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music / david hoffman
essay title Trapped and immobile after Hurricane Dorian: Exposed vulnerabilities of labour migrants target audience university students commentary The underlying and connecting element is an original composition called “UNEVEN”, with the title referring to the concept of uneven emergency or disaster mobilities, one of the central concepts used in my research essay. The composition uses a minor/major intro, reflecting the tension between those benefitting from the Bahamian tourism industry and those working in it, prior to Hurricane Dorian. The minor texture is supposed to represent the vulnerabilities of tourism workers, especially those of informal workers and illegal (mostly Haitian) migrants. The major texture as well as the somewhat light-hearted improvisation represents positivity of tourism as well as the positive effects of tourism on the Bahamas. This is also conveyed in the images that I chose as well as in the selection of adjectives, extracted from my essay. The second part of the composition is an interlude based on an ascending bass line overlayed with a continuous uneven pattern of five notes, that anticipates the looming disaster caused by Hurricane Dorian. The third part is an intense groove-based melody that represents the destruction and immobility caused by Dorian, but also uses the underlying minor/major harmony from the introduction to remind the listener of the connection between initial vulnerabilities and disaster immobilities. The composition ends on an altered dominant D7 chord with the visual caption “Bound to repeat”, referring to the fact that if mobility justice is not improved, another climate change accelerated or intensified hurricane could hit the Bahamas again and produce a similarly disastrous outcome. Harmonically, this ending chord could either lead back to the minor key of the introduction (G minor), representing a repetition of events, or to the new major key of D flat, hinting at a lessons-learned scenario. |