The music evokes subjects typical of daydreams in the manner of the ‘literary sketches’ that are traditional in Chinese literature.
Gao Ping 高平 Photo: Fang Xiang
- Twilight
- Song Without Words
- Dance 1
- Blues Over a Lost Phone
- Dance 2
- Wind Prayers
Gao Ping writes: "These pieces germinate from small and simple daily things, a bit like a musical diary. The everyday happenings, though ordinary and unimportant, nevertheless form the basic colors of our life. If willing to discover, there is no lack of beauty, unnoticed beauty, which perhaps can be called a “quotidian beauty”.
In Chinese literature, there was a long tradition of a type of short stories called “Sketches”, or “Literary Sketches”, (笔记) which mainly focuses on ordinary people and subjects. This type of literary form evolved into a prose form favoured by the literati writers, but it also preserved a kind of micro-history that was absent in our history books. The Chinese literati painting (文人画) had similar tendencies. The white-eyed fishes, or the funny cats of Ba-da-shan-ren (1626-1705), subjects all a part of his daily life, provide us enduring interest and contemplation, even interpretation into deeper meanings.
Daydreams comes out of this kind of aesthetic background, intending to let the quotidian things, the purposeless caprice, have a chance to make sounds and become music.
Daydreams are my private dreams, but I also think they are dreams of everyone… "
The six-movement piano suite was commissioned by Prof. Jack Richards, for Gao Ping's former student Tony Chen Lin who gave the première on his CMNZ tour of New Zealand in 2019.
Recorded 29 September 2019, at St. Andrew's on The Terrace, Wellington by RNZ Concert
Producer/sound engineer: Darryl Stack
