No Rush (excerpt) - MP3 link

Jin Zhang (1999), Canada Council Commission

Written in three sections for erhu, zheng, and percussion, this work is an exploration of contrasts, moving between tenderness and strength, forcefulness and tranquility.

Jin Zhang

Jin Zhang combines his training in Chinese and western music into his career as a composer, conductor and music director. He has worked with musicians from various cultural backgrounds to develop a new form of musical expression that incorporates multiple traditions into a true voice of Canadian culture.

A member of Canadian League of Composers and an associate composer of Canadian Music Center, Zhang graduated from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and studied conducting with Professor Morihiro Okabe at Toho Gakuen School of Music, with maestro Kazuyoshi Akiyama, and in a master class with Seiji Ozawa in Japan. In China and Japan He conducted various ensembles and choirs and composed music for concerts, radio, television broadcasts and recordings, receiving numerous prizes in Chinese competitions.

In Canada, Zhang has received commissions from Vancouver Chinese Music Ensemble, Orchid Ensemble, Silk Road Music Ensemble, BC Chinese Music Ensemble, Vancouver Chinese Cultural Centre, many with the assistance of the Canada Council. His music is frequently heard on BBC, CBC, VTV and other networks. His film music “Nu Shu”– A Hidden Language of Women in China, won a prize at the Festival Internazionale Cinema Delle Donnein Torino, Italy. Zhang is the music director/conductor with Vancouver Youth Symphony Intermediate Orchestra and New Westminster Symphony Orchestra, and conductor of B.C Chinese Orchestra. He has conducted Vancouver Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Inter-Culture Orchestra and West Coast Symphony Orchestra.

Proliferasian (excerpt) - MP3 link

Composer: Paul Plimley (2001), (BC Arts Council Commission)
Recording date: 2002 Sonic Boom Festival of BC Composers - Vancouver Pro Music Society

It consists of a written score at a moderate tempo with syncopated 16th notes and melodic passages played by the erhu and marimba, with the zheng playing a slower counter melody alternating with unison passages with the other two instruments. After the written music, the ensemble utilizes sections of this composed material and expands the rhythmic and textual fabrics in four sections of improvisation. The improvisational requirements are quite demanding. Each player is encouraged to improvise in his/her own tempo, independent from anyone else. The musicians play from a focused awareness of their bodies in a relaxed and involved participation in the shaping of phrasing and the options to change tempo (gradually or all of a sudden) at any time. After the improvisations are completed, the group Da capos from beginning to the end of the same written score.

Paul Plimley

Paul Plimley is a pianist/composer/improvisor active nationally and internationally for more than 20 years. He has synthesized jazz traditions, classical influences and elements of new music into a number of stylistic approaches which he distills through his original compositions and improvisations. He has toured many times throughout Europe, Canada and the United States. Paul’s music is heard frequently on international TV and radio, as a soloist, ensemble collaborators and on over a dozen CD recordings with musicians from around the globe. Paul's creative work comprises a wide range of ensemble settings, text and multi-media. He has written music for solo piano, small and large ensembles, symphony orchestra, and electronic music. In addition Paul Plimley has been leading bands for over twenty years and has conducted small and large ensembles.

401 (excerpt) - MP3 link

Composer: Lan Tung, Mei Han, Jonathan Bernard (2002)
Recorded live at The Roundhouse, September 16, 2005
Self Produced Multi Media Concert "Road to Kashgar"

Inspired by the infamous Canadian highway and composed during a trip between concerts, the piece reflects moments of anxiety and turmoil in contrast with those of peace and serenity. It features dynamic improvisation within a pre-composed structure, and symbolizes a modern route for travelers and traders of many ethnic origins.

