Zuihitsu I - Ever Different Waters

ensemble soprano, clarinets, percussion, & keyboard
written fall 2025
duration 7-8 minutes

for Sputter Box, with gratitude

text

my dreams of home are glass and steel
skyline shifting as a dune
built and rebuilt taller, further, older - ghosts upon ghosts
thronged longtang fill my lungs with pidgin barter and PM2.5
a fire, a plague, a thousand dead pigs drift downstream
and i go with them

the flow of the river is ceaseless, its water never the same
i am there, i am not
here is now, here is a hundred years ago

program notes

Ever Different Waters is the first in an intended set of Zuihitsu - 随笔 - works that I have been dreaming of for years. I was initially drawn to the stream-of-consciousness freedom the Japanese zuihitsu genre was distinguished by, as well as the historical context that gave rise to such a unique, floaty style. Many writers of zuihitsu wrote from isolation, and their work captured themes of ukiyo: impermanence, social decay, the beauty of the natural world.

What intrigued me most, though, were the sometimes unexpected similarities between zuihitsu and literatures from around the world: Kenko’s witty aphorisms had much in common with the dry reprimands in Biblical Proverbs; Chomei’s bleakly reflective complaints about society’s tedious mores reminded me of Emily Dickinson at her most wryly incisive; Shonagon’s musings on the shifting seasons echoed Heraclitus’s observations on the change embedded within cycles.

For this piece, I decided to freely compile several of these texts into a “thought-choir” of sorts that would envelop an original zuihitsu-style poem of mine. Much of the text is deliberately obscured, evoking the often-incoherent soup of influences that inform our own thoughts and words.

I owe much thanks to the wonderful musicians of Sputter Box, whose bold imagination and technical skill made this piece almost effortless to write. Special thanks to Ellie Cherry, Aihua Guo, Lucy McKnight, and Nathaniel Parks for lending their voices to the electronics.