"As well as a very unfamiliar visual landscape, the soundtrack of my time in the West Bank was striking. Taxi radios, street vendors’ tinny speakers and, of course, my music school workplace filled the air with exotic sounds: militant, percussive beats on darabuka; jangly, ornamented melodies on qanun, and the breathy warbling of the ney. But it was the sound of the oud which captured my imagination the most. Even now, a couple of notes from the lute-like instrument will immediately conjure up images of the dusty streets and rocky hillsides of the West Bank.  This piece aims to express the huge weight of emotion I hear in the oud’s sound, each note rich with sadness and longing. The shape of the instrument even suggests this - like a richly decorated teardrop falling from the eye of generations."