Della’s Different Train (excerpt) - MP3 link

Ya-Wen Vivienne Wang (2003), BC Arts Council Commission
Recorded live at The Roundhouse, January 2004
Self Produced Concert "A Contemporary Chinese New Year"

The inspiration of this composition came unexpectedly out of a series of interviews/documentaries the composer was undertaking for the BB C/CBC radio play on Chinese Diaspora in summer 2003. Among these fascinating, yet untold, stories of Chinese-Canadian women, is the poignant story of Della Tse and her mother Jenny Chan, both Cantonese Opera Singers whose lives of constant change ended up constant stuck. Della’s spoken words sampled from the interview forms the non-linear narrative here. This voice rides on a number of different train sounds collected/recorded across Canada: Canadian Diesel Trains, Go Trains, CPR-VIA and the Toronto Subway. The rhythmic nature of the train tracks provides the ‘click track’ bedding on the tape part, allowing the cross-cultural instrumentation of zheng, erhu and marimba to add further flights to this diasporadic voyage. Traditional Cantonese Opera melodies and percussion bridges are employed to imbue a sense of authenticity. While this is Della’s Different Trains, it owes much to Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988) for that first trigger in inspiration.

Ya-wen Vivienne Wang

Recipient of the explorPERFORMANCE Award 2005 (a CBC TV and explorASIAN initiative), Wang has enjoyed traveling many different artistic pathways: a composer, music director, collaborative pianist (specializing in vocal and dance accompaniment), interdisciplinary performer, TV music program host. With her clownish performance work, she has been described as the Asian female Buster Keaton. Her music performances have provoked comments like “musically dazzling”, “audacious”, “soulful”, and her work embodies the “enormous playfulness and precision” of a truly gifted artist. For some reviewers, watching her is akin to witnessing a dancer at the keyboard. Wang completed a cross Canada solo concert tour (2002) and curated the music series for the Taiwanese Cultural Festival (2003-4).

Her original solo performance work Excursions (1998) won a Jessie Richardson Award nomination for Outstanding Original Musical. A radio version was later commissioned and broadcast by the CBC Radio. Her award-winning orchestral composition, The Difficult Mountain Paths of Szechwan (1992), was selected by the Taiwan Provincial Symphony Orchestra and Asian-Pacific Composers’ Conference in New Zealand in 1993. She received a Canada Council Grant for the creation of her first cross-cultural opera The Peach Project (in progress) and was nominated for the Future Generation's Millennium Award (2000). Her recent projects include Hitting the Wall: an exhibition-installation performance collaboration with Vancouver visual artist Carol Sawyer for the Access Artist Run Centre. Wang was nominated by TECO to attend the Seminar for the Overseas Compatriot Young Professionals in Taiwan last summer.

Traveling with My Sixth Sense (excerpt) - MP3 link

Lan Tung (2004)
Recorded live at Western Front, Sonic Boom Festival, March 12, 2004

We have all experienced this: without looking, we know that someone is staring at us. Do we really know? Or are we imaging it? Maybe when it does happen, we do not feel it at all. If we do know when someone is watching, then what does it make us know? Is the energy that we received from the other person? Are we capable of conveying this energy? Or is it some other mysterious reasons? This piece is an exploration of these questions.

Eye contact has been an important part in music making. However, it is avoided intentionally in this piece to test our sixth sense. In the format of a musical game, the musicians will take on different roles randomly throughout the piece: the Giver sends out energy by giving intense looks or reaching a hand into the physical space of the others, without giving any cues in sounds; the Receiver responds in improvisation without looking up; The Encounters are the ones who happen to look up at each other at the same time.

“ a structured improvisation in which the erhu virtuoso was joined by Ron Samworth on guitar, Ya-Wen Vivienne Wang on accordion, and her Orchid Ensemble colleague Jonathan Bernard on percussion. The theoretical – and theatrical – considerations behind the piece are complex ... Lan’s attempt to harness the power of intuition paid off in a piece that showered listeners with vivid blocks of tonal colour.” Georgia Straight, March 2004

