Research Archive for the New Commission: To Future Listeners: Migrating Sounds.

The research archive for the new commission offers insight into the development of To Future Listeners: Migrating Sounds. The nine tables installed throughout the space each contain the archival materials relating to a single poem, its reconstructed recitation, and its musical composition.

For this project, the artist traces poems from across Asia that recount experiences and emotions of movement and migration, drawing on philological research and surviving traditions of oral recitation to infer how these poems may once have been recited aloud. The archive presents visitors with a selection of materials generated throughout this process, including research on the poems; translations and modern-language renderings of the texts of the past; philological reconstructions of historical recitation; documentation of recitation traditions based on archival research and consultations with specialists; and materials produced through collaborations with composers as they transformed poems originally preserved in written form into newly voiced sonic works.

“An Old Wandering Woman’s Lament (老客婦怨)”, Heo Gyun, 17th century

An Old Wandering Woman’s Lament is a forty-eight-line poem in Classical Chinese, written by Heo Gyun (許筠, 1569–1618) in the seven-character ancient-style (qiyan gushi, 七言古詩) form. It appears in the “Travelogue of Mt. Geumgang (楓嶽紀行)” section of Volume I of Seongsobubugo (惺所覆瓿藁), the collected writings of the mid-Joseon scholar and official Heo Gyun. The poem recounts the tragic story of an elderly woman Heo encountered at an inn in Cheorwon, while traveling to Mt. Geumgang during the Imjin War. Through the voice of a female speaker, it vividly portrays the lives and sorrows of ordinary people enduring war, displacement, and poverty, situating their experiences within the broader historical realities of the time.

Heo Gyun, Reciting, An Old Wandering Woman’s Lament, Ye-song Ra

This piece originated in the emotion the composer felt, as a twenty-first-century reader, upon encountering a poem by Heo Gyun. It seeks to give musical form to the experience of reading an old poem as a means of response. The instrumentation, too, reflects the historical period in which the poem was written, along with the timbre and cadence, both of which were composed to harmonize with the spatial setting and emotion the poem evokes. Heo’s An Old Wandering Woman’s Lament portrays, with subtlety and restraint, the life of a woman devastated by war. The composer reads Heo’s choice to confront the horrors of war through a female narrator’s voice as an attempt to draw out reflection on, and empathy for, those who were marginalized at the time the poem was written, and translates into music the depth of Heo’s poetic mastery—his vivid command of the scene even within the constrained phonetic conditions of classical Chinese characters—together with his gaze toward the common people.

Vocal Performance: Ye-song Ra, Jinho Khoe, Seungbin Bae, You-kyung Lee, Yejin Hong
Sanjo Gayageum: Ye-song Ra
Tungso: Jinho Khoe
Recording: Namyoon Kim

Ye-song Ra is a composer whose practice is rooted in her training in Korean traditional music and centered on traditional Korean instruments. Since beginning her career in 2016, she has developed a body of work that includes her composition concert series Old Smoke, Nostalgia (2017–) and the score for the Korea National Contemporary Dance Company’s Black Stone: Memory of Sand (2019). Her work examines the structures and meanings embedded in discourses surrounding Korean tradition, translating these investigations into contemporary musical expression.

[“Kerria (山吹)]”, Ōtomo no Yakamochi, 7th–8th century
“[Songs of the Frontier Guards (防人歌)]”, Hasetsukabe no Mamaro, 7th–8th century

Songs of the Frontier Guards is a collection of poems included in the Man’yōshū (萬葉集), the oldest extant anthology of waka poetry (和歌), compiled in the late Nara period. Volume 20 of the Man’yōshū contains ninety-three sakimori (frontier guards) poems collected and edited by Ōtomo no Yakamochi (大伴家持, 718–785), who played a central role in the anthology’s final compilation. These tanka were composed and sung by frontier guards and their families during their deployment to Kyushu, expressing their sorrow of parting and forced movement, and their longing for home under the state’s military conscription system. The Man’yōshū also contains numerous poems by Ōtomo. Among them is a chōka (長歌) that Ōtomo composed on behalf of his wife, in which the kerria flower serves as a metaphor for her longing for her sister.

