Sun Keting: Earth Sutra

Ahead of our new album's release on January 27, I am excited to share the inspiration and the story behind my music. The theme of our album this year is 'environment', which features two pieces composed by me for NYCGB and the NYCGB Fellowsip Ensemble.

Máng Gǔ(芒鼓), meaning the fullness of millet in Chinese, is also the name of a type of tribal dance in Yunnan, China. Traditionally, Máng Gǔ dance is the main activity of praying for crops, grain harvest, and celebrating holidays. My song consists of two parts, mountain song at dawn and the tribal dance on the harvest day. My initial inspiration for the first section came from the mountain songs in many ethnic minority areas in China. In the days before modern technology, villagers who wanted to communicate would sing to each other through the echoes of the mountains. This section consists of a core phrase interspersed between different parts to create a sense of antiphonal form.

The idea for the second part came from my fantasy of the tribal dance in millet fields upon a harvest day, where you should hear the hard work of farming and the joy of harvest. China covers a vast area, and each region has its own dialect. Since I know very little about the dialect of ethnic minority regions, I decided not to use any text in this song. However, the modal particle is still an essential feature of the Chinese language. You can hear onomatopoeia and modal words throughout the whole piece.

My second piece thronged only with flowers - is an earth sutra. In the Cretaceous period, flowers appeared and carpeted the world with astonishing rapidity. The blossoming of flowers converted fruit into sugar through the magic of sunlight. The fruits allowed plants to lure animals who savoured their sugars, converted them into energy and proteins, transporting their seeds and proliferating life elsewhere - a new world of warm-blooded mammals came alive.

The text of the song (above) was developed at the same time as the composition of the music. Every character is a Chinese monosyllable punctuating each musical phrase – they are the names of species and phenomena in nature. Originating from "flowers", there are trees, wind, mountains, rivers, mud, and dust. At the end of the piece, the climax is formed by the repeated phrase "无花无我无花" as written in the introduction – "without flowers, there would be no us, no flowers".

During this past year's journey with NYCGB, we participated in countless fun meetings and rehearsals or performances of various styles of choral works. As a composer without many choral works, I am grateful to have such a platform and opportunity to enrich my portfolio. I want to give a huge thanks to every choir member and of course to Ben Parry and Ruth Evans, for their great encouragement and generous support. To the composers (Tom Metcalf, Ben Nobuto and Claire Victoria Roberts) and the Fellows (Tim Peters, Olivia Shotton, Florence Price, Jason Ching), for their wonderful creativity and endless inspiration.

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