《疆》String Quartet No.2: Territory (2015)

For string quartet

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• Premiered by Mark Hui, Jonathan Yuen, Chris Choi and Joe Chan in Studio Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Centre on 30 October, 2015.

• Finalist of 2nd Biennial I Creation/ Mivos Quartet Prize for Chinese Composers, 2015

Programme Notes

The Chinese character, “jiang” (疆), literally means a boundary, is often used to define the area of a geographic space. In the piece “String Quartet No.2: Territory”, this word refers to a specific region in China, namely “Xinjiang”, i.e. 新疆 (literally means “new boundary”), which is the largest Chinese administrative division, spanning over 1.6 million kilometre square. This multicultural region is the home to the ethnic groups Uyghur, Han, Kazakhs, Mongols and more. This piece is a reflection to the composer’s trip to Xinjiang earlier in 2015, in which elements of the Uyghur music are transcribed, sometimes remoulded, and put into the work. Aside from the use of microtonal pitches and irregular meter that appear throughout the work, in the third and fourth movements, two “Muqam” (the melodic modes used in the music of Uyghur) melodies are featured.

「疆」一字有邊界意思，常用於形容地理環境。在《第二弦樂四重奏：疆》中，「疆」所指的是新疆，中國第一大的自治區。新疆是多個民族世代居住的地方，當中包括維吾爾族、漢族、哈薩克族、蒙古族等。作曲家將他2015年探訪新疆的經歷譜成音樂，當中用到不少的維吾爾族音樂元素。其中在第三及第四樂章中，更用到維吾爾木卡姆的旋律。