Nagimu Kokoro / haha to iu hana (なぎむ心 / 母とふ花), Ken Ueno

Nagimu Kokoro / haha to iu hana—Soothed Heart / the flower known as Mother—is an eight-part vocal work in which all sounds are performed by the composer and spatialized into a shifting polyphonic field. Based on a poem known from Man’yōshū, the work traces his longing through expanding and contracting vocal textures. Vocal fry evokes cicadas, throat singing suggests inward reflection, and a canonic ascent of register mirrors blooming flowers. In the latter half, a requiem quoting the phrase “a flower known as Mother,” drawn from the sakimori uta, forms a poetic parallel with the earlier poem. The musical language of the piece turns toward the now-nostalgic enka of the Shōwa period, and the different temporal layers overlap.

Vocal Performances, Recording, Production: Ken Ueno

Ken Ueno (上野 ケン), a Berlin and Rome Prize–winning composer, performer, sound artist, and scholar, is widely recognized for work championed by leading ensembles worldwide. MaerzMusik presented a portrait concert of his work in 2011. As a vocalist known for pioneering extended techniques, he has performed his vocal concerto with orchestras including the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Thailand Philharmonic, and the Lithuanian National Symphony. He was a featured composer at the Takefu International Music Festival. His installations include Daedalus Drones (Asia Society Hong Kong) and Roomba Calligraphy (C-Lab Taipei). Ueno is a professor at UC Berkeley and a published author and editor.

“Syair Perahu (شئير ڤراهو, Boat Poem)”, Hamzah Fansuri, 16th–17th century

Syair Perahu was written by the Sufi poet Hamzah Fansuri (حمزه فنسوري), who was active in Aceh (present-day northern Sumatra, Indonesia) during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The poem is regarded as an important contribution to the early development of the syair, a classical Malay verse form. It exemplifies the fusion of Islamic mysticism with Arabic and Persian poetic traditions in Malay literature. Fansuri traveled widely, visiting the Mughal Empire in India and Baghdad, and is believed to have been among the first Southeast Asians to complete the pilgrimage to Mecca. Using a boat as a metaphor for human life, the poem depicts a journey navigating the seas of the worldly realm, in search of both the right path and of spiritual enlightenment. Its waves and storms, its sails and rudder, symbolize the trials of life and the path of spiritual cultivation.

The Boat Ode, Dion Nataraja

The piece draws on a passage from Syair Perahu, by Hamzah Fansuri. Evoking Fansuri’s words—ships, sea, waves, and harsh winds—the composer found an analogue in his compositional materials: a modified gamelan tuning and gestures rooted in traditional gamelan practice, transformed until the original material becomes a sea of dim memories. This sea of memories reaches its conclusion in Fansuri’s final stanza, which coincides with the musical climax, when the gendèr—a metallophone—is struck with a hard mallet.

Sindhen (Vocal): Destya Rochmawati
Gendèr: Yustiawan Paradigma Umar
Gendèr, Suling: Suseno Setyo Wibowo
Rebab: Mustika Garis Sejati
Gong, Gong Kemodong: Dion Nataraja
Audio Engineer: Muhammad Khoirur Roziqin

Dion Nataraja is a composer and scholar from Indonesia, currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at UC Berkeley. His musical and scholarly works focus on the intersection of areas such as Javanese gamelan, spectral techniques, instrument building, multimedia composition, and anticolonial theories. In 2022, he was named a OneBeat fellow, and his music has been featured in Brown University’s “Asian Musical Modernisms” course syllabus, as well as in concerts such as MATA Festival, Soundbridge Festival, PGVIS Symposium Traditions in Transition, Jogja Noise Bombing, Salihara Jazz Buzz, and many more. At the moment, he is focusing his work on Sandikala Ensemble, a Yogyakarta-based gamelan ensemble that develops experimental techniques and new instruments with the aim of expanding contemporary gamelan music’s horizon.

