Good afternoon everyone and happy Lunar New Year.

I am so thrilled to be able to celebrate this holiday with you all and to be highlighting composers of Asian descent.

We have such a great program for you and we are featuring a couple of guest artists who actually have MSU connections.

Yu-Lien The Piano.

She actually got her DMA in piano performance here at MSU.

And violinist Sarah Plum grew up here in Okemos, grew up taking lessons from the professor here at MSU, and her dad was a professor of art here, Jens Plum.

And as I was talking to our dean, Jim Forger, he informed me that he actually owns a piece by Jens Plum and also by Nancy Plum, his wife, who is a potter.

So lots of MSU connections.

So we're really thrilled to have them here.

But first, I would like to introduce a special guest, MSU interim president Teresa Woodruff.

Teresa Woodruff is a leader in higher education and an internationally recognized biologist specializing in reproductive science.

She's a champion for the inclusion of women in STEM disciplines and fundamental research receiving the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Mentoring from President Barack Obama in 2011.

She has served the university as interim president since November 2022, leading in advancing MSU's strategic priorities of student, faculty and staff, success, research and innovation, sustainable health, financial stewardship and environmental sustainability and campus diversity and safety.

She's also a great supporter of the College of Music at MSU.

She and her husband, Dr. Thomas O'Halloran, sponsored the Spectrum Festival, The Christmas Oratorios Concert in December 2022 and the upcoming Symphony Orchestra and Choirs Celebration of Legacies concert in 2023.

Please join me in welcoming MSU interim president Teresa K Woodruff.

Thank you so much, Yvonne, and thank you for putting together for all of us today such a stellar program.

We're all really looking forward to that.

And I want to welcome everyone to this grand event, which is a Lunar New Year eve celebration.

And there are so many celebrations like this going on literally across campus.

I know some of you are going to other events across this evening and tomorrow, and it really is within the arts and across Michigan State University.

A great way to celebrate each other are our families who are part of our Asian descent, as well as great celebration of the Lunar New Year.

I also want to acknowledge the sponsor for today's program.

Lauren Julius Harris is here somewhere.

Where are you?

I know you're here right back there.

We want to thank you very much for sponsoring this evening's event.

And I also want to acknowledge the very special leadership of Jim Forger, our dean of this College of Music, is nothing short of spectacular, and he's probably out running around.

I don't see you.

Jim, are you here?

There is, Jim.

People are pointing right now.

So the man at the back, Jim Forger.

Tom and I had the opportunity to travel with Jim last week into New York City and follow our jazz combos at the Route and Jazz Festival and competition at the Lincoln Center.

And it was really just wonderful to see Jim engage and really connect MSU to the world, which is really what this concert also does.

Yvonne.

I'm really delighted to see that we have an artistic and academic home for so many individuals across campus through the arts.

And when I think of what is special about MSU, I think it is an evolving academic environment, an inspired artistic environment, and a little bit of athletics.

So those three A's represent that which is excellent about MSU.

And certainly today, look, we all look forward to sharing together in this experience of the arts that will continue to elevate us all.

So on behalf of Michigan State University, her deans, faculty, staff and students, welcome to this event.

Enjoy your time.

And thank you, Yvonne, for your leadership on behalf of all of us.

Thank you, President Woodruff.

And now let's get to some music.

I would like to introduce my very good friend, violinist Sarah Plum, who I met almost a decade ago at the third practice electroacoustic music festival at the University of Richmond.

Our paths crossed there.

We sort of hit it off.

And then it wasn't until a couple, couple of years ago, maybe during the pandemic, that she kind of emailed me and she's like, Well, I think I'm going to move back into my dad's home in Okemos half, half of the year, half time of the year, and let's do something.

And so we've been we've been in touch, we've been scheming.

And I'm really happy to have her here with us because she's going to play some really amazing pieces that I think is going to open your eyes into a sound world that might be new to you.

So, Sarah Plum.

First of all, I want to thank Yvonne for including me.

As she said, I grew up in Okemos and this is my first time playing at Michigan State in probably 40 years.

Don't do the math, please.

Anyway, it means a lot just because I studied with wonderful teachers here and had a great the great good fortune to grow up in Okemos and be a part of Marilyn Kessler's string program there.

And so it's very special.

I want to talk about the piece that's coming up and tell you a interesting connection with the piece that we just played.

So I met Mari Takano, who wrote Full Moon the next piece through a composer friend.

We actually never met in person.

She lives in Tokyo, but I performed her piece, my very first piece of electronics in 2000, for the first time in 2011, in Berlin at a really interesting concert series in the main train station there.

And but it was not the premiere it was written for and premiered by Mari Kimura, who wrote the piece that we just played.

So the second time I played Full Moon, Mari Takano's piece.

