Spirits In My Dream (2010)

HIGDON, J.: Duo Duel (excerpt) [Naxos 8.559913]

Muqam Euphoria (2023)

Live Recording from August2023, Maine.

Performed by Cassatt String Quartet

This piece is inspired by the traditional music of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, China, and captures the passion and joy that I experienced while listening to their music and watching them dance. This piece is my tribute to the beauty and richness of Uyghur culture.

Muqam Euphoria

Passion’s Continuum for String Quartet (2023)
[unmastered live performances... official recording release TBD]

This work was commissioned by and written for the Cassatt String Quartet. In searching for an idea on how to conceive this work, I turned to a collection of poetry titled Chords of Dust written by my father, Paul Anthony De Ritis (1922-2000), in which several phrases referencing sound can be found, including the quartet’s title, Passion’s Continuum. The bulk of this work was composed while I was on Christmas holiday in Berkeley, California, during December 2022. I was fortunate to have a quiet place to work at Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), where I spent a great deal of time while earning my Ph.D.

Passion's Continuum consists of five movements. “On Chapels of Doom” is based upon rhythmic transcriptions and spectral harmonies derived from chapel bells recorded in the Italian Abruzzo, the region where my father was born. “Our Conflicts Carom Close to Violin Drones” is derived from the spectra of various timpani gestures, struck, rolled, and transposed. I then imagined these sounds bouncing throughout the stone buildings and alleyways of medieval Siena, Italy, late at night, a city where I spent my summers between 2000 and 2006. These gestures then give way to a series of slow moving but energy filled violin drones, which create a kind of meditation before once again giving way to re-imagined timpani booms. “The Tinkling of Orchestral Bells” imagines the string quartet as a kind of illusory glockenspiel or other collection of dreamed-up bell-like sounds that leverage muted natural and artificial harmonics interspersed with pizzicati open strings. “On a Cello of Sorrow, Cymbals Will Harrow” references the acoustic envelope and spectra of several cymbals, and miscellaneous metallic devices, struck and scraped in various ways, gestures that serve as bookends to a sorrowful cello solo.

The final movement, "Sweet Remembrance of the Just," takes its title from a phrase that, as far as I can tell, is a reference from Psalm 112:6 of Tate and Brady's New Version of the Psalms of David (1696). This phrase is found at the onset of my father's poem. I found a profound reference to this phrase in the New York Times published on April 25, 1865, written by someone witnessing the "general mourning" of the crowd at the religious observances at the capital upon the death of Abraham Lincoln. This article closes with the fully referenced phrase, "The sweet remembrance of the just, Shall flourish when he sleeps in dust." This provides a context for my father's struggle with the meaning of life and religion, which pervades so much of his poetry. For me, after composing this movement based upon a transcription of a sketch built from keyboard improvisations, which in turn became focused as a series of "remembrances" that my father (or perhaps those from a crowd of mourners) might have had when grappling with such profound questions. As a result, I sought to include several written descriptions that reference religiosity, ultimately to a "solemn and overpowering" effect (to once again quote from the article on the aforementioned religious observances).

This movement, and the content that it struggles with, now takes on an even deeper personal meaning, as I struggle with the death of my younger brother Louis Michael De Ritis and his wife Renée in a tragic boating accident off the south shore of Long Island on September 3, 2023.

Sweet Remembrance Of The Just

2024 Missouri Composers Project

Dreamlike Lyric

Premiered by Jeffrey Milarsky conducting the Juilliard Orchestra in Alice Tully Hall, April 3rd 2017.


In this moment, all is a flower.

Look at the wide sky on the sea. In that blue, we cannot see the far-off flame. See the blossoms drifting under the sunrise in rain. In that red, waves take them to the unknown.

In this moment, all is a flower.

DUST 塵埃 (orchestra)

Invisible Valley - arranged for String orchestra (2017)

Magic [tape]

Composer Yun LI’s work combines her years of research on traditional music within a highly expressionistic and inventive musical language. Elements from experimental music and earlier sources are woven together and transformed through her own personal experiences to create impactful listening spaces.

Yun’s works include pieces for various settings and instrumentations, with recent commissions from and performances by artistic groups such as Ensemble Con Tempo Beijing, Tianjin Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Academia China, Guangxi Symphony Orchestra, China National Traditional Orchestra, Cincinnati Soundbox, China-ASEAN Contemporary Ensemble, suona virtuoso Yazhi Guo, etc. LI was previously Composer-in-Residence of China-ASEAN Contemporary Ensemble, and  has been selected as an active participant in various workshops, including the Beijing Science Foundation Project “Research on Contemporary Chinese Opera” (2018), the Shanghai International Composition Workshop (2019), and the Seal Bay Music Festival in Maine (2023). She was an orchestral prizewinner of the 27th Autumn in Chengdu International Music Season (2021), and the prize winner in the instrumental music category of the Fourth Annual Gansu Yellow Bell Music Prize (2023). Several of her musical pieces, arrangements and academic essays have been published in core journals in the field, as well as included in college textbooks across China.

Yun LI graduated with her Bachelor of Music from the China Conservatory of Music in 2018, and was directly accepted to pursue her Master's degree on full scholarship there in the same year, continuing her studies with composer Gao Weijie. She is a current DMA candidate in composition at the University of Missouri Kansas City, where she is advised by Chen Yi and Zhou Long.

Dreamlike Lyric

Yun Li

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