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Planetarium for Piano and Strings (2021)

Duration: 6’30 

World Premiere:

27 JUL 2021. Matthew Lam Graduation Concert, Lee Hysan Concert Hall, Hong Kong. CUHK Student Ensemble.

Program notes:

In the boundless universe, stars, planets, galaxies, and many different mysterious, unknown objects exist. Humanity has long been curious about the romantic and alluring universe, and never could we stop ourselves from discovering new knowledge about it.

In the first section, the string section presents itself with an antithetic texture: the upper strings, which symbolise the shining stars, play mostly harmonics, while the lower strings, which play mostly pitches of lower registers, symbolise the void, dark universe. Amid the stars and darknesses, the piano introduces the melody, and eventually brings the string section to play the melody together afterwards, depicting the grand and boundless universe.

The second half depicts the process of comets and asteroids which strike the earth eventually becoming meteorites. While retaining the motifs from the first section, the harmony is gradually becoming more dissonant, and later inexistent in the aleatoric passage, with the downward glissandi signifying the fall of the comets and asteroids.

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