“Crossing the Cao’e River (渡曹娥江)”, Wei Geng, 17th century

Crossing the Cao’e River is a five-character ancient-style poem by Wei Geng (魏耕, 1614–1662), a poet of the late Ming and early Qing periods. It is included in the posthumously compiled Xueweng shiji (雪翁詩集, Collected Poems of Xueweng). The poem follows the poet’s journey across the Cao’e River in present-day Zhejiang Province, evoking the desolate beauty of an autumn riverscape and the weariness of a traveler. Images of the cold river, a solitary boat, and mountains at dusk convey both the atmosphere of travel and the speaker’s inner emotions, reflecting Wei Geng’s sense of loss and longing for home as a Ming loyalist living under Qing rule.

Crossing the Cao’e River, Chen-Hui Jen

The work takes Crossing the Cao’e River, the poem by Wei Geng, as its point of departure, unfolding from its vast river landscape, drifting clouds, distant homeland, reeds, geese, and dusk-lit mountains, and quiet longing for retreat. In the work, the soloist assumes the role of a poet-traveler, giving voice to the poem’s shifting landscape of exile, homesickness, and imagined retreat. The male choir is divided into five groups, forming a nuanced soundscape from the poem’s fragmented phonemes. It surrounds and responds to the soloist, resonating with the poem’s imagery of distance, exile, and return.

Tenor Solo: InJae Baek
Tenor: Eunjae Kang, Jaehee Bae
Baritone: Sinhaeng Lee
Bass: Eunbae Jeon, Hyeoncheol Ko
Whistle: Yongsok Lee
Recording: Namyoon Kim

Chen-Hui Jen (任真慧) is a composer, poet, and pianist based between the United States and Taiwan, whose music presents an imaginative, spiritual, and poetic space with subtlety and sophistication. She writes concert music for diverse instrumentation, including orchestra, chorus, solo and chamber music for western and Asian instruments, as well as electronics. Jen’s musical works reflect an angle of contemporary art music and often evoke a captivating atmosphere that integrates time, sound, color, and poetry. She holds a PhD degree in music at the University of California, San Diego, and was also one of the awardees of both the League of American Orchestras Women Composers’ Reading and Commission Project, and the Copland House Residency.

“Tianzi Chounu’er: Who Planted the Banana Tree Before My Window? (添字醜奴兒·窗前誰種芭蕉樹)”, Li Qingzhao, 12th century

Tianzi Chounu’er: Who Planted the Banana Tree Before My Window? is a ci (詞) lyric by Li Qingzhao (李清照, 1084–1155), one of the foremost female poets of the Song dynasty. It is believed to have been written after the fall of the Northern Song, during the turbulent period of the Song court’s southward relocation, and after Li had endured war, displacement, and the death of her husband, Zhao Mingcheng (趙明誠). The contrast between the sound of rain falling on banana tree leaves and the stillness of the night evokes a profound sense of loss and loneliness far from home. Ci is a lyric verse form written to pre-existing musical tune patterns, and “Tianzi Chounu’er” is the name of the cipai (詞牌, tune pattern) to which this poem is set.

Shade Song (宋未眠), Alice Hoi-ching Yeung

Shade Song paints the quiet solitude of a gentle rainy night, and lingers on the stillness of being alone. Solitude is experienced here as a moment of listening, where memories and distant presences construct the whole yard—a form of quiet comfort that makes absence felt. The poem Tianzi Chounu’er: Who Planted the Banana Tree Before My Window?, by Chinese Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao, is sung and spoken primarily in Song dynasty Chinese pronunciation; while fragments of contemporary Cantonese and Mandarin appear as fleeting traces, coexisting and bringing different layers of time into resonance.

Voice and Electronics: Alice Hoi-ching Yeung
Recording: .ABOR. Production

Alice Hoi-ching Yeung (楊凱晴) is a Swiss-based composer-performer from Hong Kong. She works in the field of contemporary music composition, théâtre musical, videography, experimental her-own-vocals, and audiovisual installation. Yeung’s music has been internationally featured in professional presentations including at La Biennale di Venezia, De Doelen Rotterdam (Stichting Rizoom), Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Dutch National Opera & Ballet, and Gaudeamus Festival, among others.

