“The emotional resonance of fragile environments, both natural and cultural, is captured in haunting ways in the music of Liang Liang, 47, who this month was honored with the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, one of the most prestigious prizes in contemporary music,” writes Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim in Friday’s (12/13) New York Times. “He won for an orchestral work, ‘A Thousand Mountains, a Million Streams,’ inspired by a landscape painting by the Chinese ink-brush master Huang Binhong (1865-1955). Over 30 minutes, the work unfurls a fluid stream of instrumental colors, from shimmering filaments of sound to broad sighing gestures that build with unrelenting momentum into muscular blocks of dark matter. A series of brutal percussive slashes leads to scorched silence. In the end, droplets of sound evoke a fragile rebirth. The work is intended as a reflection on the man-made destruction of both natural landscapes and cultural ecosystems, and highlights the power of art to preserve them—at least in memory. Mr. Liang teaches at the University of California at San Diego and has collaborated with scientists on innovative ways to record the sounds of Pacific Ocean coral reefs and Arctic fauna.” The article includes an interview with the composer.
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