Programme Notes

    I sit here in silence
    In lights and shadows, days and nights
    Facing toward the ocean, listening to the wind
    Breezing into the pine forest

    I sit here in silence
    When the time slowly passes

    I consider the entire piece an aura’s time expansion. During this time progress, the music develops mostly in an abstract way, and the melodic fragments as a miniature of the musical phrases and the structure only occur in the ending section. This piece for me was a big challenge, because to certain degree Chinese instruments are symbolic to the Chinese culture: in the past Chinese music used to be more concrete, lyrical or narrative like poetry and literary paintings but far from the abstract contemporary art. Writing for these instruments in the same way as Western contemporary music is technically practical; however, because of the lack of Western classical music’s historical context, this way usually confuses the performers and the audience. Therefore I intend to reconstruct and extend some preexisting musical vocabularies to break the idiomatic, melodic continuity and add some new performance techniques (or some old ones but in a different way), and present them as a new appearance in this expanded time structure.