Poetry

by Holden Mui (b. 2002)

Program notes for Holden’s composition Poetry. More to come later, for other works. See details about our composition recital and RSVP here.

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See the full score to follow along.

Poetry is a five-movement piano suite. Poetry is “vastly complex and motivically interwoven.” Poetry is gorgeous; Poetry is clever; Poetry is personal. Poetry is lonely and frantic, delicate and wistful, plain and broad, playful and ecstatic. Poetry is the piece of music I love most.

I. Prelude

—a distant

dissonance—

repeated thrice. Repeated forever, perhaps, without the interruption—a bass note that imposes upon the chord.

Now the world was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep […] And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. Anxious light from a single spark—but light indeed. The chord unravels, elaborates upon itself; a lonely voice emerges. Prelude is the lurching of an unstable world, a world torn in two: emptiness, formlessness, distant dissonances juxtaposed with all the possibilities the spark brings.

A glint on a rusty bell—it sings, and streamlets perturb the echoing voices—is snuffed out. Darkness, still and eerie, reigns again.

The spark finds a broken mirror; light reflects across the crack, and the new melody—burnt amber, black gold, purple nightshade—begins off-sync with the accompaniment. The world, unaccustomed to color too bright to behold beyond that of the distant dissonance, attempts to engulf the foreign material whole, to envelop it in those unraveled chords. One must look away. Colors bleed into the dissonance, which grows and warps, until it remembers itself.

Now come growling bass chords underneath an unsettling ostinato, and as the lonely voice speaks, a melody ghostlike in its gloom and malevolence manifests. The spark’s newest light seems to exist only to cast shadow. The ghostlike melody reaches a high, splitting the ostinato into running sixteenth notes.

The ensuing escalation is marked by anxiety, chromatic scales swaying back and forth. The world shudders, unaccustomed to escalation, and those once-distant dissonances begin to crescendo, begin to clamor.

Now in octaves, as if accompanied by a twin, the lonely voice screams. In search of the ghost of a spark, the world tears apart the lonely voice, tears apart that once-distant dissonance, tears apart the broken mirror and rusty bells: fragments of dissonance fly in every direction, faster and faster, as the world rends itself open—

II. Lament

To externalize deeply felt emotion first at fortississimo, through frantic, jagged chords, then at piano, through offbeat rhythms and unanchored harmonies, is a curious decision.

Lament begins with a four-against-three rhythm. With the third of the four accompaniment sixteenth notes absent, the sound remains momentarily suspended after the first melodic note.

In 2018, when Irena—my piano teacher of six years—passed, I was a high-school junior. It was May 8th, exactly one month before we’d scheduled my recital. We’d had a lesson a few weeks ago. It was shocking. My memories of the time have faded, except for one incident. At school, down the hallway from Spanish class, at the little round table above the music room, I’m doing homework with my friend Luke. I’m off-balance and desperate. I want to tell him about Irena, but it feels like something physically stops me from speaking the words, leaving me open-mouthed and anxiety-ridden whenever I make an attempt.

So grief is offbeat, unanchored, suspended; and Lament is grief, the sort of grief that is difficult to externalize yet deeply felt—in the chromaticism, the half-steps in melody and accompaniment alike; in the way the music never reaches stability.

In Lament’s second section, the accompaniment sixteenths smooth themselves out. The melody, glass-like in its fragility and clarity, floats above them.

The ensuing escalation is marked by restraint: no acceleration, minimal range and dynamic increases, subtle shifts in the alignment of the accompaniment and melody. Tension builds primarily through the harmony, through half-step shifts in the accompaniment that give each arpeggiated figure a slightly different color from the previous one.

After the climax, which moreso fades than concludes, the bass vanishes. In its place appears a whispering offbeat ostinato. The original melody returns, but much of what gave it substance is absent. Lament hangs like fog—irresolute, choking, omnipresent.

Diary entry, October 2018: Yet still I found her everywhere—in each note I played, in each piece I heard; in candy bars and cigarettes, in white hair and wilted flowers…

III. Nocturne

Unlike the other poems, Nocturne opens monochromatically—the first phrase, built entirely from the white keys, comprises notes from a single Lydian scale.

In capturing beauty, the snapshot-aesthetic of dawn—kaleidoscopic, the sun bisected by the horizon—neglects its essence. Beauty is not from moments but from processes. What is a gorgeous harmonic resolution without the preceding tension? So Nocturne is dawn, and in reality dawn begins not with crimson or magenta, but with deep blue.

