UCLA Music Library

for flute solo, 9/20/19 version.

Hear on Yodh, Iwona Glinka (flute), Phasma Music

This music score was submitted for Resonate 2024: An Open Access Call for Scores by the UCLA Music Library with Bent Frequency and Jan Berry Baker.

This music score was submitted for Resonate 2024: An Open Access Call for Scores by the UCLA Music Library with Bent Frequency and Jan Berry Baker.

This music score was submitted for Resonate 2024: An Open Access Call for Scores by the UCLA Music Library with Bent Frequency and Jan Berry Baker.

This music score was submitted for Resonate 2024: An Open Access Call for Scores by the UCLA Music Library with Bent Frequency and Jan Berry Baker.

This music score was submitted for Resonate 2024: An Open Access Call for Scores by the UCLA Music Library with Bent Frequency and Jan Berry Baker.

This music score was submitted for Resonate 2024: An Open Access Call for Scores by the UCLA Music Library.

I composed The Boat and the Sea as a celebration of my first love. This piece is inspired by a poem by Xuân Quỳnh (1942–88), one of the most well-known female poets in Vietnam since the twentieth century. Her poem, “Thuyền và Biển” [The Boat and the Sea], is a love letter that describes a woman’s heart through several stages of love. At first, she is a mysterious sea, so enticing yet far away. Then, as her heart grows fonder, she is like gentle ripples, but some other times, she becomes vehement waves that push the boat for no reason. And if she is ever separated from her love, all that remains in her are tumultuous storms.

In the performers' score, I quote lines from the poem at the beginning of each musical section to suggest the desired characteristics of the music.* Several extended techniques for the alto saxophone and percussion imitate sounds from the ocean, such as winds, storms, moving sand, the seagulls' chirping, and whales' vocalization. For the electronic percussion, I use the recordings from A Collection of Sounds from the Sea on the website of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)** as the sound samples.

This music score was submitted for Resonate 2024: An Open Access Call for Scores by the UCLA Music Library with Bent Frequency and Jan Berry Baker.

With its upward and downward movements across the keyboard, this minimalism-influenced work reflects metaphorically the journey to the other side of infinity. In mathematics, when a variable diverges to positive infinity it sometimes returns from the opposite side, moving upward from negative infinity. (This is seen, for example, in trigonometry, in the graph of the tangent function.) In human terms, a traveler who does not understand that the world is round would be surprised, upon circumnavigating the globe, to arrive back home. That this could happen in space as well is hard for our minds to grasp. This return from infinity is also seen in ideology—zealots sometimes switch from one extreme to another rather than traveling through the center.  9/22/20 version 

This music score was submitted for Resonate 2024: An Open Access Call for Scores by the UCLA Music Library.

The words 'Padma Tāmarasa' are Sanskrit and refer to the red lotus flower that opens at first light. The piece evokes the mood of a prayer being sung at early morning from a high tower, slowly emerging and returning to a place of quiet and reverence. 

This music score was submitted for Resonate 2024: An Open Access Call for Scores by the UCLA Music Library with Bent Frequency and Jan Berry Baker.