Bamboo Lights

Chinese-born American composer Lei Liang (b.1972) is the winner of the 2011 Rome Prize, and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His commissions include the New York Philharmonic, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Taipei Chinese Orchestra, the Thailand Philharmonic, the Heidelberger Philharmonisches Orchester, and the Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic. Lei Liang’s new album, Bamboo Lights, features delicately nuanced miniature works, whose quiet intensity and beauty call to mind fine Chinese landscape paintings and Japanese haiku. Just as Matsuo Basho’s haiku lead us to search for a symbolic meaning arising from the juxtaposed images that strike the heart and mind, Liang transports the listener to experience inner solitude–what he calls “the silence of the mind”–through interweaving moments of silence within a fascinating array of sound.