Biography
Xu Xavier Shuang
Xu started playing the piano at age of 10 but had barely
made any recognizable progress before he was abandoned by his
piano tutor. Ironically, that was the moment when he developed his zeal
for music and soon embarked on a journey in the world of sound. The
trigger of his interest was the ballet music by Bizet and Tchaikovsky, the
colorful orchestral soundscape of which deelply impressed
him and established his favor in majestic orchestrations rather than
solo piano. He began to study music history and theory, trying to understand
how such wonderful music is composed. Meanwhile, he continued his piano playing
by self teaching. It was not long before he was struck by another milestone in
the music history, Le Sacre du Printemps, which introduced him to a
entirely new world of sound, as it did to everyone else a century ago. To him,
the new world sounded more appealing than challenging. With an open mind,
he spent a huge amount of time exploiting the theories and analyses of
contemporary music, and found himself landed in the realm of
"new music" quite comfortably. The unusual exposure to modern
composition techniques eventually ignited his desire to write his own
music.
In college Xu continued his self education and practice in music while he took
physics as his major. On the physical level, music is vibrations and
acoustic waves, and it has its own nature and character as every other
physical entity does. The backbone of a muscial composition -
its materials, its structure and the mode it develops - bears remarkable
ressemblance to many other physical processes. Xu, as a physicst, explores an
elusive face of music that is not easily accessible by every musician.
Grew up in Nanjing, China, Xu was an pianist dedicated to promoting
contemporay music in his community. In Nanjing University, he performed works
by many notable contemporary composers, such as, Messiaen, Boulez, Cowell,
Lachenmann, most of which were premieres on the local
stage. During his graduate study in University of Colorado at
Boulder, USA, Xu performed Stockhausen's Klavierstücke
IX in the music college and his "Variations on the Song of
Yantze River" at the Chinese New Year Gala 2014. His cello quartet Si I (2011) has been published by
Skinny Dip Publications. Highlights of his portfolio are a violin concerto
entitled "Cat", three piano concertos and a quintet for oriental
instruments.
Contact: xaviersx.phy@gmail.com
Silica
(by the composer himself)
Silica (2013), for solo piano is in homage of Philip Glass
and dedicated to Nicolas Horvath, who will give its premiere in his wondrous
project - “the Glass Marathon”.
The name Philip Glass reminds me of not only the mesmerizing
and fascinating landscape of music the composer has created, but also
something scientific, and I am not talking about the opera storying
Einstein or the symphony of plutonium or the soundtrack for sci-fi movies. I am
talking about the material "glass". Glass is the common name for
a variety of materials based on silicon oxide, or silica, one of the most
stable and the most abundant compounds. It has found a wide spectrum of
applications. It can be fragile kitchenware as well as ultrastrong
shields in battlefields. Silica has intriguing physical properties and it is
very complex. It has many distinct crystal structures (polymorphs) though the
chemical composition is the same and the metamorphism has been a hot topic in
physics community.
Enough for the science. A musical representation of all these interesting
aspects has been hovering in my mind for a long time. I appricate Nicolas
offering me this great chance to realize some of my best ideas. The
whole composition is based on a hexatone pitch class set 6-9 [012357]. It
starts from close voicing in the middle of the piano register and spreads out
to the entire keyboard, as if a highly condensed phase being heated
and molten. The underlying motifs are the melodic lines in each of
the three voices: the emphasized notes (white notes, see Instructions),
the top and the bottom. A pitch set is presented both vertically in one
bar and horizontally in every six bars as a cycle, in which each element of the
pitch set gets to be emphasized once. To advance with the progression pattern,
the original pitch set needs to be transformed at times, thus new tones are
introduced but the tonal structure remains the same. After six cycles, all
of the six initial sets in the first cycle have been transformed and thereby
all twelve base positions of the pitch class have been exhausted. The
metamorphosis of the music elements is metaphorical of that of silica and the
cycles imply the different phases of the crystal.
