Double Trance
for string quartet
(2016)
- Duration 9'
-
Commission
and Premiere Commissioned and premiered by the Momenta Quartet, September 28, 2016, Tenri Cultural Center, New York.
Excpert
Program Notes
One evening this past summer, while visiting Rome, I walked into Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, a 5th century church near where I had lived three years earlier. The nuns started to sing a beautiful monophonic melody as part of their evening service, which I have preserved in some form in the piece. I sat next to the fountain in front and listened to it repeatedly while the sunset. Later in the summer, when I was at a residency in Umbria, I saw Piero della Francesca’s 15th century fresco Madonna del Parto. The strikingly calm and motionless faces of the twin angels adorned in green and crimson as well as a very pregnant Madonna’s tender drooping eyelids and forlorn brought the Santa Cecilia nuns’ melody back into my head, and I have been unable to separate these associations from one another since. They put me into a kind of spiritual trance. I continue to be captivated by the tranquil yet intense painting, witnessing the moment of desperation and resignation being captured by the artist, the very human realization of an irreversible path.
– Wang Lu
