Instrumentation: Mezzo-Soprano, STRING QUARTET
First Performance: Parker Quartet, Paine Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Nov. 15, 2024.
Commissioned for the Parker Quartet and Fleur Barron by the Salata Institute at Harvard, the Harvard Department of Music Blodgett Fund, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music with generous additional support by the Harvard Provostial Fund, the Harvard Office for the Arts, and the Mahindra Humanities Center.
Duration: 20 minutes
1) Oracle-Bone Script (Arthur Sze)
2) White Morning/The Wild Geese (Victoria Chang)
3) Returning to Fields and Gardens (I) (Tao Qian, tr. Sze)/Green Fields (Chang)
4) Far Along in the Story/Some Last Questions (Chang)
5) Farolitos (Sze)
6) For a Coming Extinction (Chang)
As a much younger composer nearly twenty years ago, one of the first texts I set was one of the “drinking” poems of Tao Qian (aka Tao Yuanming, 365-427). Tao Qian – who was incidentally my maternal grandfather’s favorite poet – saw a kind of utopian purity in retreating from his bureaucratic position to go live a life of contemplation in nature. Becoming a revered figure for centuries of subsequent Chinese poets, his perspective was one of an observer in harmony with nature, building his thatched cottage to be “untouched by the dust of the world."
The image of Tao Qian and his “return” to nature hangs over the field remembers, a song cycle that explores themes of humanity’s reverent but often fractured relationship with nature. And as the more recent poems illustrate, this relationship draws on the utopian but also the extractive, irresponsible, dependent, and even symbolically dubious. Though Tao Qian’s “Returning to Fields and Gardens (I)” is at the center of the piece (in Arthur Sze’s new translation), the new poems use the natural world as a lens to collapse time, interrogate humanity’s right to interfere, and warn about the fragility of the world and its finite resources.
For this project, I’ve once again turned to the poetry of Victoria Chang and Arthur Sze, both of whom I had the honor of collaborating with on the echoing of tenses, an hourlong memory piece from 2022. This time, their texts are united by entirely different subjects and engaged not only with ancient Chinese and Japanese poetic traditions, but also contemporary ecological and environmental themes that have resonances with ecopoetics. In her collection The Trees Witness Everything, Chang uses the constraints of the ancient Japanese waka with its fixed lines and syllables, and derives her titles from W.S. Merwin, another keen observer of nature. Open-ended and filled with as many questions as observations, the poems speak of precarity, extinction, and the uselessness of metaphor. Chang's “return” to the fields, which immediately follows Tao Qian’s, is marked by doubt. Sze’s poems, drawn here primarily from the forthcoming Into the Hush, show that the quiet practice of observation can have a charged ethical imperative.
Working with texts this rich and illuminating presents so many options as a composer, and I take different paths in each movement. With the opening “Oracle-Bone Script,” Sze conjures attunement and the vibrating of tones along a timeless continuum, which I try to evoke on the strings with overlapping pure intervals, gradually coming into focus. In the following movement, lines such as Chang’s “An oak tree that must ache,/ each year of desire in rings” motivate the vocal and violin lines to stretch with wide leaps and romantic yearning. Tao Qian’s fields and gardens get a pastoral treatment, whereas in a later pair of poems by Chang, there is a conflating of onomatopoetic textures (the ticking of clocks and the falling of rain) with plucked strings. Sze’s “Farolitos” refers to the New Mexican holiday tradition of putting candles in brown paper bags, a custom inherited from the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico along with the use of Chinese paper lanterns. The failing (“again and again”) and lighting of a match is a pivotal moment in the poem that completely changes the course of the music as well.
Finally, this work takes its title from Victoria Chang’s “Provision,” which is not part of the cycle, but is worth reprinting here:
The field remembers
the wet boots marching on it.
The sky has scars from
birds. The body knows the square
root of desire, the cold nights
of bandaging the great fires.