Searching for a different point of view

Accordion
Button-keyboard accordion

Flute
with low B-footjoint

Classical guitar

Violin

Violoncello

This composition draws its inspiration and title from a repeating line in a poem Images of Hong Kong by a late Hong Kong poet, Ye Si. The concept of different points of view represents a crucial value today as well as a core of my music-making: to surpass boundaries of expressions. The constant reinterpretation of quotidian matters and the stay at the alteration between the brink of marginalization and transformation in the poem resonate with my experience in the 21st century Hong Kong. The personality of Ye Si is being vividly captured, through everyday objects, questioning himself and his existence in the rapidly changing and developing Hong Kong in the ’90s, for example, in this poem: “with neon dancing in the back-churning waters of the Star Ferry, on the old depot, with Repulse Bay Hotel rendezvous produced on cue. All this exotic stuff, of course, is for export. We change our stances. We need a fresh angle, nothing added, nothing taken away, always at the edge of things and between places.” (in original text: 天星小輪拍岸的浪花，舊火車站/不斷複印的淺水灣酒店/異國情調描繪給遠方的觀眾/在增添在刪減之間/我們也不斷移換立場/我們在尋找一個不同的角度).

The words of addition and deletion, akin to musical augmentation and diminution, pairs up with the objects that are rich in sounds which can then suggest music materials that are stand-alone in meaning: maybe, “the waters” of soft undulating figures, “the depot fading in memory” of shifting and dissolving block chords al niente, are some imageries that one may find helpful while navigating through the piece. Music gestures of polar contrasts (mainly (1) familiar versus foreign to our ears, and (2) resonating versus dampened) are stitched together with sweeping long-winding chordal ambience transformations. In this 7-minute journey, the work is modeled as constantly shifting tectonic plates consisting of different timbral and pitch materials striving to achieve a balance through reframing and repositioning, which reflects a change of the viewing angle of the receiver, thus the title “searching for a different point of view”.