Brass Quintet

My goal in writing a brass quintet was to write a piece for a standard ensemble that was idiomatic for that ensemble, but not cliche. However, I did not want the result of my endeavors to sound like an arid exercise and determined that the piece must have a visceral emotional arch.

Sonata for Clarinet and Piano

The first movement is a declaration. There is a sense of emergency and alarm throughout the piece. While writing the movement, I imagined giant cathedral bell towers ringing with anger instead of comfort, and twisted dancers joining in - changing poses with each punch of the piano.

The second movement was inspired by a bedtime story I improvised about a whale, a sailor and his travels across the ocean. In the story, the sailor becomes daunted by the vastness of his journey across the sea. One night, in his loneliness, a whale comes to visit him. They talk all night and both the sailor and the whale are so enchanted with each other that they decide to take the journey together - the sailor riding above the ocean and the whale underneath. Each day at sunrise and sunset the whale rises up to tell the sailor a story to ease his time while they travel across the sea, after his story he sinks back down into the ocean only to come up again with the sun.

Vestige

Vestige grew out of an attempt to write a piece with nice and neat textbook form. What was the original eight-bars became the opening two and a half minute opening section. This also increased the dramatic intensity of this one movement, ten minute piece.

In A Shrinking Room

In A Shrinking Room was completed in April 2007. It makes frequent use of echoes and imitative textures between the two instruments. The "shrinking room" is depicted in the final section of the piece, when the echo gradually becomes metrically closer to its "source" with each repetition of the melody. Wood blocks make brief statements at the divisions between the piece's five sections.

Dream Rhapsody

Everyone holds a dream to live with and we are also trying to carry out our dream. Even though the path to a dream is paved with sacrifices, with the strong faith to believe and keep on fighting, we will find ourselves living in joy and triumph. Dream Rhapsody was composed for a Taiwanese concert at the time Taiwan was rejected from joining the United Nation again.

Raga

Ragas are precise melody forms, where improvisational melody solely determines the movements and transitions in a piece. Similarly, this piece does use melody lines initiated by the clarinet and mirrored by the piano to sculpt the direction of the music, but unlike traditional ragas, however, traditional free improvisation is not used. I did not intend to write a true raga, although when listening to them, I wished to replicate the never-ending spiritual quality I experienced when listening to Indian classical music recordings. The piano acts as the tambura, the drone instrument in the background, and the piece features the clarinetist, highlighting subtle turns and stresses on particular notes.

Ballade Mystique

My family lives on Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles, which is one of the biggest local streets in L.A. and also where many people pass to enter and exit the 10 freeway. Since my parents' house is pretty old, I can hear almost everything from the outside. At 2 o'clock in the morning, these "Harley Davidson" guys wake me up quite frequently, and during the daytime, honking cars make me want to flee the house. However, while writing this piece, I discovered serenity inside myself - though surrounded by thunder-like noises, I heard a ballade, not just beautiful, but mystic.

Amalgamation

I wrote this piece during the summer of 2006. The Bloomington Saxophone Quartet had told me they would play a piece of mine if I composed one for them, so I took them up on it! I tried to give each voice an equal balance and distribute the melodious content evenly. I view this piece as a mixture of different ideas that come forth at different times until finally they are able to agree in the end.