Mirror (2026)

for solo violin and string orchestra

Premiere:

Premiered on June 5th, 2026 at The Great Church of Kintai as part of the opening of Kintai Music Festival.

Performed by:

che ali- violin

Emre Sener- conductor

Klaipeda Chamber Orchestra

Duration:

10 minutes

Program Note:

The first creative impulse for 'Mirror' emerged after coming across Rita Dove's eponymous, palindrome like poem. I was immediately struck by the clever and intentional format of the poem; two parallel stanzas side by side, with the sentences inverting each other. Lines such as "memory & rebuild," "dissolved, under powder pressed into my skin," and the last sentence, "Am I all if all I am is Woe is me?" evoked great emotional power for me that I found profoundly inspiring.

This encounter sparked an interest in creating a quasi-monologic work, a concept I found would suit the medium of solo violin and string orchestra. However, during the writing process, I hit a wall. As a composer-violinist, I found myself l struggling to move past the preconceived expectations of thousands of existing violin pieces to make room for my own ideas.

To overcome this, I revisited a recording an old recording from my archive- a spontaneous improvisation I did for fun a few years ago. Amplified and processed with a generous amount of reverb, that recording was highly gestural, filled with overtones and feedback, decaying reverb tails, and percussive sounds on the body of the violin. I immediately told myself: "this is the piece!" 

'Mirror' is an act of self-reflection, viewed from many different angle. Starting from the entire creative process, which was a confrontation with myself: first through the lens of Dove's poetry, and later through the mirror of my own archival improvisation.  The work is also intensely autobiographical, drawing directly from my own experiences dealing with resentment and spite. The relationship with the solo violin and orchestra is one that is concerned with exposure, physicality, interiority, and fragility. The orchestra is the soloists memory, fragmented self, emotional residue; therefore the whole composition is metaphorically, a single being.