Du Yun: An Empty Garlic (2014), for bass flute and electronics

You miss the garden,
because you want a small fig from a random tree.
You don't meet the beautiful woman.
You are joking with an old crone.
It makes me want to cry how she detains you,
stinking mouthed, with a hundred talons,
putting her head over the roof edge to call down,
tasteless fig, fold over fold, empty
as dry-rotten garlic.

She has you tight by the belt,
even though there's no flower and no milk
inside her body.
Death will open your eyes
to what her face is: leather spine
of a black lizard. No more advice.

Let yourself be silently drawn
by the stronger pull of what you really love.

—Rumi



Over the years, I have written quite a few pieces for Claire, and each of them reflects who we were at the time, as well as our evolving understanding of each other...

As of late I have been going back to relearn the classical forms. Growing up, playing any Sarabandes from Bach’s Suites was one of my favorite things to do. The playing always accompanied a sense of meditation, grief, bereavement, and transcendence.

Historically however, the Sarabande had a rather provocative and coquettish beginning. It was said to have received its name in Seville from a fiend in the form of a woman. The dance was a group dance mainly done by women and was considered wild in manner and a highly sexual pantomime in nature, with undulations of the body, massive hip movements, flirtations, indecent song lyrics and women using castanets. When it was introduced to France, the dance included men who would dance it as well. They would occasionally use the tambourine, which was considered effeminate in those days. People who sang it were arrested, lashed, and exiled in the Sarabande’s younger days.

In the piece, I also looked into the orthodox chant Xenia of Rome, and Her Two Female Slaves (from the 5th century). In the hinted scents of Bach’s famous Sarabande (from the a minor Partita for solo flute) you hear at the beginning and ever so present throughout the piece, we wordlessly discover a story beholden between Claire and our beloved friend who passed away at this very time last year.

I often wonder about bereavement. When and how it pauses, recharges, morphs and restarts. Along the way, we possibly also hold bereavement reserved for ourselves too.

I am so close to you I am distant, I am so mingled with you I am apart, I am so open I am hidden, I am so strong I totter.

This is a fruit of life to me: intoxicating, in exile, and always at home.

Written for Claire Chase, in memoriam Elise Mann.

— Du Yun

Du Yun

Du Yun, born and raised in Shanghai, China, currently based in New York, is a composer, performer and performance artist, working at the intersection of orchestral, opera, chamber music, theatre, cabaret, pop music, oral tradition, visual arts, electronics and noise. Hailed by the New York Times as a leading figure in China’s new generation of composers and often cited as a key activist in New York's "new movement in new music," Du Yun's music is championed by some of today's finest performing artists, ensembles orchestras and organizations Known as "protean' and "chameleonic," the National Public Radio voted her as 100 composers under 40 in 2011. Her music can be heard on New Focus, Oxingale and Deutsche Grammophon. In 2014 she was appointed as the artistic director of MATA, a pioneering international festival dedicated to commissioning and presenting young composers from around the world under age 40.