It was in New York, so I really wanted to meet Mari Kimura.

It was my first electronic piece.

I had a lot of questions and when we met we didn't even really talk about the piece that much, but we just had a great time .

We hit it off.

I loved her compositional voice, and as it turns out, we both were at Juilliard at the same time.

But I didn't know her then.

She was very busy because she was doing a double degree with electronic music at Columbia.

But anyway, so she wrote me this piece.

Sarah Hall.

Sarah Hal.

An interesting Michigan connection.

I premiered it with Hal Grossman, who's another Okemos violinist that I grew up with, hence the name Sarah Hal.

So when I play this coming piece, Mari Takano's piece, I want you to listen for two things.

All the violin that's recorded in the electronic accompany accompaniment is hers.

So she's still present even though her piece is done.

And then pay attention to what I do at the end.

I won't give it away.

It's a little unusual, but I've played this piece.

50-60...

I stopped counting after 50 so many, many times.

And at about 25 or 30, I got an idea that Mari Takano approved to end it in an unusual way.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

So the next piece we're going to play, And Then I Knew 'Twas Wind by Toru Takemitsu it was named after the second verse of the poem that you have in your program right there.

It's a very, very beautiful poem by Emily Dickinson, if you want to read it afterwards.

The actual the title of the poem is the first verse.

But this piece was also inspired by a Debussy trio which was also written for the same formation, but also not only the formation, but there are some direct words from the Debussy trio in this piece, Professor Mike Chen and Professor Chen-Yu and I really enjoyed putting this piece together.

We had a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoy it.

Happy Lunar New Year.

While they're setting up the stage, I just want to speak a very few words.

I'll try to keep it as brief as I can, since it's a very short piece and I hope to not talk more than the length of the piece.

So Monologue Impressions of the True Story of Ah Q, despite the title, Ah Q is a fictional character created by a very important writer in modern Chinese literature history.

Lu Xun.

was published as a series of short stories during the 1920s.

This was a very chaotic time in China.

The dynasty were ending and the New Republic of China was founding.

Ah Q is essentially an embodiment of everything to Lu Xun that was bad.

Despicable, backwards.

Ah Q was a very uneducated, ignorant person, but has a very high opinion of himself.

It was very conceited.

Even when he loses everything, he could always bend the reality in his mind that he is the winner.

So Chen Yi he wrote this little unaccompanied piece for the clarinets as a reflection on the character that is Ah Q. Chen Yi is one of my favorite composers living today.

I really very much appreciate the fact that she used a lot of Peking opera elements in this piece.

So you hear different types of music.

One is the slow music, one is the faster music.

In the slow music, you can hear very much an imitation of a Peking opera speaking style in the very highly inflected way of speaking.

And then the faster music you hear the instrumental music from the Chinese opera, usually played by The Jinghu, features a lot of major and minor seventh intervals.

The piece really sort of stretches the limits of the clarinets and is very dramatic.

But he ends in a series of repeated low notes, as in some sort of a whimper, as to say, How could this be?

How could everything get to where it is today?

Sort of in disbelief.

The piece I wrote for Joe Lulloff is entitled New Stories.

And the concept behind this piece was that in my music, I was ready to tell my own stories.

And in this piece, I wanted to explore really a sense of cultural identity that embraces all my influences, whether they be Eastern, Western, whether it was marching band from my my school days or Chinese music that I heard my grandfather playing when I was young.

I had to come to a realization or come to a place of comfort first that I didn't entirely own any of these musical traditions.

Similar to my experience with my cultural background.

I was born in Winfield, Illinois, where I spent the first 12 years of my life.

My parents were immigrants from China, arrived at the US by way of Taiwan.

And growing up, I lived in a very predominantly white suburb, and it was always very apparent to me that I was an outsider, a foreigner, simply because of the the difference between the culture I experienced at home and the culture I experienced at at school and outside the home.

And that was not so much of an issue until my parents moved back to Taiwan when I was 12.

And I again felt like an outsider because I never lived in Asia before.

I was familiar with the language and some aspects of the culture, but it didn't feel like home to me.

So that's when I really felt this sense of rootlessness and that I wasn't quite entirely American yet.

Also, not Chinese, not Taiwanese.

The issue was further complicated when I moved back to the US and I attended university at University of Michigan.

Rather than feeling a sense of coming home, I again felt displaced.

For a while.

I felt like I was an imposter.

But in this piece for Joe, I let myself free and I truly embraced all of these different influences.

I just wanted to thank you all so much for coming and to thank all of the performers to this afternoon.

And also, a special thank you to our audio engineer, Jen Shangraw and the WKAR crew and all of the staff that helped us put this program on for you today.

And please join us in the Billman Pavilion for a reception.

Some food.

You can follow your nose and I'll see you there.