Program note

	The flute has always been one of my favorite instruments; in high school I played piano for the amazing flute sonatas by Prokofiev and Poulenc. Ever since then I’ve wanted to write a flute sonata, but I never had the chance until Kristin Pisano contacted me about the festival at Fort Hays State University—an exciting opportunity! This piece was commissioned by the FHSU New Music Esnemble and inspired by the 2020 novel of the same name by Susanna Clarke. From its description:

	Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousand upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth iteslf. He lives to explore the house.
	There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other—who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

	In this piece I hope you can hear Piranesi playing his bone flute, and hear the ocean tides surging, and the endless statues. And I hope you read the book—it’s magnificent. Piranesi is dedicated to Kristin Pisano and flutist Hilary Shepard, who gave the first performance with pianist Gustavo do Carno.

Piranesi

Salvatore Sciarrino: Tre notturni brillanti, di volo
J. Chen - viola
Neue Aula, 01-2023 Essen

Salvatore Sciarrino: Tre notturni brillanti, di volo

Poem by Constantine Cavafy.  Courtenay Budd , soprano solo, University of Illinois Oratorio Society, Chamber Singers, and Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Megill, conductor.  World Premiere 30 April 2023.

In The Month Of Athyr (2023)

Quintet for oboe, accordeon, violin, viola, and cello
Oboe - Nai-Hua Chuang
Violin - Muzi Lyu
Viola - Jing Chen
Cello - Rebekka Stephan
Accordion (premiere) - Marc Ahcin
Accordion (recording) - Nepomuk Golding

Leon Focker: CLOCKδ19 (2023)

"This incarnation of my unconsciousness, is a simulacra of the real sounds, from which I could unfurl or "dream" the piece, prompting me to question if we ourselves are merely simulacra (of a transcendental being).  Aren't we?"

Dongryul Lee: Circular Simulacrum

Franco Donatoni: ALI due pezzi per viola sola (1977) 
II. il più veloce possibile, precipitando

Performed at Museum Folkwang, "Schwingen"
NOW Festival, Nov. 1, 2023
https://www.theater-essen.de/spielplan/a-z/schwingen-134282/

Jing Chen, viola

Franco Donatoni: ALI II. il più veloce possibile, precipitando (1977)

Silvia Simons: Bruchstücke (Puzzle Pieces) for violin, viola, and two celli (2023)

Composition with improvisation based on imagined behavior of proton activity. A collaboration with Silvia Simons (composer), Amalia Young (violin), Jing Chen (viola), Audréanne Filion (cello), Kirke Gross (cello). 

Darmstadt, August 19, 2023

Silvia Simons: Bruchstücke / Puzzle Pieces (2023) Premiere

With a glissando, the overtones of a flute can become unstable and break away. A glissando flute can use this to evade attempts to approach it. Playing quickly gets out of control.

Written for Evelin Degen (glissando flute) and Jing Chen (viola).

World premier: Essen, Germany Feb. 10, 2024
@filumkonzerte

Leon Focker: Catch A Break (2024) Premiere

"funny kind of animated being..." for viola (and electronic)

Premiered at Szene 10, February 10, 2024 IG @filumkonzerte
Ruben Philipp, composer and live electronics
Jing Chen, viola

A courteous occasion makes a paper show no such occasion and this makes readiness and eyesight and likeness and a stool. 
- Gertrude Stein. "A Paper" from Tender Buttons (1914)

The art of memory is like an inner writing. Those who know the letters of the alphabet can write down what is dictated to them and read out what they have written. Likewise those who have learned mnemonics can set in places what they have heard and deliver it from memory. 'For the places are very much like wax tables or papyus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of the images like the script, and the delivery is like the reading.' - Francis A. Yates. The Art of Memory (1966)

dynamics and intonation are explicitly left to the performer.[...]

this piece can be performed with or without the involvement of electronic facilities (analog or digital) interacting with or accompanying the rendition. [..]

there are two versions of the score [...] version a) should be consulted for practising and rehearsing, while b) [being devoid of most symbolic information included in version a)] should be considered as being the score to be use in (public) performances. 
- excerpt from the performance notes of "funny kind of animated being..."

Ruben Philipp: funny kind of animated being… (2024) Premiere

Yarn/Wire
Recorded at the DiMenna Center, August 2023, by Caley Monahon-Ward. 

"Tactile Values" (2023)
2 pianos/keyboards + 2 percussion

Commissioned by the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust for Yarn/Wire at TIME:SPANS 2023.

Video by FourTen Media available here:
https://youtu.be/qjFekapTYxk?si=TD1lMFOqJk35LCmL

Tactile Values (2023) for 2 piano/kbd + 2 percussion

Underwater Comet (2014-2015)
for string quartet
by Dongryul Lee
3rd movement, "Fractal Boundaries of Night"

Kylwiria Quartet, April 2015, Urbana, IL
Sue deNiem, violin I
Chukyung Park, violin II
Yoobin Lee, viola
Haeju Song, violoncello
Stephen Taylor, conductor

Underwater Comet picks up the place where my last piece, Psychogonia left off, which is based on the alchemical process, Axiom of Maria, a simple precept symbolizing a consecutive numerical dimension from the number 4 to 3 to 2 to 1.  I employed Jung’s article, in which he used the axiom as a metaphor for the psychological development towards individualization, yet in my piece, the One-Lapis Philosophorum is not the Jungian birth of consciousness but the longing for the perfection: Anamnesis.  For this I used the concept of cubic or higher order difference tones, a psychoacoustical phenomenon of how our mind hears a virtual fundamental tone when we hear two different pitches simultaneously.  So the entire piece is a journey from the overtones to the unfathomable (mental) fundamental, which is physically unreachable.  
The piece begins from the stage of the Two, representing the two opposite forces, Coniunctio Oppositorum, Solis et Lunae, logic and emotion, or here the Prelude and Fugue.  The prelude-logic is made up with fractals-the Cantor set is mainly handled with the features of infinite recursive self-similarities and endogenous temporal flow.  The fugue is treated traditionally-quasi intuitively, as Baroque composers did, but in cosmic or quantum levels including diminutions, augmentations, fragmentations, stretti, and so on.
The hidden fundamental, the One-Filius Philosophorum, which only our mind can imagine is hypostasized in the third movement by the asymptotic convergence towards the untouchable D (440/3 Hz) overtone series calculated by infinitely large higher order difference tones which can be projected on the psychoacoustical screen located in the deepest abyss of the human psyche.  
The title Underwater Comet is from a vision which I saw in my dream, a still gleaming azure comet underneath my foot on the frozen surface of the sea, which can be interpreted in the same way that Jung analyzed in his book, The Psychology of the Transference (Die Psychologie der Uebertragung, 1946): “The sea has closed over the king and queen, and they have gone back to the chaotic beginnings, the massa confusa. Physis has wrapped the man of light in a passionate embrace”

Underwater Comet (2014-2015) for string quartet, III Fractal Boundaries of Night

I am a composer who seeks to write music that is both bodily and spiritual, intuitive and structured. I aim to reconcile and sublimate these tensions not through stylistic eclecticism, but through clarity of expression and depth of process. I conduct research in search of what I cannot yet imagine, so that imagination itself may move toward new terrain. Please visit my website for more details.

Underwater Comet (2014-2015) for string quartet, III Fractal Boundaries of Night

DONGRYUL LEE, Composer