Lan Tung

Lan crosses the lines between classical, contemporary, folk, blues and various ethnic styles, such as Indian, Celtic and Middle Eastern, to expand the horizons of the erhu. Lan has performed with Huun Huur Tu (Tuva), Baka Beyond (UK), Khac Chi Ensemble (Vietnam) and Hossam Shaker (Egypt) and shared the stage with many Vancouver's innovative improvisers, such as Ron Samworth and Coat Cooke. She is a member of Vancouver world music ensemble Tandava, and she has premiered numerous compositions by Canadian and US composers. Trained at Taiwan's Chinese Cultural University, Lan went on to study with erhu virtuosi Jiebing Chen in San Francisco and Zhang Funming in Beijing, with Hindustani violinist Kala Ramnath in Bombay and Egyptian violinist Dr. Alfred Gamil in Cairo. The various influences are evident in Lan's compositions and music arrangements. Lan started classical voice training since she was 12, and she continued at Capilano College and with Joseph Shore in Vancouver. A concert producer and arts administrator, Lan also serves as a board director of the Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra.

Parting at Yang Kuan (excerpt) - MP3 link

Hope Lee (2004), Canada Council Commission
Recorded May 2006 at the Norman Rothstein Theatre Self Produced Multimedia Concert "Parting at Yang Kuan"

Parting at Yang Kuan, the eighth work in Lee’s “Voices in Time” cycle, reflects on the Ming Dynasty, the last dynasty in China ruled by Chinese, a time of rapid changes of rulers, internal rebellion, wars at the frontiers, naval expeditions, Manchus invasion and conquest. This piece shares the 'farewell' mood and gesture of the famous phrase from a poem, “Outside Yang Kuan to the West, you will not find any familiar faces”. Although Yang Kuan is historically referred as a military path, the composer sees it as gate where people depart their earthy existence. Musically, it re-examines many musical ideas and materials of the seven previous works and renews in a new sound world.

Hope Lee

Since 1979, Hope Lee has been studying Chinese music, medieval and classical poetry, in particular the ideology, philosophy and notation of qin (Chinese 7-string zither) music. The knowledge absorbed and material collected have integrated and become an important part of her creative voice and to-date, nine pieces have been completed, with each representing a particular time in Chinese history which in turn, reflects our own existence.

Lee studied music at the McGill University in Montréal and at the Staatlich Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, Germany as a recipient of a DAAD scholarship and a Canada Council Grant. Her main teachers in composition are Bengt Hambraeus, Brian Cherney and Klaus Huber. During this period, she also attended the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik and the Durham 1979 Oriental Music Festival in England. Both events were important in shaping her musical development. Between 1987 and 1990, she carried out studies on Chinese traditional music and poetry, as well as computer music in Berkeley, California. Hope Lee has been invited to the first International Woman Composers Conference in Berlin, to the Künsterlerhaus Boswil in Switzerland, Die Hoege in Germany as artist-in-residence and as visiting composition instructor at Queen’s University and composer-in-residence at University of Calgary.

Lee’s work has been presented at various international music festivals such as Music Today in Tokyo, World Music Days of the ISCM, Aspekte Salzburg Festival, Hong Kong Festival, International Computer Music Conference, the Scotia Festival of Music, Trieste Contemporanea, Italy and International Tribune of Composers in Belgrade. Her works have won many awards, including first prize for Nabripamo (piano, marimba, 1982) in the Scotia Festival of Music Boulez Year Composers' Competition in 1991, an Honourable Mention in the International Composers Competition at Budapest, Hungary in 1989 for ...I, Laika....(flute, cello, piano, 1988-89). Other principal works of Lee are Ballade of Endless Woe (vocal quartet, percussion ensemble, 1978-79), Onomatopoeia (chamber orchestra with children's choir, l979-81), Melboac (harpsichord, 1983), one thousand curves ten thousand colours (1997), a multimedia presentation integrating live acoustic and electroacoustic music with computer-generated images, lights and dance, with the theme of artist's role in the society, and Voices in Time cycle (1989-present). The complete catalogue of Lee's works is published by Furore-Verlag in Germany.