November Story

The piece was composed after collecting field recordings in Guangxi Province. My primary concern was to find a proper way to treat the local musical and cultural elements that I studied and collected in the places we went. Eventually, my solution came from an architectural project found in a museum I discovered on my travels. The architects collected building materials from a collapsed old temple and used them to build the new museum construction. In that project, by deconstructing the historical elements, history finds a new way to continue with another meaning.

In Flowers of Three Colours, the fundamental intervals and note contours are derived from the local music our team collected in Guangxi. By reconstructing the raw material, I hope that this piece will be, like in the architecture project, having a new life that came from, and went beyond, the original elements, going on to obtain a new meaning for itself and its audiences. I believe that this process used manifests history, which is always forward and its values time bound, and yet the remains from the old, despite being inevitably replaced by the new, will still tell the everlasting glory of the history and its waving vicissitudes, which is exactly the charm of making art for the future from digging into the past.