Garden of Fire: for mezzo-soprano, percussion and piano

Research output: Creative WorksComposition

Abstract

Garden of Fire takes its point of departure from the sensuality of Tang Xianzu's Peony Pavillion poetry through lucid translations from Lindy Li Mark and Mandarin as well as the structured sense of revelatory space from the Chinese Gardens in Sydney. The music explores the poetry's static sense of understated erotic tensions that suddenly strike the senses through nature allusions through inside-the-note vocalizations and operatic vibrato through the mezzo-soprano line, and accentuates the colours through drawing on both traditional Chinese and extended European instrumental techniques in the percussion and piano. The living colour aesthetic from Chinese Confucian thought that underpins the vocal line, is extended through the Chinese opera percussion sensitivity to sliding gong timbres and resonances as well as prepared string vibrations on piano. The structure of the work is composed of flanking distilled sections of colour transformations at the beginning and end of the piece around static colours which gain propelling motion to a form multi-sonority climax, with elements of Peking Opera modal pitches, percussive freedom, free-jazz intrusions and pulsations. The timelessness of a free section presents the "shyness" after the climactic and dissolves back into an emergent colour labyrinth where distilled colour wrestles with jazzy ruptures. The macrocosmic idea is flow between differing sections of a Chinese Garden around the dream-like states of the Peony poetry through dreams of distilled, climactic, free and wrestling emotions as the sensuality dream portion of the larger sequence of Shakespearean and Tang Xianzu dream tableaus. Duration: ca. Part J: 15.30 minutes.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationSydney, N.S.W.
PublisherAustralian Music Centre
Size1 score ; 19 pages
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Keywords

  • piano music
  • mezzo-sopranos

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