A collection of poetry, composed from a small number of Magnetic Poetry magnets discovered in an old box belonging to the student residence Quaker House at Haverford College, set to sounds created in Ableton Live.  An exploration of queerness, mental illness, and magical imagination.

convalescent

cyclic

consummation

transcendent

quakerly

decolonial

fluxing: inherent fluidity of being.  many things within me oscillate over time: gender, mood, passions, desires.  waxing and waning, yin flowing into yang flowing into yin.

quivering: once shivering with fervent Spirit, now vacillating with anxious uncertainty.  my bodymind loses its balance; the vertigo spins me sick.  to where have i travelled?  how do i find my way -- forward?  back?  elsewhere?

transforming: what does it mean to be forever in transit?  never stationed in one place, always in the process of becoming myself.

this is a story of my college years: the buoyant enthusiasm, the turbulent confusion, the convalescence and cautious regrowth.  more than a composition, it is a deeply personal performance situated in time. 

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fluxing, quivering, transforming was composed as part of my undergraduate senior thesis project and premiered in my senior thesis recital.  It narrates an important aspect of my experience at college, my tightly intertwined journeys of mental illness/Madness and my gender identity, and places it in the context of my bicultural upbringing as an US-born and -raised child of Han Chinese immigrants.  It paraphrases a melodic fragment of the song “Reflection” from Disney's animated film Mulan, corresponding to the lyric, “When will my reflection show who I am inside?”  Sonically it is primarily a piano piece, but it is equally a performance of and by my own bodymind: it cannot be performed by anyone besides me.  There is some speaking, singing, shouting, and whispering, as well as playing on the strings of the piano by plucking and by brushing with large Chinese calligraphy brushes.  In addition, towards the end I improvise upon a tarot card (from Cristy C. Road's Next World Tarot deck) that I randomly selected before the performance.

Video of performance: https://youtu.be/VJnviG1WceM

fluxing, quivering, transforming

《施氏食狮史》
石室诗士施氏，嗜狮，誓食十狮。
氏时时适市视狮。
十时，适十狮适市。
是时，适施氏适市。
氏视是十狮，恃矢势，使是十狮逝世。
氏拾是十狮尸，适石室。
石室湿，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始试食是十狮。
食时，始识是十狮尸，实十石狮尸。
试释是事。

« Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den »
In a stone den was a poet called Shi Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.

Simplified Chinese text and English translation from https://chinesepod.com/blog/2014/10/25/how-to-read-a-chinese-poem-with-only-one-sound/

Zhao Yuanren’s poem “Story of Shi Eating Lions” (《施氏食狮史》) has the peculiarity that if read in Mandarin, it consists of a single syllable (in varying tones) repeated over and over. I transferred the repetition to music by restricting myself to a single pitch class in my piano composition (i.e. the single pitch G# in any octave). My choice of G# as the pitch to use derives from the solfege syllable given to that pitch in the fixed-do system, “si,” which roughly resembles the syllable “shi” in the Mandarin.

Using traditional as well as extended piano techniques, I “translated” some parts of the poem (or rather, of the story told in the poem) quite literally. “Ten o’clock” became ten steady, bell-like strikes of an octave, suggesting the ringing of the bell of a clock tower, and ten arrow-shots became ten plucks of a piano string, suggesting the plucking of a bowstring. The number ten appears also in time signatures and in the five-fold repetition of measures with an even number of beats. The moment when poet Shi realizes that the lions are of stone is conveyed by the striking of a harmonic; that is, by sharply attacking the key while placing the fingers of the other hand on a particular node of the strings hammered by that key. The effect of that unusual technique is a sound somewhat resemblant of the tapping of a stone, as it is much less resonant than the usual striking of a key. I convey both Shi’s ravenous hunger and the lions’ roars when dying in pain with octave tremolos, which sound somewhat like a growl.

Other parts of the poem and story I translated more metaphorically, attempting to suggest some image or mood associated with a description or plot event. In the score, I included various phrases in lieu of verbal tempo markings to describe or suggest the meaning of a musical passage in relation to the story. All of them use only words beginning with the letter “s” (ignoring the conjunction “and”), again making reference to the homophonic nature of the poem. Notably, there is no mention of a poet or of lions, although as mentioned above the demeanor of the poet and lions is suggested in various musical motifs. Inspired by the enigmatic Erik Satie, I meant to mildly perplex and amuse the performer with my instructions and to prompt them, if ignorant of the original story motivating the music, to imagine a different story along a similar emotional vein. The performer who is indeed familiar with the Chinese can easily recognize the references made in the performance instructions and thus can also perhaps interpret the music more vividly.

Performed by the composer (Margin Zheng).

Photo by Scott Meltzer, obtained from PublicDomainPictures.net

Story in Si

Performed by Gabriela Godin (voice) and Margin Zheng (piano)

Text (by the composer):

There’s a river of flowing ripple
cascading in your soul.  
It streams from mother’s nipple,
it seeps through ancestral scroll.  

Its waters rush with passion
with light of joy, with grief,
with shivers of compassion –
a beauty beyond belief.  

The river knows not words
nor why it yearns to flow.  
Aloof from dictates of the herd,
it only its course will go.  

It beckons now behind your eye
and laps against hardened dams,
entreating the man of you to try
to be not wolf for once, but lamb.  

Today let not your tears be shy –
fear not the river flow.  
Cry for me; for when I see you cry,
I peer into your wetted eye
and see a man of truthful glow.

When I see you cry

I am a student at Haverford College studying music and mathematics. I am a composer and pianist passionate about the intersections of music and social justice.

Margin Zheng

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