Scenes from the Post-Diaspora

It is a great honor to be featured at Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto in a concert-portrait dedicated to my work. Tonight you will hear three recent works, including a world premiere, masterfully performed by my dear friends from Ensemble Garage and guest artists.
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Texts by Baldwin Giang

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Scenes from the Post-Diaspora‍

for ensemble and video‍

premiere

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flute Laura Faoro

clarinet Carlos Cordeiro

pipe Yun-han Su

keyboard Malgorzata Walentynowicz

percussionists Yuka Ohta

violin Rada Ocharova

violin Jacob Schafer

purple Emlyn Stam

cello James Morley

director Elias Peter Brown‍

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Scenes from the Post-Diaspora chronicles the places where I have lived, where identity must always be interpreted and negotiated, and critically imagines what it might mean in the future to belong to a diaspora. The concept of "post-diaspora" comes from the writings of theorist Shu-mei Shih, who argues that, given the widespread, post-generational migration of peoples away from their ancestral homelands, "diaspora should have an end... to anyone should be given the chance to become local." While remaining agnostic about whether a utopian "post-diaspora" can or should happen, I am interested to in investigating the conditions of space and time that might make a subject feel visible and accepted in his or her cultural difference, regardless of whether he or she belongs to to a majority or minority community. One could say that I am looking for and imagining the tracks of "post-diaspora" in the present.

The artistic research behind this project was simple: I filmed myself carrying the signs of my identity, the pipe (a traditional Chinese lute) and the đàn nguyệt (a traditional Vietnamese lute), while interacting with urban environments with which I have a personal connection. I then wrote the music in response to the effects generated by the interaction between my identity, the environment, and the video medium. Finally, I edited and ordered the video into a non-narrative syntax, but closely integrated with the music.

The first scene takes place to Philadelphia, where I was born. Made in collaboration with Philadelphia filmmaker Brian Erickson, the video investigates the politicization of the boundaries of the U.S. city's Chinatown. to in the face of a long history of political organizing from part of the community, Philadelphia's municipal leaders have disrupted the urban geography of Chinatown by installing a highway that bisects the neighborhood and threatening to build a prison and basketball stadium on its fringes. In my work, the relationship between video and music explores the barriers that constitute the identity of the neighborhood and playfully subverts the rigidity of these boundaries.

The second scene-a video made in collaboration with Taiwanese director Chris Kang-is about Ximending, a flashy neon-covered Taipei shopping district that fuses Asian and Western consumerism. I lived in this neighborhood for a year and was interested in understanding how it embodied a drunken and evasive optimism about the future, but also the signs of capitalism's excess. Filmed to late at night after the tourist hordes have left, in their absence we hear only the tracks of a globalized audience.

The last scene, made in collaboration with Italian director Andrea Bancone and Italian actor Gabriele Lepera, reflects on the porosity of place, identity and history in Rome's gay cruising venues. Filmed to Villa Gordani, a beautiful park with ancient ruins that at night becomes a cruising hangout for Rome's diverse queer immigrant communities from the far east, as well as to Settimo Cielo to Ostia, we investigate the way queerness and migration intersect with the palimpsestic nature of city life to Rome. to unlike Philadelphia, boundaries are fluid and encroachments are frequent and discreet. Identity is multimodal and through the interaction of different media we aim to at an aesthetic that can contain its vast multiplicity.

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songs after sufjan‍

for violin, cello and piano (double keyboard)

Italian premiere

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I. I should have known better

II. so/that

III. to be alone with you

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violin Rada Ocharova

cello James Morley

piano, keyboard Malgorzata Walentynowicz‍

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‍songsafter sufjan is, in part, a tribute to singer/songwriter/composer Sufjan Stevens. My piece for piano trio makes use of some of the musical material from Stevens' songs, such as the transposition of their carefully orchestrated pop production into dreamlike microtonal harmony and extended techniques, as a means of evoking both the intimacy and delicate affection of Stevens' sound worlds. Moreover, the ghosts of Stevens' lyrics, recontextualized in relation to my music, serve as a starting point for the unique emotional arc of my work.

The first movement, I Should Have Known Better, is a reference to the song Should Have Known Better from Stevens' 2015 album Carrie and Lowell. Stevens' lyrics deal with her grief over the death of her mother and the conflicted nature of their relationship, before an unexpected turn toward the light that her newborn granddaughter brings into her life. My work, inspired by the dramatic nature of the texts, juxtaposes strongly contrasting materials based on chromaticism and just intonation. The second movement, so/than, is a study of ambiguity. It functions both as an interlude between movements I and III and as the emotional centerpiece of the entire opera. The title of the third movement, to be alone with you, is a reference to Stevens' song of the same name; I found the song's lyrics-which express the necessary self-sacrifice to be from alone with someone and with God-especially pertinent at a time when I was making difficult choices in my personal life during the COVID-19 pandemic. In these times, choosing to be from alone with someone brings comfort and risk, companionship and embarrassment.
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songs after sufjan is dedicated to my mother, Cam Ly, who died of cancer in November 2020 while I was composing the song.
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my axe, my gun...my wayward son‍

for four musicians‍

‍Italian premiere‍

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I. my axe

II. my gun

III. ... my wayward son

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bass clarinet, keytar Carlos Cordeiro

keyboard, keytar Malgorzata Walentynowicz

percussion Yuka Ohta

electric guitar, bass Steffen Ahrens‍

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my axe, my gun... my wayward son, written to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Vietnam War memorial, opens on a web of metaphors that relate instrumental music to violence and self-expression in Western music. The virtuosic swinging of electric guitarists (and saxophonists) during solos generated the American slang for "axe" to refer to the guitar. Since the birth of the European orchestra in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, commentators have likened the orchestra to an army and the coordinated raising of violin bows to the "raising of muskets." my wayward son questions how this unique instrumentation and its improvisational talent can establish a series of relationships with the performer that derive from deeply rooted metaphors in Western music, from an instrument as a weapon to an instrument as a vehicle for imaginative wandering.

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