Creating a Tibetan-Celtic soundtrack

Dadon - our fictional, and real, singing star

Why did we record the music for Windhorse in Ireland, using a mix of Irish and Tibetan musicians?

In the early 1990s, my wife Ellen and I had produced a feature documentary called Out of Ireland. It told the story of Irish emigration to America through the letters and memoirs of Irish emigrants. When we began work on Windhorse, I was struck by the how similar the two stories were. In both cases, a more powerful neighbor to the east (Great Britain/China) had invaded and occupied a pre-modern, deeply religious society (Catholic/Buddhist), destroyed the language (Irish/Tibetan), and generated a diaspora, forcing a exiles across a great geographic barrier (the Atlantic/the Himalayas) into new settlements in nations to the west (America/Nepal and India).

That thematic connection played itself out in many ways-from script notes regarding the often beaten-down character of Irish and Tibetan men, to the plaintive quality of the music we conceived for the soundtrack.

Paul Wagner listening to temple music

When Westerners think about Tibetan music, they often think of the Buddhist "temple music"-the great long horns and oboes, the crashing cymbals, the "throat-singing" of the monks. But there is also a vast folk music radition in Tibet apart from the temples. To understand and utilize it in the soundtrack, we turned to two of the premier Tibetan musicians living in the West-- Tashi Dhondup & Sonam Tashi of the musical ensemble Chaksampa.

Based on my notions about the similarities between the two cultures and their stories, I asked Tashi and Sonam to travel with me to a small recording studio in the west of Ireland. There we worked with a handful of Ireland's top traditional musicians under the supervision of percussionist and arranger Tommy Hayes. Together we would watch sequences in the film and discuss the type of music we were looking for. Then Tashi and Sonam would play a traditional melody or improvisation on their Tibetan instruments and we would build an arrangement around the melody. Some of the tracks ended up as spare performances on solo Tibetan instruments. Others were more elaborate, more "Western" renditions. All, I hoped, were true to the spirit of Windhorse.

In showing the film many times to audiences around the world, only once has someone come up to me afterwards and said that they "heard" the Irish influence in the music before seeing it acknowledged in the end credits of the film. It was a young woman in San Francisco who happened to be an Irish musician. Now that you know about it, you might enjoy watching the film again and listening for the Celtic colors.

By the way, there is another aspect to the Windhorse music that is also based on a hybrid musical form. The several songs Dolkar sings in the Chinese owned disco are very authentic and representative of the type of songs actually sung in Lhasa nightclubs. Although sung by Tibetans, they are in the Chinese language and use Chinese musical styles. Our songs were composed especially for the film by musicians Sam Chapin and John Dana, who live in Kathmandu and had listened to a lot of disco music, and Dadon, who had actually sung it.