This concert was streamed by LIVE@jacobs on April 27, 2025. We would like to thank Tony Tadey for operating the cameras, encoding the stream, and providing technical advice. Ben Wesenberg led the team of students who mixed our 8-channel live sound to stereo for the stream.
Alzheimer Alzheimer…
Keep forgetting , keep forgetting
Don’t know any more
Just this moment, just being right here, right now
The past is as if wiped off, just the heavy feeling left, lost
The tomorrow seems far, what was scheduled there, my mind doesn’t work, it cannot even move, cannot track down the memories, cannot think of what is going to happen no more
Did time past, how come the days are already past so many, it is already past
Past, missed, forgot…
Maybe it is a protection,
The mind forced the delete, the heart no longer pains like dying
I feel heavy and lost, as if something is missing,
But I can’t recall. I don’t want to recall.
I only know it is painful, to even try think of it.
Move on, my body did it for me, my brain resume to a blank paper, so I can create the future after all the struggle and death, now I am a newborn.
— Clara Qiyun Zhao
Since I was a child, I have always felt a profound sense of peace when I am immersed in nature. All of the obstacles and anxieties of the world seem to melt away and seem insignificant, as if I am observing things from a great distance. I am detached from the superficialities and artificial stresses of society. I contemplate the age of the trees around me and how long they will outlive myself and everyone I know. I wonder if one day the atoms that compose my body will become part of these woodland sentinels, or the soil which sustains them. I am undisturbed by my own morality, as I see how nature recycles and repairs itself with the same elements over and over again, ad infinitum. This tacit understanding of the cycle of life and my place in the universe can only be achieved through my solitary musings in the woods. This is not escapism, but rather a quasi-religious revelation within my soul.
This sense of detachment, understanding, and revelation is described elegantly by Ralph Waldo Emerson in a passage from his essay, “Nature” (1836):
“In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”
This piece is both a meditation on this text and my own experiences with nature. The development of the music parallels the structure of the text, with the music becoming more abstract and transcendental as Emerson describes the experience of becoming a “transparent eyeball.”
Spontaneous Generation is a scientific theory that living creatures can arise from non-living matter. This theory dates to ancient times and was not discredited until the mid-19th century with the work of French chemist Louis Pasteur and Irish physicist John Tyndall.
Aristotle writes in his Generation of Animals, Book III, Part 11, that “Animals and plants come into being in earth and in liquid because there is water in earth, and air in water, and in all air is vital heat so that in a sense all things are full of soul.” And Belgian physician Jan Baptist van Helmont proposed in the 17th century that the recipe for mice is a piece of dirty cloth with wheat for 21 days.
When I began work on this piece, it immediately felt like something that was alive.
I can set the parameters, but once they are running, a complex set of input and chance-based interrelations is set loose that make each iteration of the piece irreproducible. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, it appears as if the legitimacy of this theory, as well as what it means to be living, is once again being called into question.
This piece is dedicated to all composers who, with unwavering passion, embrace their creations and seek truth through the solitude of struggle.
It unfolds in three movements. The first presents pure fixed media, interwoven with live performance and spoken word—an invocation. The second evolves into a musical theatre moment, where piano, voice, and fixed media converge in dialogue. The final section dissolves boundaries entirely, merging extended piano techniques, vocal expression, and the sonic landscape into one breath.
The two performers arise from the same origin, mirroring a duality at the heart of the self—one embodying tradition, conservatism, and silence; the other channeling radicalism, innovation, and rage. Together, they tell the story of a composer stepping into a luminous yet quietly disquieting new world. She yearns to translate its brilliance into sound but is torn between two internal voices: one whispering of form and restraint, the other urging her toward rupture and reinvention.
In the end, she returns to silence—not in defeat, but in clarity. She realizes these voices were never adversaries, but guides. Only by writing the world as she perceives it can her divided self find unity—and what remains is a music that is wholly, unmistakably her own.
