String Quartet No.1 on Việt Themes (string quartet) (2017)

Program Notes

String Quartet No.1 on Việt Themes was written in the summer of 2017 for the MUSAICA Chamber Ensemble in New Orleans, LA, after winning their composition competition earlier that year. It is the product of two years of personal ethnomusicological research on the folk music of Việt Nam. I had already spent the previous summer working at my late father’s laundromat; I spent the bulk of my time jerry-rigging broken washers and dryers, making change for customers, and cleaning, then I would sit in the office during the quiet hours transcribing the đàn bầu music of Phạm Đức Thành. The summer of 2017 was similar, only instead of transcribing Việt music, I was finding ways to marry it with my own “western” language, much like the mixed race, the literal marriage of my parents, or the dualities I experience as a person of mixed race in America. 

In addition to being a marriage of two sound worlds coming from my two ethnic identities, the piece is programmatic, much like the music it was inspired by. My father had just passed sometime before, and it was strange to be working in a building he built and ran, to sit in an office and smell his scent long after he passed, all while transcribing and rearranging the music of his homeland. I didn’t have a relationship with him, so I wrote a story imagining how our relationship could have been. The poems that accompany each movement of the piece tell a story of a boy and his father, of unspoken love, and of coming to terms with the fact that there are things and people we will never understand.