Requiem for Beauty- for soprano, ensemble and electronics

The title for my work came from Gao Xingjian’s (b. 1940) film, Requiem for Beauty, which is a haunting literary-visual hybrid. I chose the English translation of the title because the text materials that the singer delivers are presented in both the original Mandarin Chinese and the English translation by Gilbert C. F. Fong. The vocal part explores the idea of translation as negotiation between languages, and the ensemble as a whole explores the idea of translation between art forms in a more inter-semiotic sense.