About “Phantasmagoria”
Written for four cellos, “Phantasmagoria” is a piece combining my compositional thoughts and imagination that have been developed in the recent years. I began my education in Los Angeles for almost six years since 2008 and during the time, I started comprehending various types of arts including films, theaters, dance, and stage performance, as opposed to my previous study all focusing on the traditional concert works, or contemporary classical music. Those arts all, naturally or indirectly, stimulate or affect my musical linguistics in aspects of creating transition, reproduction, and development. I was living in a different study environment so that automatically encountered different cultures and peoples. Consequently, I returned with diverse exploration and deep self-examination. In the last years of my student life, the question I was frequently asked, out of my expectation, not from the series of academic curriculum such as counterpoint, harmony, orchestration, contemporary execution and notation, or individual instrument’s and ensemble’s timbre, but writing melody. I was not merely inquired by only one professor with question or straight answer like, “What is the most difficult thing? Melody.” “You have learned much from schools including orchestration, counterpoint, harmony, and so on. But when does a teacher tell you to write a great melody?”
Tonal or atonal, melody still exists in the contemporary repertoire in the 20th and the 21st centuries. Although, it has been developed and mutated, melody is definitely the only musical element that is apparently ignored, less-mentioned, and underrated.
I am hugely involved in commissions combining music with visual media in the past years and melodic lines of course the main concern that producers, filmmakers, actors and dancers care most of the time. However, as a contemporary composer, how to write melody beautifully after paying full attention to the skillful composing techniques covering well texture, abundant harmony, and novel tone colors, so that the music can still be artistic, intellectual, and spiritual, is the largest goal and subject of my current writing.
Even though composers seem to have to give up something intuitive for creating music original as well as for avoiding the criticism from academia, I think a successful melody is not only because it sounds great itself but how it is skillfully embedded into the fabulous counterpoint and harmony, and then comes out impressively through the collaboration with brilliant timbre and structure.
Try not to think of music but the sonority.
“Phantasmagoria” is a composition I composed after deliberating all the ideas mentioned above. I hope to deliver the music’s artistry and sympathy via the intelligence of melody, which to me is also the essence of music.
This work is commissioned by Cello4 and dedicated to YH Chen.
