Yoonjung Lee & Michelle Shengyu Li
Flute and Bassoon
Stretching time and space along a score for an 8ft long double-sided music stand, composer Yoonjung Lee and artist Michelle Shengyu Li traverse the liminal phenomenology of walking and migration. In Brian Massumi’s idea of “walking as controlled falling,” each step leans into external forces like gravity with freedom and constraint, mundanity and necessity. Speculating a path of blurred starts and ends, the piece instead directs attention to the pressures of breath and movement itself.
The score contemplates a musical motif derived from the intonation of the phrase “a moment of stillness” in Lee’s native language. Exploring Milan Kundera’s theory that “the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting,” it holds the tension and release, purification and velocity, that emerges in the act of walking. Through repetitive breaths, it seeks a subtle equilibrium within the passage of time, sonically tracing the boundary between pause and progression.
