30 March 2025
Hong Kong, HKSAR

This past week, we premiered HORIZON (2025), which features the second movement of my String Quartet no. 2 (2024-25), at JUMPSTARTER, an Alibaba Group-sponsored event here in Hong Kong. The work had a funny path- the film, by Alejandro Rodriguez, was a bit of a moving target when I composed a four-minute score which we recorded in Hanoi, Vietnam earlier this month with AURA String Quartet– and then, as the immersive (3D, 180-degree) film took shape, I turned to Anandi Bhattacharya to produce and really shape the track, adding sound effects, mastering the work, and generally finessing the material to the point that the work sounds entirely well-rounded. The goal was really to propose a romantic image of the future, a sort of melancholic, HG Wells-ian vision on science fiction. I hope it does come off that way.

Earlier this month, also, I spoke at the Hong Kong Arts Administrators Association annual convention, this year titled “The Future of Cultural Management,” as part of a panel on – you guessed it – artificial intelligence. It was my first time joining this highly influential group and, incidentally, getting to meet many people from Hong Kong and regionally that I don’t necessarily run into on a daily basis! That, accompanied by visiting guests and great friends and preparing for the European premiere of The Once and Future (2021), has meant an incredibly busy and not-always productive time. So it was just especially nice to experience HORIZON coming to fruition in such a meaningfully collaborative way, and under Jeffrey Shaw‘s conceptual vision, I’m proud of the results.

This spring is getting incredibly busy, as is the longer-term future. The European revival and tour of En vertu de… (2021) will take place in February-March 2026 and preparations for Russia : Today (2020) as part of INTO THE OPEN festival are quite advanced by now- stage director Sergej Morozov shared his own perspective on the project in a recent Russian-language radio interview here. While these seminal works (of mine) receive new leases on life, I am turning to the next major projects, collaborations both in Hong Kong and abroad, on which I’ll share more information soon!