“Sandeśarāsaka (सन्देशरासक, A Message Poem)”, Abdul Rahman, 13th century

Sandeśarāsaka is a verse composition written in Apabhraṃśa in western India, generally dated to the thirteenth century. It is regarded as one of the principal secular works in the sandeśa-kāvya (सन्देशकाव्य, messenger poem) tradition. The poem follows the love and longing of a woman separated from her husband, who asks a traveler to deliver a message to him on her behalf. As she journeys through the trade routes linking Jaisalmer and Multan in the Indian subcontinent, the poem illuminates the intersections of Sanskrit poetics, regional literary expression, and the histories of mobility and cultural exchange in medieval western India.

Night (निशा), Kamala Sankaram

This piece takes its inspiration from sections of the Sandeśarāsaka of Abdul Rahman (Addahamāṇa). The loneliness of the poem’s female narrator is captured in the acapella writing for the double choir: these are voices that have no support beyond themselves. The structure of the antiphonal choir also mirrors the poem’s central exploration of the emotional toll of separation. The first verses are sung by two soloists—one from each choir—before the voices of all the women sing a call and response. The composition mirrors the emotional state of the narrator through its use of raga, moving from Hindol and Pilu (characterized by longing) to the darker Todi exemplifying the terror of the thunderstorm.

Soprano: Samantha Martin, Shaina Martinez, Kamala Sankaram
Mezzo-Soprano: Mary Rice
Contralto: Kirsten Solleck
Phonetician: Maxence Lasserre-Engberts
Recording: Jeff Cook

Kamala Sankaram is a composer and vocalist whose work spans opera and experimental music. Recent projects have included compositions for a dancer-controlled digital mouth, an opera for the trees of Prospect Park, an opera with live data mining of the audience and a chorus of twenty-five tablet computers, and an augmented reality music walk exploring the history of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. As a biracial Indian-American and trained sitarist, Kamala has also drawn on Indian classical music in many of her concert and operatic works, including the upcoming world premiere of her grand opera The Many Deaths of Laila Starr at Minnesota Opera.

“Tawathotsamat (ทวาทศมาส)”, Anonymous, 15th century

Tawathotsamat is an anonymous love poem believed to have been composed at the royal court during the Ayutthaya period (1350–1767), most likely in its early phase. Written in khlong dan (โคลงดั้น), a classical Thai verse form, it consists of 260 stanzas, each made up of four short lines. The title, Tawathotsamat, derives from the Pali and Sanskrit term meaning “twelve months.” The poem follows the journey of a male speaker over the course of a year. Rather than expressing emotion through physical movement and distance, separation and longing gradually unfold in the poem through the twelve months of the year and its changing seasons, creating a lyricism rooted in the experience of time.

Kroḥ’rab, Thanakarn Schofield

Kroḥ’rab—translated as “to fill, to receive”—is centered on the Ayutthaya-period Thai poem cycle Tawathotsamat, drawing on selected poems and paraphrases that capture longing, seasonal change, desire, hope, and grief. The texts focus on a noble male figure separated from his beloved by unknown circumstances, represented through the narrator’s voice, while the echoing female voices appear as memories, apparitions, or spiritual traces of the absent lover. The spatialized saenghwang, accordion, and electronics evoke seasonal events, from summer and the Visakha holy month to the rainy season and the closing month (March) of the Thai calendar, tracing an unresolved cycle of yearning and grief.

Accordion: Haein Yujeong Jeon
Saenghwang: Hyo Young Kim
Narrator: Peravich Punnatrakul
Female Voice: Logan Sigler
Voice Material: Olan Rattanapakdee
Recording: Winy Taveras, Namyoon Kim
Editing and Mixing: Thanakarn Schofield

Thanakarn Schofield (ธนาคาร สโกลฟิลด์) is a Thai composer based in New York. His work explores sonic ritual, drama, and the fusion of multicultural influences through traditional and contemporary methodologies. His works have been performed in more than twenty countries across Asia, Europe, and America by ensembles including Klangforum Wien, Mivos Quartet, TAK Ensemble, Ensemble Linea, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, and Residentie Orkest. He was the winner of the Young Thai Artist Award in 2017, the Stichting Frank van der Wal Fonds Prize, and a Fromm Foundation Composer Fellowship. Thanakarn is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Teaching Fellow in New York.

