...Qi zuo bù néng píng

Music for Soprano, 14 instrumentalists & electronics
with a poem by Li Yu

dedicated to Fabrice Pierre
commissoned by Opus XXI

One important source of inspiration for this piece was the following poem by Li Yu (937-978).

Last night the wind and rain together blew,
The wall-curtains rustled in their autumn song.
The candle died, the water-clock was exhausted,
I rose and sat, but could not be at peace.
Man's affairs are like the flow of floodwater,
A life is just like floating in a dream.
I should more often go drunken through the country,
For otherwise I could not bear to live.

Even even if there are some influences of the content of the poem to be found in the form of the piece, the main importance of the text for the music lies in sonic aspects of the chinese language.
I warmly thank Jing Zhao for recording the poem for me. This recording became not only the main material for the electronic part, it also was analysed and used for certain compositional processes whilst writing the instrumental part. The rhythm of the speech, the melodical contour served as material. And parts of an FFT analysis have been orchestrated in a very slow tempo in order to combine this orchestrated version with the original played by the computer during the concert.