Pink Pagodas

Pink Pagodas is an exotic, Asian-influenced solo harp composition. Much of the piece is built on the pentatonic scale that demonstrates the influence of Asian music, but these inflections are as indigenous of other cultures’ music as well. Inspired by a recent visit to China, the musical poem is tied to the picturesque views of the boatmen singing spirit-lifting songs and of the remarkable enormous landscape.

The piece uses original musical materials made to sound like the traditional Chinese folk melodies of which the title suggestively reflects, as it evokes the character and imagery of the music that was heard along the region near Shanghai and can be felt in its designs and figurations of ornamental additions in the texture, timbres, and tremolandos. The spiritual energy and lyrical momentum, however, of the work relies on its continuation of left-hand broken arpeggiations and dynamic shifts of register and textural differences, and the right-hand plays the tuneful melody in octaves or sixths. Anthem-like in its musical mainstream European artistic filtering, the various alluringly repetitive nature makes this piece a culturally anachronistic original.