A Sheep Afloat (2021)
for saxophone octet; 13 minutes
Samuel Chen, Bingchen He, Soprano
Jack Smith, Xiaotian Yuan, Alto
Christopher Jones, Blake Smith, Tenor
Jesse Ma, Aeon Wang, Baritone
MacMillan Theatre, University of Toronto
A Sheep Afloat is a piece I wrote for saxophone octet in 2021. It was premiered by the University of Toronto Saxophone Ensemble, for which I was Composer in Residence that year. When writing this piece, I was influenced by the spectralist and post-spectralist works of Kajia Sarriaho and Georg Friedrich Haas, so the piece makes use of post-spectralist elements, such as quarter-tones, saxophone growl sound, free altissimo glissando, and multiphonics.
The piece mainly emphasizes a complex quarter-tone harmonic color and dense texture. However, at the climax section, I composed a contrast by using a simple homophonic texture, with pure melody and soft quarter-tone harmonic accompaniment. The melody comes from one of my favorite romantic Chinese folk songs, which has a weird lyric, “I’d like to be a little sheep, and stay with her all the time. I’d like her to wave a whip, gently beating me every day.” I transferred the bizarre little sheep metaphor to the title of the piece.
Score