Chloromnesia is a coined word combining “Chloro,” derived from the Greek word chloros meaning green and life, and “Mmesia,” from mnēsis, meaning memory. Here, “Chloro” goes beyond color to represent the living energy flowing through plants and the quiet breath of nature itself. This title imagines the plant as a living being that absorbs, remembers, and breathes the invisible traces of the world. Humans and plants are connected within a single flow of life energy and electrical currents. While natural objects may sometimes appear inert to human eyes, their cells are constantly alive, responding to even the slightest stimuli with subtle electromagnetic changes. This work seeks to reveal these hidden, living responses through the fusion of electronic technology and art, present in both sound and vision.
In Chloromnesia, the plant is imagined as a sentient life form. Each leaf and cell senses the world’s phenomena as electrical signals and remembers them. At the beginning of the piece, the plant responds delicately to human presence, creating a moment of mutual perception and subtle interaction. It then recalls the beautiful memories it has held within the vastness of nature over time, expressing them as sound and offering a meditative resonance. At times, it also voices the pain and scars of having endured the burning and pollution caused by human actions throughout history. Through this work, I hope to reflect on the relationship between nature and humanity, and to dream of a world where nature is once again cherished.
The first time I attended an electronic music concert, it felt like magic. Sounds twisted, transformed, and moved through the air with no clear source—an illusion as compelling as any stage trick.
This piece takes the form of a magic show, inviting the listener to question what’s real and what’s not. Is the performance genuine sorcery, or is it just a cheap trick?
When a young stone princess suddenly sprouts a crystal on her head, she must learn what it means to grow up and become a great ruler.
This short film animated by Con Ray explores the theme of “growing”: the sometimes painful but beautiful process of stepping into new responsibilities and figuring out what your own dreams are in a world of expectations. Gigantic thanks to Con for his incredible artistry and partnership on this project!
a vessel in pieces reflects the quiet tension that runs beneath the surface of everyday life, a feeling of being caught in endless repetition, like a wheel turning over and over. Beneath the flow of ordinary days, there is a persistent sense of strain, of breaking and fracturing.
Yet within that breaking, there is a quiet strength. The piece follows the inner journey of a self that endures through its cracks and imperfections, continuing to move forward with a fragile heart that chooses to hold on and believe.
Heqet, an ancient Egyptian goddess depicted as a frog or a woman with a frog’s head, symbolized fertility, renewal, and rebirth linked to the Nile’s floods. She embodies a liminal space between the divine and human. My music reflects this with synthesized drums, sampled frogs, and a pure sine bass that creates a surreal, otherworldly sound that bridges the two realms. Shawn’s video complements this with kaleidoscopic, distorted scientific imagery of frogs, eggs, and salamanders. It offers an alien perspective on nature and is a timeless interplay of cyclical visuals in counterpoint to the understated music.
This project was created to document the time I spent with my late uncle’s family in Troy after coming to the United States for my studies. The title Troy comes from the name of the town in Michigan where they live.
The piece incorporates various sound objects connected to my memories of the family. I used recordings of voices and events captured on my phone, then divided and restructured these moments through different synthesis techniques to recreate and reimagine scenes from my past.
Beyond a personal reflection on family and relationships, the work also evokes a sense of nostalgia for the SDA (Seventh-day Adventist) community that formed part of my early environment. As part of this, I borrowed and reinterpreted recordings from worship services at the Troy Korean Church, where my uncle’s family is involved. Through this material, I sought to metaphorically weave my feelings and reflections on faith into the piece.
This work is dedicated to my late uncle and his family in Michigan.
I want to run again is a performance piece for a movement artist and audiovisual media generated and controlled through TouchDesigner software. In the piece, the artist introduces their goal of running again, providing context about a neurological event that took away their ability to run. They explain that they have designed a test, loosely based on the FitnessGram PACER Test, to monitor their progress in returning to running. The test measures how long the artist can keep up with its pace, which, like the PACER Test, progressively gets faster. As the pace increases, the artist eventually fails to reach one side in the allotted time, triggering error messages.
The piece investigates the feeling of surveillance that I associate with my disability, forcing myself to perform within a synthetic environment that amplifies this experience. There is no prescribed agenda for the work, but in composing the music and movement, I have discovered a hopeful interpretation of my efforts: that there is something inspiring and beautiful in not succeeding.
