Ember for orchestra
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Ember is a single-movement piece for orchestra which combines my years of compositional experience, the exploration of musical aesthetics, an experiment of adapting electronic music technique in acoustic writing, and a personal reflection on humanity. This piece is my own reflection after reading the fourteenth-century Chinese historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义). Readers from the past to the present all enjoy the splendid tales of different characters and worship their great achievements in battle. However, I cannot disregard the fact that countless innocent people were scattered and disappeared during this heroic age. Their families and homelands had been ruined, and their names have long been forgotten. I therefore composed Ember with mixed feelings. It is a requiem for those innocent souls killed during the chaotic period, a reflection on the cruelty of warfare, and also an ode to hope. Even with a specific inspiration, Ember is not based on any programmatic script. It is a mixture of impressions or scenes. There are two distinguishable “characters” in this piece. One is an innocent young girl who lives in a peaceful pre-war world. The other is a plaintive woman who survives the war and becomes destitute and homeless. Each character has a distinctive type of musical material. The young girl is represented by an imaginary ancient folk tone that is very simple and direct, while the plaintive woman is represented by step-wise, non-functional gestures. The pitch material throughout the piece is mainly non-functional. However, I always emphasize a specific pitch center to ground the sonority and generate a texture. The structure of the piece is based on the development and alternation between the specific musical materials associated with the two characters. Rather than operating in clear-cut sections, Ember presents a continuous, unfolding of a soundscape with sensitive changes of color. Here, the harmonically non-functional material becomes tonal in order to represent resolution and hope. The ember could be a fragment left after the destruction, but it could also be a shred of hope.
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D.M.A. (Doctoral of Musical Arts)