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- Bright Sheng
Melodies of a Flute (2012)
- G Schirmer Inc (World)
Programme Note
First performance:
April 10, 2012
Camerata Pacifica
San Marino, CA
Movements:
1. Flute and Phoenix
2. Lotus Flowers
Composer note:
Melodies of a Flute was commissioned by Luci Janssen, for her husband Richard, on the occasion of their 40th wedding anniversary. It was written for Camerata Pacifica, who gave the premiere performance on April 10th, 2012, at Huntington Library of San Marino, California, with Adrian Spence on flute and alto flute, Catherine Leonard on violin, Ani Aznavoorian on violoncello, and Ji Hye Jung on marimba and small suspended cymbal.
Melodies of a Flute was inspired by the poetry of Li Qing Zhao (1084-c. 1051), arguably the most important woman poet in the history of Chinese literature. Unlike her (mostly male) contemporaries during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), Li was audacious in expressing her deep feelings, sometimes in a rather direct and sensuous way. According to the Confucius tradition, unwavering expression of love and passion was considered taboo and distasteful. Most of the "love" poems found in ancient Chinese poetry were often used as metaphors for articulating something else, e.g. the author's loyalty to the emperor. When love was the true intended theme, it was often implied in other symbolic forms such as flowers or weather.
But Li Qing Zhao, expressively or metaphorically, wrote often about her love life with Zhao Ming Cheng, a government official and Li's soul-mate husband.
In the first movement, I tried to capture the mood of longing in Memories of a Flute on the Phoenix Terrace, in which Li referred her union to Zhao to an old myth about love and music to utter her melancholy emotional feeling on the eve of Zhao's departure to a far-away post, designated by the emperor. This fable, known as Flute and Phoenix, was a recurrent reference in her poems: Nong Yu, an avid jade flute player and the daughter of a Duke, fell in love with a virtuoso musician named Xiao Shi, who, when playing the (vertical) flute, could recreate the song of the phoenix. Later the two were married and played flutes everyday on the Phoenix Terrace built by the Duke, until one day, charmed by the music, the phoenix came and brought them to heaven.
The image of the second movement, Lotus Flowers, came from a poem in which the author accounted a spontaneous boating race and lost her way among the lotus flowers. As in many of Li's works, this poem may suggest itself as a sensuous metaphor:
To the Tune: Like a Dream
I always remember that dusk at a pagoda by the creek.
In our boats, we were exulted but exhausted,
Too tipsy to remember our way home;
We lost into the deep place of lotus flowers.
Row! Row!
We startled a flock of egrets and gulls.
— Bright Sheng
Media
Scores
Reviews
Sheng's new "Melodies of a Flute," commissioned by local music patrons Luci and Richard Janssen in honor of their 40th anniversary, proved to be a stunner... The composition is based upon interpretations of the poetry of 11th century Chinese poet Li Qing Zhao — who was distinctive for being a woman and writing about the passions and pressures of love, literally and metaphorically.
In the first movement, "Flute and Phoenix," mixes scamper, restless flute and marimba lines turn suddenly and crisply in unison, along with slow, harmonized long times from the strings. Throughout its wavering textures, the movement involves contrasting agitation and languor, the calm glow of love, longing, the rough and tumble of love, and the hollow ring of absence.
Things turn more assertive and driving, more declarative than the earlier ambivalence, in the second "Lotus Flowers" movement. A steadily propulsive energy prevails, with motoric 16th notes running through it, a life force wending around angular syncopated accents, but ending on a graceful sigh of closure. All told, "Melodies of a Flute" has a compelling and also emotionally complicated personality, inviting future hearings. Like poetry, the music keeps its interpretive options open, even while stating its case assuredly, an ideal artistic paradox.
Without a doubt, Mr. Sheng's new work ascends high in the ranks of important and thrilling musical events in the current local classical season.
In the first movement, "Flute and Phoenix," mixes scamper, restless flute and marimba lines turn suddenly and crisply in unison, along with slow, harmonized long times from the strings. Throughout its wavering textures, the movement involves contrasting agitation and languor, the calm glow of love, longing, the rough and tumble of love, and the hollow ring of absence.
Things turn more assertive and driving, more declarative than the earlier ambivalence, in the second "Lotus Flowers" movement. A steadily propulsive energy prevails, with motoric 16th notes running through it, a life force wending around angular syncopated accents, but ending on a graceful sigh of closure. All told, "Melodies of a Flute" has a compelling and also emotionally complicated personality, inviting future hearings. Like poetry, the music keeps its interpretive options open, even while stating its case assuredly, an ideal artistic paradox.
Without a doubt, Mr. Sheng's new work ascends high in the ranks of important and thrilling musical events in the current local classical season.
17th April 2012
the night’s biggest imaginative journey came in the world premiere of Sheng’s new work for quartet, Melodies of a Flute... The first movement, “Flute and Phoenix,” is arresting in its contrasts—rapid patterns in flute and marimba unexpectedly drop out, leaving the ear suspended among sonorous long tones of violin and cello. The second movement, “Lotus Flowers,” is all energetic time and trills. The 11th-century love poem on which this second movement is based, ostensibly about a boat race, is said to convey a veiled reference to physical love.
17th April 2012