Black Monk
for Soprano, Violin, Double Bass, 2 Bassoons, Tuba
and “Toy Instruments“ for audiences
Full length 14 minutes
Black Monk is originally a short story by playwright Anton Chekhov, the black monk is a hallucination that often converses with the man, leading him to immerse himself in the world of his genius but decadent in the real world. As Chekhov said, he just wanted to portray a man suffering from delusions of grandeur; at that time, he was deeply interested in psychiatry.
My black monk is a shadow, a mirror, an innermost desire. In my work, the four music sections stand on different perspectives to show the relationship between the black monk and others.
The first is the black monk with its ontology; the second is the black monk being suppressed and trying to reveal itself to the outside world; The third is Black Monk seems to be absent, but it is secretly awakening the black monks of all people; the fourth is the black monk of all people being awakened and they all start to grow. In the third part, some of the audience would participate in the performance.
The instruments are very unbalanced. I chose four low instruments and two high instruments to create a confrontation. And the interaction among instruments is also a metaphor of the relationships between the Black Monk and the others throughout the piece.
Extra Instruments Arrangements:
Instruments arrangement for the audience follows three principles: easy to produce sound; easy to identify; distributed throughout the audience space to produce surround sound.
Text
The text is in Quenya, an Elvish language that was created by Tolkien in his Middle-earth fiction. Sindarin is used for the majority of the regular dialogue, Quenya was the language of the Exiled High-Elves returning to Middle-earth, later mainly being used for “spells.” I choose Quenya because it’s more poetic.
Tengwar is a script Tolkien invented to write the Elvish language. For the vocal graphs, I refer to the shape of Tengwar characters that directly translate the meaning of English: Hi, Who are you? Where are you going? To be with me! And combine the Quenya words.
Structure
The structure of the whole work is spiral, each part of the music is independent, but each part ends with the same musical figure: long or repeated B with fermata in different registers.
