Romance for Cello and Orchestra (2008-09)
Program note by Gordon Chin

Renate Wood wrote an article titled ‘Poetry and the Self’’, which starts with the following:

Every time we sit down to write a poem we set out to discover, to define and redefine the Self or some aspect of it, this essential, yet to some extent invisible and therefore open territory of our personhood.

I found this also applies to me as a composer when I sit down to write music. As I try to find a certain pattern of sounds to express, or to establish a certain form in time, or to search meaningful and relevant resolutions, all efforts turned into inner struggles aimed helplessly towards ‘beauty’. This process is repeated each time when I set out to start a new piece, and the urge to discover, to redefine the self never diminishes with age and experience. I guess this is one of the biggest thirsts that insist on me to initiate a journey to discover, to achieve a self-creation.

Romance can be characterized as one of my most personal work. The intimacy sprang from the persistent impulse of the main motif that permeated throughout the piece. It is a petition, a request for sympathy, or a deep solicitous concern about life, pleading it to be “beautiful” and “everlasting.” Romance is sort of my way to address life and love. It is only a twelve-minute piece, too short to carry a topic heavy as this. I think it is more like a sudden recognition, or, as Robert Hass put it, “waking up to the fact of one’s being.” In this case, it is seeing the bounding between nature and man, the attachment of man and his homeland, and of course, the romance between a man and a woman.