When the leaves flutter in the wind, the sunlight filtering through the shifting shadows they cast seems to shine ever brighter where it shimmers on the ground, each ray of light heightened by each shadow it adorns, until the shadows themselves seem to glitter.

Performed by the Illinois Modern Ensemble at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, February 2022.

glittering shadows (2022)

Like in drawings, a sound material not only exists in the moment but sometimes hints at the path it can be heading next. The direction is derived from very subtle traits of the sound—not only the texture, gestural aspect, degree of tension but also implied visuality and expectation generated from it. While working on my fixed media piece, Openings, I followed the invisible but tangible threads that the sound materials were organically engendering and chased the sonic sceneries that emerged afterward.

Openings (2022)

L’amour pur for vocalist and electronics
Commissioned as First Prize Winner of Sweetwater/SEAMUS Commission Award 

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Program Note

A pure, bold, dazzling connection of souls
At a heartbreakingly beautiful point in time and space. 

How truthful and courageous can you truly be?

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Studio recording
Performance and mixing by Liann J. Kang

L'amour pur (2024)

Program Note

I. Blue Air

The flickering image of bursting air
Intertwined with sounds around us
Sounds that bring out memories
Voices that call out to us
Nostalgia about a place that we have never been to


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released October 6, 2023

Performer: Dr. Jack Thorpe (saxophone)
Live electronics developer: Dr. Victor Zheng
Engineer: Graham Duncan

Recording Date and Location: May 19, 2023 at the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, Urbana, IL

Commissioned by Jack Thorpe under the auspices of the 2022 Presser Graduate Music Award

Images I. Blue Air

Program Note

II. Traces

Fog rising out of a swamp
Movements leaving lines behind
Tinging a space with dusky gradients

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released October 6, 2023

Performer: Dr. Jack Thorpe (saxophone)
Live electronics developer: Dr. Victor Zheng
Engineer: Graham Duncan

Recording Date and Location: May 19, 2023 at the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, Urbana, IL

Commissioned by Jack Thorpe under the auspices of the 2022 Presser Graduate Music Award

Images II. Traces

The Gardens Between The Pillars

The Gardens Between the Pillars is one of five movements of The Elemental Cycles, where each cycle uses a primary element as the principal character.  In fact, all five cycles are considered works for “cinema for the ear.”  For this cycle, the sole element used is wood, including sound images pertaining to wood.  There are books and creaky doors, wood surfaces where steady and irregular footsteps walk, the flow of trees pertaining to The Pillars, as well as divine and earthly creatures, and pure and warpy, rough music to accompany this cinema for the ear.

The Gardens, first and foremost, are made up of interior and exterior scenes, motions and projections, and the emergence of figurative and explicit sounds from the decentralization of The Pillars.

In search of a narrative, doors open and close, pages turn,
The duality of images that represents:

Theory and Knowledge
Beauty and Violence
Life and Death
Temptation and Enlightenment

The duality of these sound-images contains the same motion ‘not two’: Advaya
The Pillars points at transcending this duality through 
The reallocated sound images, sound function, and motions
As ways to navigate The Gardens Between

The Pillars¬ are the paths, which reveal the interconnection of the natural, the inter-complexity of the nurtured, and the intervening of scenes through insertion
Which often feel that what is represented is horrific and cruel

We recognize from the far plane The Gardens as a gestalt labyrinth
Up close we perceive the many, many paths and narratives
Between The Pillars, we are presented implications of sounds that have neither beginning nor end

A wanderer severed from illusion in the infinite forest
An area of the Everblossom trees, a life of fleeting beauty 
It is the worldly sculpture of the Bas and High-Relief 

Realms of the Divine and Mortal

An immersion of boundless rhizome—a chiasmus of sonic ascription
An immersion of all materials of wood perceived 
A duality must be understood to walk the way broadly 
And you will hear it in everything 


The Gardens Between The Pillars

Victor Zheng, DMA (b. 1994) is a composer of contemporary classical music. Victor explores the intersection between acoustic and electronic composition in his work, including such topics as algorithmically assisted composition, interactive electronics, and building custom hardware interfaces to control electronic sound.

glittering shadows (2022)

Victor Zheng

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