The Quiet Piece: a journey toward my inner peace
June 12, 2024; Mannes School of Music; New York, NY; Sandbox Percussion
"Wow, it's been a long time since my last blog post."
Funny enough, that's exactly what I wrote last time in May 2024. And here we are, a year later, with a new one. I guess I'll just make one blog each year. Anyway, I recently got the recording of my latest work for percussion quartet, The Quiet Piece, commissioned and performed by the incredible Sandbox Percussion. And let me tell you, I cried my eyes out watching it.
From late 2023 through early 2025, my life felt unbearably desperate, mostly because of a bad relationship. Under the circumstances, I began questioning whether I should give up my music career, even though it has always been my greatest passion. Fortunately, the commission from Sandbox Percussion, through their Creator Mentorship Program, felt like a beam of light cutting through my darkest time. I had one job that year: write this goddamn percussion quartet. Honestly, at first it was mostly because they had already paid the deposit and I couldn’t bail on that. But I was grateful, deeply grateful, that this obligation forced me to finish the piece.
May 14, 2024; Mannes School of Music; New York, NY; Testing ideas with Sandbox Percussion
Sonority wise, The Quiet Piece doesn’t really fit into my current catalogue. As you might know, most of my works are fast and loud. This piece, however, has the simplest texture, a tonal chord progression, and above all a slow, slow, slow pacing. Why? Because I honestly thought this might be the last piece I would ever compose. I wasn’t sure I would keep writing music after this, so for once I felt I was truly writing music for myself. The world felt so noisy and chaotic, and I needed a quiet moment just for me—a moment to breathe and to cry. In that moment, I didn’t care what people in music school might say about my style, my techniques, or all the other things young composers get judged for. William Brittelle heard this piece and loved it. He said I should consider writing every piece as if it were my last, which I found quite funny to think about.
The whole piece is centered on one vibraphone technique: pitch bending, where one mallet strikes the note while the other presses the bar firmly to create a distorted sound. Sure, it’s overused in contemporary works, but I’m 99% sure no one has ever tried it with an entire group at once. The group pitch-bending sound reminds me of an old vinyl record player or of music played underwater. It is blurry and uncertain, and that is exactly the kind of effect I have come to appreciate over the years. Controlling unpredictability and uncertainty has always been a big part of my writing. In this piece, that idea appears not only in the pitch bending but also in the use of melodies on the slide whistle and a simple whistle. Neither can ever be played with the perfect accuracy of a piano, but that is what I love: the delicacy, the way the performers must approach the sound with extra care. That subtlety means so much to me.
2016; University of Macau; China; Metal Flower･Drum; My first percussion ensemble work
If you check the Instagram clips below, you’ll see our collaboration—the exchange of ideas and the creative process in action. I gave Sandbox Percussion an idea and a few notes, and then they began to improvise based on my instructions. In the end, I basically just notated what they improvised because it sounded so good. So I don’t really feel that I created this piece alone; it was a group effort, and they should also get credit. This kind of collaborative process also happened to me 10 years ago when I was composing my first percussion ensemble piece in China, Metal Flower･Drum, which was performed around 30 times and was just programmed again in Beijing a few days ago. I truly believe this is the best way to compose for percussionists, and that composers should work this way.
Even after I had everything I needed—the music, the idea, the technique—the most challenging part of writing this piece still hadn’t been figured out. It was choreographing the shifts between mallets and bows. In the first version, the setup was so awkward that Sandbox couldn’t move without bumping into each other. To fix this, I wrote some incomplete chords and unusual voicings to make those transitions more comfortable for the percussionists, though it still takes a lot of effort for them to coordinate. So even though it’s an easy piece to listen to, I’m sure the performers feel plenty of pressure, because it is virtuosic in a very different way.
June 10, 2024; Mannes School of Music; New York, NY; Score Follower
After finishing the piece, I went to New York for its premiere. I remember crying hard at the performance. To my surprise, I received many positive comments about the work and even sold several scores—something I never expected, since I honestly thought the piece would not be well received at all. One of my friends, who knew what I had gone through, told me she cried hard while listening because the pitch-bending sound reminded her of sobbing. That made perfect sense to me, even though I had not realized it myself before.
Okay, I think that’s enough for me to share. A big thanks to Ian, Victor, Jonny, and Terry for trusting me and offering me this commission. I’ve long been a fan of Sandbox Percussion, so I was incredibly grateful to work with them. Writing this piece genuinely changed my life, and I am deeply thankful to everyone who has helped me along the way, especially over the last two years, because I know I would not be who I am today without them. I used to be very ambitious and wanted my works to impact society. Looking back, I realize I was naive to think that way. But after this piece, I only hope that someone with a similar experience can understand me and find some relief in my music. That’s all I need now.
