Four Pieces of Slide - Female Voice and Octet

Lyrics

I often received letters at the 1st half year after parting for 2 years, then became less and less; her embroidered shoes are still under the bed; sometimes, the potpourri coming with the wind makes me feel that, she has come back, come back….

Notes

The contemporary jazz I know should be free in form and polyphony, full of uncertainty, characteristic of complicated harmony and changeable improvisational performance. When I read Four Pieces of Slide by Hong Kong poet Pia Ho for the first time, I was immediately reminded of the jazz music heard when I was a child by the fancy sentence segmentation which was made antithesis carefully and neatly, and the pictures of old Shanghai full of moist breath in the forties’ which was hidden in the volumes.

My intention of composing this work is not only in this aspect. The beginning acoustic effect, which moves sluggishly, is to reminisce the betrayal of James Joyce and Marcel Proust who initiated the composing technique of "stream of consciousness". Whilst the pile of sound piece, the un-harmony tone and the application of "noise music" in the ending part, are to show my regrettable respect to Luigi Nono, Krzysztof Penderecki, Alfred Schnittke and Pierre Henry. My work might be a heritance of the tradition of free jazz; or it might be a re-abruption toward the modern orthodox music in terms of its traditional sense.

This score, I hope, is to be just an incomplete sketch or a fragmented skeleton to its performers. I wish to teach, or rather, to inspire the musicians by this score about the attitude, and method, as well as all necessary skills in my creation. Then they may try to forget all the monotone and sweet notes on the score, and cooperate with others to consummate uncompleted opus with remaining images.

I have never quite known what new music should be like, and where it should go. But in writing this score, I have always keenly felt luxurious and dissipative, frightened at the same time: as if the blade cuts off the skin, a pain acutely felt and a danger thoroughly exciting co-exists. I feel that it is in this that I derive pleasure from learning the composition.