Nostalgia

Program note

Nostalgia 《乡愁》 is a renowned poem written by Chinese poet Yu Guangzhong. In this poem, he expressed profound longing for his homeland. When the San Francisco Choral Artists invited me to compose a piece for their Concert Apple Pie and all that: An American Sampler, I, as an international student, associate myself with people who also live here with homesickness and chose this poem as the text. I learned this poem in middle school. At that time, I didn’t quite understand it. Many years later, when I read Milan Kundera’s interpretation of “nostalgia” in “Ignorance” while flying abroad to study, this poem suddenly appeared in my mind. In this piece, I use shifting, unresolved harmonies to evoke the sense of rootless drifting, and the different vocal registers to reflect ‘this side’ and ‘that side’. The poem goes through childhood, youth, middle age, and then it returns to childhood again at the end, suggesting that, in addition to the geological region, nostalgia also lies in the past——a time that we could never return to. I am very grateful to Dr. Solomon, director of San Francisco Choral Artists for commissioning this work and to Yu Yushan, daughter of poet Yu Guangzhong for granting me the authorization to set this poem to music. This piece would not exist without them.