A Blooming Tree

May Buddha let us meet in my most beautiful hours,

I have prayed for it for five hundred years.

Buddha made me a tree

By the path you may take.

In full blossoms I’m waiting in the sun

Every flower carrying my previous hope.

As you are near,

Listen carefully

The quivering leaves are my waiting zeal,

As you pass by the tree without noticing me.

My friend,

Upon the ground behind you

Is not the fallen petals

But my withered heart.

 

In the spring of 2008, I was commissioned by a soprano to compose a piece with Taiwanese poet Xi Murong’s famous poem A Blooming Tree. Xi Murong’s poetry has been known for its simplicity conveying deep emotions. While the moderation of her writing is prevailing, the flow of warmth and sentiment that is built up with delicate rhetoric delivers the thickest level of romance. Her letters remind me of Debussy’s music that discards the hysteria of the chromaticism tracing back to the last half of the Romanticism, and invents a new language of harmony which seems simple, but from another perspective, can truly interpret the artist’s romantic mood.

 

As a Taiwanese composer born in the universe of Mandarin Chinese and influenced by the tonality of the western music, I obtained my initial inspiration from Debussy’s harmony but in the meanwhile, blurred the boundary between the elements from tonality and mode that together form the spirit of this composition.