The next phrase brings us another color: perhaps royal purple, still dark and steady. Deep blue returns, brightening imperceptibly. In the final phrase of the opening, low grey clouds drift into view. The phrase closes with a measure without a sustained bass note, without pedal—where the hazy, dusky colors give way for specks of pink.

Then the colors come all at once—after pinks come ambers, golds, violets, the world unfurling with increased urgency and intensity. The sun appears; ascends, from a single-voice melody to octaves; at its climax, becomes too bright to behold. One must look away.

A variant on the opening theme returns, in a higher register, marked by a sparkling broken-octaves accompaniment—morning’s bells, or birdsong. Blue again, but brighter. Sunrise is asymmetric. Whereas previously the east surged, luminous, the west proceeds unhurriedly.

Nocturne, originally from French, means of the night; thus its closing heralds day. The sun’s theme appears one last time—now without its restless accompaniment, the horizon’s other hues and textures—in radiant octaves that leave the world suspended in adulation. There is beauty in moments, after all.

At the end, the stars, twinkling as they do in the fairytales, wave good-bye.

IV. Scherzo

Scherzo’s opening might be punctuated with anything, really—the splashing of pebbles, or the snickering of schoolchildren. What matters is that it is punctuated. Unlike Lament and Nocturne, Scherzo—in English, joke—is angular, witty, sharp.

Where Nocturne was dawn, Scherzo is day, and day begins playfully. The first joke is repeated thrice; initially as a single line; next, in thirds; then, in thirds, with the left hand. Each iteration is followed by what might be an explanation (or an elaboration) until the whole thing spills into pitchy peals of laughter.

A brief pause. Then a stone skips across the water, or a child declares herself the leader of the bunch, and this new voice, slightly slower and more measured, asserts itself momentarily. But whimsy has its own gravity. Thus occurs a bewildering series of short phrases, fragments from the first joke and new voice taking turns, tying themselves in knots, chasing each other’s tails up and down the keys until they tire.

Punctuation muted, chase finished, the backdrop comes into focus. A peacefully flowing streamlet, it sings—first, in the way that streamlets do, steadily, with only slight perturbations; then, braver, echoing past jokes and voices. One could stay there, suspended, bathed in light and birdcalls and the streamlet’s sweet song.

Like the rest of Poetry, Scherzo is simultaneously abstract and personal, like intimacy seen through the eyes of the universe. And like the rest, Scherzo is tightly constructed. So Scherzo is built upon these strange, disparate building blocks—the first joke, the new voice, and the streamlet’s song. But much more so than the previous poems, Scherzo is built upon improvisatory mood and character changes. Everything is in constant motion, even the pace at which the motion occurs.

Such is the nature of day.

So day proceeds. You could listen for the humming, the buzzing of the low offbeat ostinato that descends by half-steps, as the world’s denizens prepare for a grandiose celebratory ceremony at high noon; the staccato raucous revelry that follows, with its frenzied octave leaps; the ensuing exhale, which sinks into a mid-afternoon meditation, accompanied by luxurious upper-register runs that conjure crystals from thin air. Or instead of listening for structure and story, you could listen for snapshots: the deeply amusing measures where the right hand, written in quarters, mimics the left, written in eighths; the way the pause following the celebratory ceremony rings differently than the pause following the raucous revelry; the snippets of those upper-register runs stolen from previous melodies.

You could listen for all these things and more—but so many brilliant moments and fantastical scenes will pass you by, as they passed me by the first time I encountered Scherzo; as they passed me by the first time I performed Scherzo; as they pass me by, even now, and as the days, minute by minute, second by second, pass by us all.

Scherzo does not remain sentimental for long. Neither will I. After the streamlet’s song come the celebratory ceremony and the mid-afternoon meditation, the latter a gorgeous reminiscence on the streamlet. Nostalgia infuses the winding-down of the day.

In our reality, days end in sleep. But why should music not defy reality?

The beginning of Scherzo’s ending is a more lyrical restatement of the opening, set to arcing arpeggios that weave around the melody. It advances, first tentative and measured, as if feeling out whether such an attempt would be welcomed. Then the bass descends and the phrases shorten, become more clipped. Like children converging upon each other in a game of tag; like wind picking up dust, then leaves, then pebbles; like a streamlet cascading into a river into an ocean; Scherzo accelerates, and accelerates—

—and explodes! Modulations whizzing by, chords zigzagging from register to register, the finale, a climactic practical joke, crashes into—

V. Postlude

—a distant

[ecstasy]

dissonance—

Now the world is formless and empty, darkness is over the surface of the deep [wave goodbye … wilted flowers] and the spark having been swallowed, night drones on.

—repeated, forever […]