Programme Notes

    "Darkly then fall the shadows and, ready to come home, I yet fondle the lonely pines and loiter around." (Tao Yuanming, Song for Returning Homewards / Translated by Dr. Lin, Yutang)

    Drifting Mountainwards (2017) for pipa and live electronics reflects a distant response to a previous work of mine, Mountainwards (2010) for zheng solo. In this work, I use pipa to reinterpret the symbol of late-autumn mountains. To me, late-autumn mountains recall a deep memory from several years ago when my only sister and I last time visited the mountains to see the silver-grass. The next year I moved to the US, and a couple of years later my sister passed away. With this regret, when I finished Drifiting Mountainwards during my temporary return to my home country, I quoted the poem from Tao Yuanming's Song for Returning Homewards to express my mind of "returning home, feeling everything has changed and no longer like that was yesterday." The entire work primarily develops based on my imagination of "lonely pines" and is filled with simple but subtle sounds that one can only be aware of though close listening in order to create an interactive space evoked by the poet (the performer) and the nature (the whole).