Symphony no.1 for Large Orchestra

"White clouds encircle the mountain waist like a sash,

Stone steps mount high into the void where the narrow path leads far.

Alone, leaning on my rustic staff I gaze idly into the distance.

My longing for the notes of a flute is answered in the murmurings of the gorge."

- Laurence Chalfant Stevens Sickman -

The world we visualize with our eyes is made up of thousands or even tens of thousands of shapes. However, people do not consider these shapes as complicated but rather regard them as one complex, and the sight or vision of shapes and scenery people gaze at are varied and will be seen and felt as they desire. Moreover, everything in the world is composed not of introduction, development, turn, and conclusion; but of several complicated or temporary situations as well as unsuspected or unexpected situations.

This work was composed by analyzing landscape and phenomenon musically. Landscape is expressed as a horizontal form of complicated structure and phenomenon is expressed as a vertical one. In the case of landscape, a lot of inspiration was gained from the East Asian landscape paintings. The static beauty shown in the landscape paintings and hidden tenacity within them are expressed melodiously.

This work is not represented by one central structure; instead, it is comprised of multiple short phrases, each of which expresses elegance of scenery, as if it were a piece of painting. These short phrases continue for over fifteen minutes. It will be helpful to understand them as folding screens, a type of the Eastern art. Various pictures of folding screens are either separate paintings with one topic or one connected painting. Likewise, in this work, a variety of phrases are connected like the paintings of folding screens, allowing the expression of several musical flows, meanings, and tensions in one large shaped frame.