The Ecchoing Green

The score and song hold the emotional space between Mona and her son Anwar across three stages of his life. He appears in the film aged 8, 17 and 80, while Mona remains eternal throughout. 

The director Fawaz Al-Matrouk suggested a lullaby, and we discussed their anchoring, nurturing role in real life and possibilities in deepening and serving the film’s narrative.  

A day after this meeting, Kerry Bishé (Argo) accepted the role of Mona (Anwar’s Mother), and suggested independently that we might include a lullaby.

I wrote the lullaby in pre-production, and after sharing it with the director, he shared William Blake’s Ecchoing Green from Songs of Innocence of 1789 as a possibility for the lyrics. It worked so perfectly with the themes and emotional subtext of the film. From here, I further crafted the music with Blake’s text, and we had an anchor for the score in which the lullaby is woven through and fully embodied.

I embarked on writing for string quartet, bass, piano, guitars, hammered dulcimer, oud (with the film’s middle eastern connection) and flutes. I wanted to include the detailed textures of bowed strings, breath (flutes) and the shimmering plucked textures of acoustic guitars, the deeply resonant  sonorities of oud and magic of hammered dulcimer.

The lullaby became a powerful anchor while filming on set in the rainy Northern Californian forest with the cast and crew. All of the cast had learned it with vocal coaches Fiora Cutler and Kelci Hahn in pre-production.