Kaki

In the score of Kaki, there is an almost total abandonment of Somtow Sucharitkul's avant-garde style, with which he came to prominence as a composer in the 1970s. Indeed, reports the composer, "I decided to return to the roots of Russian ballet, and write the kind of score that the great practitioners of Russian ballet music might have written if they had been subjected to the seductive influence of Asian musical traditions." The result is a richly melodic score, and one which uses not only a large symphony orchestra but also an almost endless array of ethnic instruments – gamelan ensembles, a sitar and tamburas, Japanese gagaku instruments _ a score largely possible because it was performed entirely by the composer himself with a "virtual symphony orchestra" – one composed of digitally-sampled musical instruments, painstakingly recorded one at a time into a computer.