According to Buddhist teachings, a life in any one existence begins at conception and ends at death.

In this program for solo violin and electronics, which can be staged traditionally or with choreographed lighting accompaniment, I aim to explore these two ideas with music inspired by Eastern ideologies and cultural practices - we have so much Western concert repertoire that speaks to the nature of life and death, creation and destruction, and so I felt compelled to pull together a series of pieces that speak to the Eastern view of these concepts.

The concert opens with a call from a conch shell, echoing through the air with its visceral sound. In Buddhism and Hinduism, the first sound in all creation was the God Vishnu blowing into such a shell, a sacred noise known as "aum” that is still used today to call worshipers to religious assemblies and sacred rituals. Sciarrino’s Capriccio Di Una Corda draws us further into this primal sound world, followed by the musical meditation of Korde’s Vák, which is accompanied by electric tablos. Then Huang Ruo’s Four Fragments reimagines a series of sacred and secular Chinese melodies, John Cage’s The Whiskus channels the concepts of Chinese Taoism into an aural haiku, and Reena Esmail’s Darshan (seeing) offers a musical vision of the divine. The program concludes with Du Yun’s Under a Tree, an electro-acoustic mantra about achieving peace at the end of life.