Kevin Charoensri - MOTHER'S LULLABY (Score Follower)

Kevin Charoensri - Mother's Lullaby - Impressions From Thai Folk Song: Khmer Saiyok (เขมรไทรโยค) Conductor: E. Yuji Jones Michigan State University Wind Symphony (reading recording) Score and Parts: https://www.kevin-c-music.com/mothers... As a child, my mother often sang many songs to me around the house. One of the songs that stuck to me, passed down aurally by one of her aunts, was named “Khmer Sai Yok”(เขมรไทรโยค): a Thai Traditional song originally composed by His Royal Highness Prince Narisara Nuvadtivongse when King Chulalongkorn visited Saiyok Waterfall, Kanchanaburi Province in 1888. Much of my childhood musical influence was based upon these melodies. As a child, I split time between both Thailand and America. However, at around six-years-old, the bulk of my time (about eight months per year) would be spent in the United States. At this young age, my mother’s singing became one of the remaining means of access I had to Thailand musically, whenever she sang lullabies and folk songs. My mother and family are not musicians, and lovingly, my mother is not a professionally trained singer. However, she was never afraid to expressively phrase and dynamically explore all the melodies she could remember. These moments of musical joy, blissfully singing no matter what, were some of my fondest memories of her. I wanted to encapsulate this feeling in the ending of this piece, by asking the instrumentalists to sing. As I started to arrange and compose the accompaniment to the melody, I wanted to bring both my Thai and American influences, while still authentically preserving the melody to the best of my ability using Western instruments. Through this work, I wanted to musically describe my upbringing as a Thai-American through one of the most cherished songs of my childhood.