Snow Spell for Flute, Erhu, Cello, Piano, and Max/MSP (Interactive Music Composition, 2007)

Title: Snow Spell (Real-time for Erhu, Flute, Cello, and Piano, and Max/MSP)
Duration: ca. 18 min.
Finished Date: March 25, 2007
Excerpt 1:

Excerpt 2:

Excerpt 3:



Program Notes:

This one-movement piece, Snow Spell for erhu, flute, cello, piano and Max/MSP, is intended to depict the beauty of a snow scene mixed with eastern cultural association and related personal fantasy by presenting four different impressions of snow through music, The First Snowflake, Footprints Vanishing in the Storm, A Soliloquy in the Snow, and The Past Melts from the Window Panes. The four impressions of the snow scene will be presented in order in music through different textures, timbres, and temporalities. Transitions will obscure the demarcation between the four different sections. Pentatonic scales, traditional erhu glissandi, embellishment, and pizzicato techniques, and quotations from Chinese folk tune River of Sorrow are incorporated to evoke Chinese folklore as a context for the images of snow. The pitch structure focuses on the interval of a third, used both diatonically and chromatically in (0 1 4) or (0 1 4 5) pitch sets in order to combine the elements of eastern pentatonic materials, and western atonal techniques as a whole.