Jacques Bailhé “A Mother's Tears”
“A Mother’s Tears” is full of rage and emotions. It’s jarring and tragic. It makes you face the things that you want to look away from. The hard truth that we overlook as “normality.” “A Mother’s Tears” is a protest piece against gun violence. Inspired by Vivaldi’s “Stabat Mater,” which was dedicated to Mother Mary’s suffering during Jesus Christ’s Crucifixion, Jacques Bailhe reflects on the horror that is still happening all around us, though we’re far from biblical time. Behind the death of each child is a mourning mother, and compare to the loss and pain, the reasons for killing simply can’t be justified. For Bailhe, he can’t just sit around and be silent about it, and as a musician, his composition becomes the way he vocalizes this raising issue in the United States, extending to the rest of the world (we do have wars going on as we speak).
The chilling high register of the piano is in full contrast with the sorrowful middle-range strings. Piercing staccatos and amplified hits separate themselves from the flow of sorrow and love. It’s always amazing to see how music speaks to our hearts. Even without words, the sorrow, helplessness and anger of a mother; the cruelty and coldness of gun violence; the dissonance and dystopian nature of our world; the breaking of one’s gentleness and innocence are all intertwined into one piece of music. “A Mother’s Tears” is brutally hard-hitting and naked. Truth speaks through the music like a stare into your soul, so are the feelings. “A Mother’s Tears” is a scream, primal, instinctive, and unfiltered.
Check out our interview with the LA-based composer and learn more about the message behind “A Mother’s Tears.”
Punk Head: I love the dark undertone and how you tackle a serious subject through an instrumental composition. Can you tell me more about "A Mother's Tears?”
Jacques Bailhé: As so often happens to me, a fragment or phrase sticks in my head, either something I’ve invented jamming on the piano or something I heard. I start improvising based on its sound or harmony implications, thinking of it as pure music, but almost without exception, I start imagining a story. In this case, it was a piece of melody from Vivaldi’s “Stabat Mater.” We immediately associate that music with the church because, of course, it’s a contemplation of Mother Mary experiencing the Crucifixion of her son, a defining event of the Western world—in many respects, the defining event. But none of that story took place in a church. It took place in 1st-century Judea, a city that socially, wasn’t really so different from our own.
If we recount the events in plain language, without religious associations, it’s a story that constantly repeats in every city around the world: a mother’s child is brutally, senselessly killed with a gun. More often than not, the child is innocent in every way—innocent of any crime, and still so young. We see images of this repeated on the news without end. A weeping mother cries out in unbearable pain, the “reason” for the killing pathetically meaningless and insignificant compared to the loss.
By our inaction, we allow this to continue. Our mannered sympathy and bizarre rationalizations do nothing to end this. We are as brutal as ever. That strikes me as hopelessly tragic. I‘d be overcome with despair, except for this: as these images and sounds come from my television, what I see every time is a mother standing as a pillar of strength, begging, demanding that we abandon antiquated ideas and uphold the fundamental ideals of civilization: co-operation, harmony, compassion. This dance marvels at the towering, inexhaustible strength of mothers—mine and yours—as yet another begs us to change.
PH: What are you most proud of about this track?
Bailhé: The feelings the music creates. Theory, genre, rules of counterpoint, etc., are all secondary. I’m always driven by emotion.
PH: Can you tell us more about you as an artist?
Bailhé: I have no formal music training, other than harmonic analysis in a UCLA Extension course and some sitar lessons in India and Nepal. I’d say I’m self-taught except I’ve learned so much working with some of LA’s finest composers and awesome studio musicians in my career in advertising and film—that and talking music after gigs during my early days playing bass and guitar in the Folk-Baroque-Rock band, Big Lost. I read a lot, study scores, and above all else, listen.
PH: Who are your biggest influences?
Bailhé: From Bach to the classical giants, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Hiromi Uehara, Snarky Puppy and everywhere in between, but also engineers at Paramount, Capitol, Sony, RCA Hollywood, Jimmy Hite at Margarita Mix, and the legendary Buzz Knudsen at Todd-AO.
PH: What is the one thing that you’d like your fans to know about you?
Bailhé: I like to start by improvising with reckless abandon—no thinking, just emotion, then sort it out.
