the village detective is music I wrote as the soundtrack to Bill Morrison’s film The Village Detective – A Song Cycle. In this film, Bill uses the discovery of a decayed copy of an old Soviet movie as a window onto a century of Russian storytelling. The
plot of the original Soviet film hinges on the theft of an accordion, so it seemed only natural to build the score out of music written for 1, 2, 3 or 4 accordions. I did this with the encouragement of my accordion-playing friend Frode Andersen, who recorded all the parts in the film, and whose technical support was invaluable during the music’s composition. The accordion movements can be played in any combination, in any order, and in any grouping. There is also a song in this suite, for voice and 2 accordions, which serves as the music for the credits at the end of the film.
I wrote this song for my friend Shara Nova. A few years ago I worked with Shara on my piece death speaks and her voice still haunts my dreams. When Bill Morrison asked me to score his film I imagined that a Russian folk song could play a role in it, and I imagined Shara could sing it. I thought of all the Russian folk songs that I love and it seems that their lyrics often fall into three categories—love of nature and the land, and Russian land and nature in particular; unrequited love; and a soldier going of to war, maybe never to return. I wrote the lyrics by searching the internet and autocompleting the sentence ‘across the field I hear…’ and I filtered out all the answers that weren’t in one of those three categories.
