Year: 2025

Duration: c. 5 minutes

Instrumentation: soprano, baritone, piano

Premiere information: 30 April 2025, Performance Hall, Royal College of Music

Isabel Xu - soprano
Zhen Liu - baritone
Yilin Liu - piano

Notes: Traduttore, traditore is a pun in Italian which loosely means “translation is a betrayal,” referring to the way that translating between languages almost always causes something to be lost; whether that be the prosody of the original text, nuanced meaning, or a pun that only works in one language. Translators often have to choose between their listeners understanding the meaning of a text as the original author intended it, or being literally faithful to the form of the text itself, in an ongoing battle of whether to prioritize hermeneutics or poetics.

crow / night / weeping was written for students in a module called Contemporary Music in Action, as an examination of the tension between form and meaning. Zhen Liu, the baritone who premiered this piece, provided me with a book of Tang dynasty poetry, from which I selected the poem 乌夜啼 by Li Bai (701–762AD).

The piano part of this piece, especially its reliance on pizzicato, recalls the sound of Chinese zithers (gǔzhēng).