thin places

for sheng and guzheng
2020

click for score

The earliest notions about the nature of the universe in ancient China set forth that the earth, flat and imperfect, is enclosed in a round heaven in which the heavenly bodies freely float. Here, the sheng—whose sounds are born of breath and are limited to a fixed chromatic gamut—embodies the earth in this cosmological scheme, and thus its music slowly churns as it rotates through overlapping cycles. The guzheng’s music is free, untethered, and improvisatory, representing the heavens; its strings are tuned to a spectral scordatura over a large stretch of the overtone series. Octave displacements on selected overtones yield varying degrees of harmonicity and inharmonicity, like an infinite plane being molded into a dome.

The two musics proceed individually, often apart from one another yet sometimes interacting in unusual or unexpected ways. These interactions between opposing forces—breath vs. pluck, equal temperament vs. microtonality, rigorous process vs. chance, etc.—are the “thin places”: a term from ancient Irish legend which describes physical locations in which the presence of the supernatural can be felt on earth. The combining of the two cosmologies is also of personal significance to me, as my ancestors partially include Cuban immigrants of Chinese and Irish descent.

—JZ

PERFORMANCE HISTORY

January 9, 2021: performed on AIR 2021 New Works Concert, AIR Contemporary Music Collective, Beijing. Xipeng Duan, sheng; Qunqing Zhang, guzheng.