Where the Grove Would End
ensemble flute, clarinet, piano, electric guitar, double bass
written winter 2026
duration 10 minutes
for fivebyfive, with gratitude and warmth
program notes
When fivebyfive flutist Laura Lentz reached out to me about writing a piece about home, my thoughts quickly turned to a then-obsession of mine: Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossom Spring. The enigmatic short story, written in the early 5th century, depicts a wandering fisherman who stumbles upon a beautiful grove of luscious peach trees. As he explores the grove to its end, he accidentally discovers a hidden village, healthily populated and robustly managed. The residents, initially nonplussed by this outsider’s intrusion, take the fisherman in for a night of wining and feasting. They explain that their idyllic existence began as an escape from the Qin dynasty’s tumult some 400 years prior, and that subsequent generations decided to remain happily apart from the world’s violent instability. When the fisherman leaves, the villagers warn him from telling anyone else of their home. He immediately disobeys, and tries to rustle up a crowd to find the peach grove again; however, they never manage to.
I imagined the fisherman in his older age, forever fixated on the peach grove village, watching as it retreated further and further into the recesses of his memory. I often dwell on my childhood in Shanghai, and the more time passes, the more I realize that these fond recollections are by nature irretrievable, that these calcified moments of home are made all the more precious and defining to me precisely because they only ever retreat further from the present.
Where the Grove Would End is structured, essentially, in three verse-chorus cycles. Each time the music completes one cycle, though, the ensemble detunes slightly, imitating the dreamlike haziness of recalling a distant memory. By the end of the piece, the ensemble is quite out of tune, leaving just the piano as an anchor point.
Much gratitude to the fine musicians of fivebyfive for commissioning the work.