“Be the Volga, Be the Ural (Еділ бол да, Жайық бол)”, Asan Kaigy, 15th century

Be the Volga, Be the Ural is one of the best-known works of Asan Kaigy (Асан Қайғы), a poet and zhyrau (жырау) believed to have been active during the early years of the Kazakh Khanate in the fifteenth century. It belongs to the tolğau, a traditional form of Kazakh oral poetry transmitted through oral performance. Set against the symbolic landscape of the Volga and Ural rivers, central to the nomadic culture of the Kazakh steppe, the poem reflects on the well-being of the community and the ideals of good governance. Through its distinctive use of repetition and parallelism, the poem conveys philosophical reflection and moral wisdom.

Köchip-konip körmegen, Sanzhar Baiterekov

Köchip-konip körmegen—translated as “those who never roamed”—is a piece based on a poetic text by the Kazakh akyn Asan Kaigy. The work explores the birth of the word from pure sound—from the rhythmic skeleton of language, through syllables and throat singing, to a full melody and a question addressed to the listener. The performing ensemble includes percussion, noise objects (foil, various objects), qyl-qobyz, and viola. A female reciting voice delivers the poem’s text in full, creating a counterpoint to the fragmentation of language into its components. The form of the piece is built on the principle of “germination”: the gradual emergence of meaning from the meaningless, of words from individual phonemes, of melody from noise.

Voice, Throat Singing, Percussion, Qyl-Qobyz: Akazhan Bakzhol
Narrator: Aikumis Baiterekova
Viola: Pavel Tarasevich
Objects: Sanzhar Baiterekov
Recording: Baktiyar Kussainov

Sanzhar Baiterekov (Санжар Байтереков) is a Kazakh composer, and graduate of the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where he completed postgraduate studies with distinction. He is a prize winner of international competitions including Pre-Art (Zürich); the International Jurgenson Competition; and New Generation. His music has been performed at leading festivals such as Gaudeamus Music Week, and by ensembles including Musikfabrik and Talea Ensemble. He has collaborated with renowned composers and participated in academies at Harvard University. Founder of Kazakhstan’s first contemporary music ensemble, he is also an active curator and educator. Since 2024, he has been a Senior Lecturer at the Kurmangazy Kazakh National Conservatory.A

“Sojourner’s Song from Distant Lands (海島僑居辭)”, Kim Woo-rak, 1911

A Sojourner’s Song from Distant Lands is a naebang gasa (內房歌辭) written in 1911 by Kim Woo-rak (金宇洛, 1854–1933), who fled to Manchuria during the Japanese colonial period. The work records a woman’s experience of leaving her homeland for an unfamiliar land, as well as her life as a member of a family involved in the Korean independence movement. The title refers to a life of temporary residence in a foreign land across the sea. It recounts the arduous journey from Andong to West Jiandao, undertaken with Yi Sang-ryong (pen name Seokju)—the first Premier of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea—as well as the hardships of settlement and a deep longing for home. Naebang gasa, written in Korean, was a literary practice through which women copied texts by hand, shared them among themselves, and recited them aloud—a practice that created an intimate space of emotional exchange.

Vox inter, Dahae Boo

This piece draws on the text of A Sojourner’s Song from Distant Lands, performed by two vocalists and two pansori singers. Their voices—shaped through recitation, humming, and extended vocal techniques—are electronically transformed and reconstructed, then installed across multichannel speakers within the exhibition space. The work begins with the meaning carried by words and writing, but gradually follows the breath, intonation, and emotional textures embedded in their utterance. As the voices overlap, disperse, repeat, and interweave, language—once a vessel of meaning—gradually transforms and fades, leaving only the emotional resonances that lie beyond verbal meaning.

Voice: Celeste Bang, Jaeyeon Choi, Yujin Kim, Hyejin Lee
Voice Material: Sukhee Kwon
Recording: Namyoon Kim

As a composer working primarily in contemporary and electronic music, Dahae Boo creates works in various regions, including South Korea, France, and Germany. Following her early work in acoustic music, Boo expanded her practice to include electroacoustic and spatialization as means to evoke not only time but also space through sound—creating environments that immerse the listener by making sound’s movement, layering, and sense of distance palpable. Boo has also developed installation-based and interdisciplinary works through collaborations with visual artists and choreographers.