MUSICAL WORKS

TSENG Yu-Chung / 曾毓忠

2010

Points of Departure with 17 variations

Gender: Male

Dest: Concert

Media Specification: Tape

Duration: 7:45

Prog. notes: Points of departure with 17 Variations, in duration of 7:45, has received the 1st prize at Category A from Musica Nova2010 Competition(Prague,Czech). The sound source of the work was mainly drawn from the Chinese plucked Stringed instruments--Pipa. The main ideas of the composition is to abstract the sound object, to suspend listeners’ ears through overwhelmingly sonic transformation. As a result, it’s only until the last moment of the piece which the original material was revealed. The idea of proposing the appearance of original source to the last moment of the composition was drawn from a Chinese poem ”Song of Pipa” by Po-chui I in Tang Dynasty. In the poem, a mysterious lady Pipa player finally appears after audience ‘s thousand calls after her amazing performance. The compositional technique similar to “developing variation” used by Brahms and others was employed here to work out all the transformation possibilities of material. As a result, 17 variations were then created. Each variation departs for its own new sound journey with a punctuated percussive sounds, taken from Pipa’s plucked sound with transformations.

Editor: MB

Comment: 2010