Overview
Introduction
"Lonely living in doudoir, unhappy and worried. Feeling pity that spring left, with some rain to make flowers blossom. Leaning over the parapets, having no interest. Where is my beloved, the fragrant grass extends to the horizon, as far as the eye can see, and turns over to the background."
This is a well-known poetess Li Qingzhao’s poem "Rouged Lips." The composer created this piece of chamber music mixed with soprano and 7 musical instruments in 2001, at the invitation of Lyon GRAME-Centre National De Musicale (GRAME National Music Center), with this poem as the lyric of the soprano.
The music is mild and slightly sad in contrast with the description of miserable background. The soprano vocal solo expressed the sadness and sentiments of the heroine, and the cello solo is the symbol of “beloved” image longed for the heroine. The pitch system adopts the composer’s invention of artificial scale of non-octave cycle and the traditional Dorian modal scale, to respectively correspond with the music image of heroine and her “beloved one”. These two different musical scale systems separate different times and spaces of music. The piece also cherishes composer’s deep thinking of his mother, as the music was created in memorial of the 10th anniversary of his mother’s passing away.
