Music Unlimited I: “Voices of the Mountains” (山之聲)

Included in “Chinese Choral Music Anthology: Music Unlimited I.”

About the Work

This series was written in memory of a journey taken during the year, and all of its texts were written by the composer. Its three continuous movements are each scored for a different mixed-choir configuration, with “longing” as the core running through the whole work, unfolding and transforming images of the mountains: canyons, cliffs and forests. Yet the poetry and the music that embody these musical ideas each lead into an endless space of their own…

In “I Sing to the Valley” (我向山谷歌唱), the choir is divided mainly into six parts, at times overlaid with solo voice, whistling and breath sounds, singing intricately layered melodies, now soaring, now hovering low, lingering like echoes in a valley. The harmonic rhythm is very slow throughout, filled with the fluid colors of wordless vowel changes, vibrato and glissandi, which merge with the stretched-out sounds of the text into an unbroken musical texture; in its expression of feeling, it is like an unending longing, until the “silence” at the close.

“Deep Valley Space” (深谷空間) is a deep, introspective piece. The choir sings mainly in simple four-part mixed voices, with the tune arising chiefly from the chanting and depiction of the text itself, and the melody passing among the voices in turn: it opens with the basses representing “the lonely I,” repeats several times, then moves to the tenors and the other voices, and finally returns to chanting led by the men’s voices. Wordless vocal lines in different forms take up most of the music, like distant echoes in a deep valley or the sobbing of a mountain stream, repeating, layering and interweaving again and again within the deep singing.

The finale, “Revisiting the Forest” (再訪森林), adds a piano part to the six-part mixed choir as part of a vast texture. The entire piece is built as a single long phrase moving in one direction: it begins with nothing but rhythmic breath sounds, then gradually adds flutter-tongued breath sounds, flutter-tongued single pitches and melodic fragments, the sung phrases growing ever longer and stronger until they reach a peak at the line “Ah, once again it is the season of melting snow.” Echoing the first piece, “I Sing to the Valley,” it maintains very long harmonies and richly colorful layers of sound, though the musical gesture differs: the feelings may seem familiar, time keeps turning, and the world goes on endlessly renewing itself. (The word “vast” (闊大) in the text is lost in the music and is expressed only through imagery.)