CONCERT WORKS
Soaring to the Past: Jin Se, for voice and piano
This is a text-setting of Chinese Tang poet Li Shang Yin’s “Jin Se.” It focuses on the theme of the past––how it shapes identities, how one can look back, years later, with ever more reflection, empathy, nostalgia, and broader scopes. Finding that music-making explores just that by chronicling and reenacting fleeting moments, I attempt to engage with the visceral thrill of this connection, imagining how the poet might have plucked the strings of the zither as those indelible rhymes came into being.
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Winner of NextNotes at the American Composers Forum. Performed on voice and piano by Helen Feng.
Upon a Painted Ocean (for SATB Chorus, ASCAP Morton Gould finalist)
Written for SATB choir, "Upon a Painted Ocean" sets to music an excerpt from romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In response to broader themes of deprivation, seafaring, and divinity explored in the poem, this piece, composed after close textual analysis, opens with a hymn-like, modal chorale and then incorporates experimental vocal techniques to text-paint the soundscape of water.
Performed by the Walden School Chorus.
Corner (for saxophone quartet, commissioned by PRISM Quartet)
A data-inspired piece using EEG sleep rhythms tied to depression and dream cognition. Sonifies NREM/REM patterns from Northwestern sleep research.
Dark Night (for solo piano)
Written during the early months of COVID, Dark Night is a musical diary—three reflections shaped not only by isolation, but also by the tension and social unrest unfolding in the world concurrently. These pieces hold the inner world I lived in then: the stillness, confusions, the questions of how to stay grounded when both personal rhythm and the world outside were shifting so quickly.
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Performed on piano by Helen Feng.
Uprising, for Flute, Bassoon, Piano and Percussion (for the Walden School Players)
Composed of three movements with spoken texts drawn from MLK, Emily Dickinson, and Ghandi, this piece is a musical reflection on intent and impact in societal discourse.
Performed by Helen Feng and the Walden School Players.
Hollow (etude for clarinet, vibraphone, and violoncello)
Rhythmos (three miniatures for cello and piano, premiered at Carnegie Hall)
A musical meditation on Lefebvre's concept of rhuthmos, an understanding of time in terms of flow and duration, recognizing that it is non-linear and constantly in the process of becoming. I wanted to capture an experience of seeing, feeling, and experiencing time in an embodied, emotional and intuitive manner, rather than a clock of fixed and uniform metrics.
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Performed on piano by Helen Feng, and cello by Amy Kang.
Circles (for voice and piano quintet, commissioned by Mivos Quartet)
Cloud Atlas Quintet, for piano quintet (for the Cassatt String Quartet)
Inspired by David Mitchell’s novel of the same name, this piece responds to the book's theme of “how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky” (Cloud Atlas, Random
House Edition).
Performed by Helen Feng and the Cassatt String Quartet.