Li Xiangting and Guqin Improvisation: Expression, Poetic Impression and the Ambiguities Between Improvisation and Composition.  (2007)

Social Meaning and Performance Practice of the Yi Ethnicity San Xian Improvised Tradition in Nanjian, Yunnan, China. (2007-08)

Sugudu in Naxi Dongba Folk Music Tradition (2008)
   

Magazine Articles 
Finding Tradition in Modern China: A Musician's Perspective   Metropolis, Beijing, China, Winter 2008

Time Reflection                                                                                                  top
Time Reflection ‘reflects’ upon time in different ways. One way involves the perspective of personal experience. Having lived for periods of time within different musical styles and traditions (jazz, Brazilian bossa and samba, classical, Chinese, among others), I have developed different senses of musical time. These different senses arise from the cultural and historical context of the music. How one learns to listen to and appreciate the music in the context of its tradition affects how they experience musical time. From this perspective, Time Reflection is a stylistic collage: un-abstracted quotation, allowing each music the space to retain its own stylistic sense of time. Also, a sense of larger cyclical time is subtly touched upon in this music. The experience of rhythms and cycles at larger time-intervals within nature differs from the experience of metric time in music or the tracking of the day using a wristwatch. Some events in Time Reflection repeat themselves at larger time intervals throughout, creating a pulse on a larger scale. Perhaps not overtly perceived but felt, adding a bit of glue that assists in binding the flow of the piece into a larger whole.

Glimmer                                                                                                                top
Quite often, the titles of my compositions end up referencing in some way light or water. When I compose I don’t necessarily always think about light and water but in the end, I gravitate toward titles that give the impression short, ephemeral events. This is the case with Glimmer. I wanted to use the orchestra in a way that would produce sparse and varied inflections of texture and sound color. With the bass marimba as a soloist, I imagine his quiet quick lines as moonlight projecting occasionally on the surface of a placid mountain lake. The dim light flickers and disappears as the clouds pass and what was once a dance of shimmering silver glow now evaporates into stillness.

Wandering (in the footsteps of Li Po)                                                           top
Although there are direct musical influences from a couple types of ancient Korean music in this piece, I have, perhaps ironically, come to name this piece with reference to the legendary Chinese Tang Dynasty poet Li Po. There is an ephemeral beauty and scattered ness in the imagery that I find in his poems: an observation of nature here, a memory of a distant friend there, then a Taoist  immortal, then perhaps a ‘nostalgia’ from a past life. These images, presented in a sparse few words, are what have inspired me to think in a similar language of impression and brevity in my own music. Analogous to Li Po’s wanderings in his poems and in his life as a recluse poet, this piece wanders too: there are the longing gestures from Korean music, but also a fleeting memory of sensual rhythm from Brazilian Bossa Nova, or an echo of quiet improvisational rustlings. These are the impressions from some of the musical wandering I have done in my past as improviser and composer. These are the experiences that I hope come through in this music.

Skimming                                                                                                             top
The observation of lake water surfaces seems to convey well the initial images I had for ‘Skimming’. There is subtle activity at the water’s surface: flies buzzing, stones skipping, birds skimming. Also, tiny wave motions produce constant change in the surface’s shape and character, producing a glittering effect from varying reflections and refractions of light. As this composition ‘Skimming’ passes in time when listened to, it seems to have a correlated effect: a constant mélange of short quiet gestures, a lacing of continual repeating notes, and a buoyant, spontaneous quality of rhythmic motion that never keeps the music from stopping and sinking like a stone. A barrage of sensual subtleties, never completely grasped but lingering like a haze in the memory.



Fading Drift                                                                                                             top
Many of my works are inspired by a sense of motion, flow or trajectory observed in life. In this way, Fading Drift was inspired by a memory of boats drifting in and out of fog alongshore, off the beaches in my home town in north coastal Massachusetts. As the fog lifts, a drift of subtle motion is revealed in the movement of boats, eventually obscured once again by oncoming fog. The fog and the boats move in different trajectories, their motions merging and crossing through one another: they both float in their own rhythm - their motions the inconsequential results of tide currents and weather patterns much larger than the local environment reveals. The memory of these motions helped shape the flow and interaction of phrase, gesture and timbre in Fading Drift.

Turning Tides                                                                                                      top

Program Note
When the tide turns, the water in salt-water rivers and salt marsh creeks transitions between incoming and ebb tide currents. The water does not cease to move, but rather fragments into a mélange of inward, outward and swirling motions that overlap, intersect, collide and synthesize. Watching the indecisive movements of boats moored in a river can attest to this: sometimes they float facing inland, sometimes towards the sea, sometimes facing sideways, caught in an eddy. With the piece TURNING TIDES, I have tried to express something of these motions. Musical shapes and processes repeat themselves and overlap with each other in different ways. They change subtly each time, they may build up and die out or transition into something new. But as much as it is the blend of motions that fascinates me, it is also the quiet, slow and almost unnoticeable process of the tide turning that makes it so wonderful to watch. I hope to capture this subtle quality in the music as well.

Composer Note
Turning Tides is a work born from the creative activities of an amateur found object experimental ensemble. I began this ensemble initially as a way to involve people with little or not musical training in the performance of a work of contemporary music. As a composer whose background had little to do with music until after secondary school, I come from a community with no orientation to the world of classical or experimental music. As I have developed my ideas in music as an improviser or composer, it has been a goal for me to include the sum of my experiences – musical or not. By including people from my non-musical past in the original performance of Turning Tides, I was able to achieve this. Since this time, the found object ensemble has involved many varieties of people both in age and walk of life, performing my compositions as well as creations of their own. For more information on this ensemble, visit the Walden Percussion Orchestra Project website at: www.improvis.org/walden/ .