Program Note: 
Three Places for string quartet is made up of three sonic portraits of special places that I frequented over the course of the last two pandemic years. Each of these locations has provided me some sort of refuge and fresh air, helping me navigate this challenging solitary and sedentary time. In each movement, I focus on capturing different aspects of an environment, from distinct sonic markers like the doppler effect of a train horn around a campsite, to more abstract character driven evocations of a visual like that of wine grapes strung between trees in a vineyard field, to more musical depictions of vivid imagery like that of the fluctuating surface of Lake Michigan. 

This piece is dedicated to Quatuor Diotima with admiration and gratitude.

Movements:
I: The Indiana Dunes (0'00 - 5'35)
II: The North Fork (5'40 - 7'50)
III: The Lakeshore (8'00 - 13'00)

Three Places For String Quartet - Live Premier by Quatuor Diotima

Premiere concert: December 7th, 2013, as my Master Thesis at Bandeis University. The premiere is founded by the New Music Brandeis. The opera received The American Prize 2015 in Professional Category.
Conductor - Jeffrey Means, Soprano - Aliana de la Guardia, Violin I - Lilit Hartunian, Violin II - Annie Hsu, Viola - Justin Ouellet, Cello - Kett Lee, Piano - Elaine Rombola Aveni, Percussion - Nick Tolle, Organ/Celesta - Alexander Lane, 
Electronic Assistant - James Praznik, Stage lighting - Richard Chowenhill, Concert Manager - Jared Redmond
Composer, Playwright, Stage/Light settings/Performing design - Yiguo Yan

Act One
A female writer lives in an imaginary country without free speech. Language is distorted by the governing dictatorship and centralized religious authorities. (This distortion is represented symbolically first by a musical collage—a recording of political speeches in seven languages, including words of a trial after Chinese culture revolution, a Stalin speech, a Hitler speech, a Mussolini speech, a FDR speech, a Taliban recording, and a young Japanese Nazi speech, and second by a religious organ music) In this depressed and restrictive environment, people shout meaningless and ridiculous slogans. Meanwhile, the writer suffers painfully because her waking consciousness stands out among the fury of the world. After a long period of depression, the writer gradually becomes an aphasic. She cannot control her words whether it is in writing or speaking. Her language disorder causes her to act crazily. On one hand, she keeps repeating "pink" (the symbol for vulgar in the libretto) obsessively; on the other hand, her sober consciousness stimulates her nausea towards society. An important sentence of the first act is "people are dolls that are manipulated by society, morality, government, religions, nationalism, class contradictions, boundaries, majorities, norm!" At the end of Act One, the writer completely loses herself in the mental disease, isolating her from the world. 

Act Two
In Art Two, "Colors of Obsessions" expands to other colors, as the writer starts her inner-self journey. Each color symbolizes an extremely painful life experience: black for dictatorship; white for nihilism; red for violence; green for claustrophobia, yellow for fury, and blue for sorrow. Colors are the all-pervasive pain, which fills the writer's soul. The seven colors' journey also symbolizes a path going towards the highest level of wisdom, the "purple heaven". Although the writer commits suicide at the end of the opera, her soul flies to the purple paradise; she achieves the wisdom that cannot be found during her lifetime. 

Notes of Composer/ Playwright:
"Colors of Obsessions" is dedicated to thirteen suicidal writers, symbolically represented in the libretto by the "thirteen dead angels" who appear in the female writer's dreams: Sarah Kane, Haizi, Ernest Hemingway, Akutagawa Kyunesuke, Sylvia Plath, Stenfan Zweig, Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, Sergei Yesenin, Henri Maupassant, Yasunari Kawabata, Sappho, and Sara Teasdale. I grew up reading their profound literature works. They dedicated their lives to art that is everlasting. While I continue to be inspired by their works, I feel their suicidal deaths are like a nightmarish transmigration. Their works and deaths leave me a speechless intensity that has to be expressed through music. The suicide of writers to me is a very serious cultural and spiritual phenomenon with complicated reasons including: an excessive dedication to art; the conflict between imaginative worlds and reality; the sensitivity of seeing through the weaknesses of human nature; and the over-exposure of personal emotions, causing nervous breakdowns. I want to explore this phenomenon further through the depiction of a writer's inner-self journey from creative life to death.

Colors Of Obsessions--Yiguo Yan, composer and playwright, Premiered in Boston, 2013

Their arrhythmia, they hear, so I listen. I hold them through me, awkwardly, more for me than them. Arms clumsy, entangled, I hear myself, through them. I share my pulse, just, knowing it will be heard but, likely, not listened to. But I still hold, they are still, I am not still. Aural spectres hold sub eclipse blood work. So I listen, hoping they hear. They can't hear my pulse, because I hold them, arms clumsy. A heard pulse, not listened to, I hold in my awkward hands. My blood work, sub itself, listening to its spectre. Work is spoken, but, not heard, and not listened to. My ears wane. I hear them and they try to hear each other as they eclipse. Blood work rushes from them, through them, between them, as an arrhythmic moonlight mobile. Spectres hold me, they hear, more for me than them, awkwardly, so I listen. I hear, their hold, a spectre, so I can't listen, but I don't mind. My pulse through their pulse, spectral, I hear and hold, I am not still. My ears wax. I hear, I do not need to be heard to listen.

———

Written for Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir and Sarah Nemtsov's harp composition class at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2023. Performed by Jenna Vergeynst.

For Kari x

SUB ECLIPSE BLOOD WORK

starlings, sparrows (2022)
for amplified clarinet, cello and prepared piano with synthesizer
*
Trio Catch
BOGLÁRKA PECZE Klarinette
EVA BOESCH Violoncello
SUN-YOUNG NAM Klavier/Synthesizer
*
WP: 7.5.2022, Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik; Trio Catch
Duration: ca. 16′ - (some short excerpts here on soundcloud with kind permission by Trio Catch)

starlings, sparrows (2022) - Excerpts - Trio Catch

Recorded live at Constellation, 3111 N Western Ave, Chicago, IL. 04/02/2024

Collective lovemusic

Emiliano Gavito - performance/recitant
Adam Starkie - clarinet
Christian Sedano - electric guitar
Sophie Wahlmüller - viola
Finbar Hosie - electronics, mixing

The Hyacinth Garden Finbar Hosie + lovemusic

Recording of the 2017 Brevard Music Center Wind Ensemble during a reading session.

Mercurial Fleck (For Wind Ensemble)

MIX 012
FEMI + MALIBU

https://soundcloud.com/femi92/united-in-flames-12102017

tracklist : tinyurl.com/uiftracklist

UNITED IN FLAMES 12/10/2017

2-channel electronic, fixed-media.
Loíza, Puerto Rico, December 25, 2020 - January 2, 2021.
"drink rain from the pulse at my throat" - text excerpted from Kim Addonizio's "Muse".

drink rain (2021)

composer, performer and sound artist based in Chicago, IL.

Three Places For String Quartet - Live Premier by Quatuor Diotima

Kari Watson

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