Lullaby (2023)
for violin and piano; 17 minutes
Jiarong Li, piano
St. Paul’s Chapel, Columbia University,
New York
Lullaby is the opening composition of my recital at St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University, on May 16th, 2023. It was a site-specific concert. The chapel architecture allows for truly awesome acoustic experience. The reverberation in the chapel produces amazing results. I often compose artificial echoes and reverberations, and the overtone-heavy, harmonically-rich music can benefit from a reverberant space. Based on this concept I wrote an entire program of music specifically for the St. Paul’s acoustic.
This is a slow, quiet, and meditative work. In this piece, the piano creates a drone canvas that has static pace and sophisticated harmony changes. I derived the violin’s gestures from the piano’s chords. The violin has linear flowing textures, which involve a lot of natural and artificial harmonics to create delicate overtones.
Score