Ammie Brod: viola; Amanda DeBoer Bartlett: soprano; Alejandro Acierto: clarinets; Jacob David Sudol: electronics

Live Performance at the FIU Miami Beach Urban Studios, as part of the New Music Miami Festival (January 23, 2019)

Program Note:

after parting – 在離去之後 was composed for violist Ammie Brod to be included on her Dal Niente Ensemble concert program titled – Momento Mori.  The composition uses a poem written in Chinese by my dear wife, Chen-Hui Jen.  Relating to the concert’s theme both the poem and composition focus on personal loss and the season of autumn, which in Chinese classical poetry and thought represents the moment in the cycle of time when life approaches death or when presence/being (有) transforms into absence/non-being (無).

-Jacob David Sudol
November 30, 2018	
Miami, FL

Poem: (English translation below)

《在離去之後》

「秋之水兮，其色幽幽。」—唐．韓愈【將歸操】

時間彷彿停滯了
在日記書寫的
關於盛夏的那一頁
之後都是空白的─—

或許過了無數個冬天
早已遺忘楓樹與
白楊樹的顏色
也遺忘季後
心凋零似雪的溫度
渡口一片水色荒忽

臨別的場景不斷
以雨後
松針散落一地的姿態
回歸，在醒睡之間
在巨大的空寂敲響之前

或是我將辭行
此去便是明日
霧卻擱淺在昨日
或是我們共處的前夜
對坐共飲，俯瞰無聲的海灣
蟬噪鼓動山林
月光自山巒後爬升 

霧自海上來，又往海上散去
我們的島嶼
始終是昨日與明日的距離

巨大的空寂敲響長夜
我聽見雨聲細數著時間
的碎片
在離去之後
晚秋，水色依稀

 
after parting

As if time stops
on the page we wrote in our diary
about the eternal summer,
all is empty after – 

I might have spent several winters
while all are forgotten:
the colors of maple and aspen trees,
and the cold after a season
when the mind falls like snow.
Across the harbor, only haze.

The scene of parting recurs
like pine needles
scattered after the rain
and recurs, in between thoughts and dreams,
before awoken by the empty ringing silence.

As though I was parting
towards tomorrow
while the fog remains in the day before.
Or as though in our last night
we sat and drank together, gazing at the silent seashore.
The cicadas echo the forest
as the moon rose over the mountain ridge.

The fog rose from the sea, and vanished into the sea.
Our islands are always
the distance between the day before and the day after.

The empty ringing silence woke the long night.
I heard the rain gathering
flakes of time.
After parting –  
late autumn – the water, only haze.

"after parting – 在離去之後" for viola, soprano, clarinet, and live electronics (2018)

Jacob David Sudol uses new technologies to create intimate compositions that explore enigmatic phenomena, the inner nature of how we perceive sound, and novel connections between Eastern and Western musical cultures.  His music has been performed well over one and fifty hundred times by many prestigious ensembles and performers across the USA, Europe, and Asia.  In addition, Dr. Sudol is currently writing a chapter on his music for the upcoming Oxford University Press Handbook of Spectral Music.  
	
Dr. Sudol is currently an Associate Professor of Music Technology and Composition at Florida International University and was awarded a 2015-16 Fulbright Fellowship to teach and research in Taiwan.