Programme Note
Composer Note:
This piece was written on the death of my grandmother, after I went back to Hunan to take part in her funeral in the village where I grew up. This Taoist ritual brought back to me the sounds, the movement, the spiritual vibrations from my childhood, forgotten in the many years I was dedicated to learning western music. I used both instruments and voice to break the artificial law that music must be made of tonal and atonal scales. I wanted to explore sound in many dimensions: microtonal, swimming among frequencies, expanding timbres as the ink of calligraphy spreads in rice paper.
-- Tan Dun