel, music box, celesta, strings, bass, cello, French horn, and oboe.

When the Aswan Dam was built, it trapped the Nile's crocodile population behind the dam and, according to our guide, there are now 30,000 crocodiles in Lake Nasser, the huge artificial lake created in the 1960s.

Is that true? It's hard to verify. But that didn't stop me making it the theme of this piece. 

One aspect of my work is the integration of computers (all these instruments are synthesized, after all) and creativity. As we enter the age of A.I., I'm always curious about the ways that artificial intelligence can help and hinder the creative process.

For this song, I asked ChatGPT to write me a poem titled, "30,000 Crocodiles in Lake Nasser." A.I.-generated poetry is uniformly lousy and this was no exception, but I lightly edited the work it spat out, asked Google to translate it into Arabic, and then had my computer read it aloud. So, that's the voice you hear narrating.

The piece is in D minor. It is mostly a bass loop, onto which are layered various synths and the occasional out-of-place instrument like a koto (a Japanese zither) or an erhu (a Chinese spike fiddle). Those evoke the international aspect of the Aswan Dam  -- much of it a UN and UNESCO project -- which transformed modern Egypt and required investment from all over the world.

Kom Ombo is a trip. The dual temple is dedicated to Horus (the falcon god) and Sobek (the crocodile god). There's a nearby museum centered on Sobek's crocodile cult, filled with mummified reptiles and religious paraphernalia,

The street sounds you hear are vendors hawking their wares. They are ubiquitous at every Egyptian tourist site, but were particularly boisterous at Kom Ombo.

The piece is in C Major (admittedly, not a very bluesy key) with bass, cello, viola, and bassoon doing the heavy lifting. They are supplemented by a couple of pre-recorded loops of blues guitar.

Over the past 35 years, early morning hot-air balloon rides have become a staple of the Luxor tourist industry. Had I known just how unsafe these balloons can be, I probably wouldn't have done it, but I was blissfully ignorant and had a good time. What struck me most was how quiet it was up in the air (when our captain wasn't pointing out the various historical sites or regulating the amount of hot air in the balloon.)

This piece is in G major, filled with ambient synth patterns -- some of them inspired by samples of the sound of the balloon being filled.

Another real highlight of this journey was visiting the Valley of the Kings, especially the tombs of Ramesses V and VI and the most famous tomb of them all, that of King Tutankhamen. It was a broiling hot day and most people didn't opt to visit all the tombs, so many were serenely empty. That emptiness is the inspiration for this piece.

It is written in C Major (it was originally slated to come directly after "Sobek's Blues"), scored for cello, piano, and sound effects.

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.

Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies,

whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive,

stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them

and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

— Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias" (1819)

Shelley wrote "Ozymandias" having never been to Egypt but presumably having seen the drawings and artifacts being sent to Europe in the wake of Napoleon's failed Nile campaign. (Ozymandias is the Greek name for the Pharaoh Ramesses II; a statue of Ramesses II had been acquired by the British Museum around the time Shelley composed this poem, but he'd never seen that, either.)

The poem, about immortality and impermanence, was Shelley's most successful. Seeing the Colossus of Memnon in Thebes -- surely an inspiration for this -- is awe-inspiring.

The piece is written in G minor, ending our musical journey in the same key in which it began in "Among the Rushes." The piece is scored for synthesizer, viola, flute, cello, and bass.