pelagic RADIO festival 2023
Featuring nine new shortform audio works created in the spring ’23 Workshop in Writing For and Beyond Performance: Audio Edition, in which we explored writing for the edge space between voice and sound.
Each piece was written, recorded and performed by its creator. All source sound is by the artist except where additional credits.
Presented here from shorter to longer.
for imitation
3:38
Aviv Nisinzweig
there were no sirens
The nature of being at sea is one that is always shifting. Fasten your sea legs and listen for the changes in the tide, siren songs, sunken things, doorways, and the sighting of land on the horizon.
Audio description/Script: The piece begins with the ocean which then begins to intermingle with crackling flames. There is a short pause and then a voice begins to speak the following over an arpeggiated melody: “There is nothing cozier akin to death maybe than oysters in bed. You saw her in the car at the intersection and her eyes cut through the windshield. There is nothing in the car at the intersection. Her eyes cut through the windshield akin to death. Oysters in bed cut through the windshield. The windshield cut through the oysters in bed. There is nothing cozier than her eyes. Through the windshield akin to death cut through. Oysters in the car at the intersection cut through the windshield.” We have now arrived somewhere new: there is the sea, a new, second voice, and a repetitive, melancholic, electric piano pad underneath. The new voice beckons us speaking the words, “Mignonette Please, mignonette please.” Then, we also hear the sound of a camera shuttering and a giddy voice repeating, “Run put it in the darkroom!” We then overhear a conversation between a mother and daughter. The mother speaks: “That there’s no judgement, there’s no judgement, it’s just that I was trying to figure out what was going on because it wasn’t what I thought what was going on or what I heard was going on or what I hoped was going on, you know and all that once it’s like the tide was shifting, you know and that’s just the nature of being at sea.” The mother laughs and the daughter makes a few expressions of agreement. There are keys shuffling during this conversation. The phrase, “The tide is shifting you know, and that’s just the nature of being at sea, on a voyage,” repeats and fades another time before we are left just with the melancholic electric piano pad. Next, an auto tuned, humming, melodic voice enters, and a round of sorts begins with two other voices that speak and repeat the following at different pitches and times: “There is nothing in the car at the intersection there is nothing in the car at the intersection.” After a moment, another layered voice enters, speaking the following: “No her, no oysters, no eyes.” The voices build to a breathlessness and this section ends. We are back with the electric piano which leads us to an echo of the auto tuned humming voice. A door opens and footsteps, perhaps human and animal, walk upstairs. The ocean is heard again. This all fades out together and the piece concludes.
4:42
MacKenzie “Fynn” Kugel
additional credits: Sammy, fire, water, oysters, my mother and her voice.
Duck Guck Cormorant
I was thinking about field encounters in investigative audio stories: the host leaves the studio to go on location, and with a quick transition, a moment of uncertainty begins to unfold in real time, in an actual place. This piece’s building blocks are sounds collected along a one-mile stretch of trails leading to the Little Falls Dam on the Potomac River.
[0:00]
A gurgling synth creeps up a major scale and gets stuck on the last note. From the background, the gristly hum of a refrigerator swells and fills the entire space. It gets louder and louder.
[1:00]
A shuffle in the background.
The refrigerator drops out. The shuffle becomes footsteps crunching for just a moment. With a gust, the footsteps drop out, and the space fills with a spacey, booming whir and glassy crackling from the inside of a fire.
Space empties. Footsteps crunching. A Carolina wren sings.
Fade. Booming whir and glassy crackling.
Cut.
DANIEL: Here, I’m gonna—I’m gonna stop walking, see if I can get this noise. Ten seconds of outdoor room tone.
[2:00]
DANIEL: Yeah I’m not sure if that picked up, but I was trying to get the sound of my eyes…DARTING to the side, cause I just noticed these very blue flowers—it’s blue like Gatorade, that’s what it reminds me of…and then behind it there’s this whole bunch of yellow flowers, um, looking like weeds but that/it’s like taxicab—taxicab yellow…
A trembling breath.
Gristly refrigerator hums and fills the space.
From the background, a chorus of chirping—small frogs and some birds—comes to the fore. Refrigerator drops out. Chirping settles into the background: more outdoor room tone.
[3:00]
More room tone layers in, and the air sounds denser.
DANIEL spits with an audible tonal note. He spits again and again, creeping up a major scale. He lands on the octave and the air thins out.
Chirping continues. Surrounded by outdoor room tone, a gurgling synth creeps up a major scale and gets stuck on the last note.
[4:00]
Chirping continues. More room tone layers in—the flat white noise of the Potomac River rolling—and DANIEL clears his throat and recites:
DANIEL: Wood duck, wood duck, double-crested cormorant
Three water birds lining up for the tournament
Whose head or whose neck is the gorgeousest ornament?
Wood duck, wood duck, double-crested cormorant
[5:00]
A brook babbles into the fore.
A round, delicate synth modulates and resolves. Synth and brook fade.
5:21
Daniel Maseda
Recorded in Philadelphia, PA, Washington, DC, and Bethesda, MD
spring street
8:18
Rebecca Pappas
voices: Rebecca Pappas and Nancy Pappas
image by Ben Bush
strangers calling her name
I place my individual and mundane experiences alongside the epic – my memories of commuting during the height of the pandemic and navigating doctor’s visits through treatments for an early stage cancer, appear alongside a report of a Swiss village encountering a possible mountain collapse. It embraces persisting and attuning to everyday beauty through the emotional upheavals and undercurrents of our present moment — whether facing climate change or mortality.
8:45
Jane Jerardi
includes expert from score for ‘mono: singular, one’ (by Lucas Zarwell, commissioned by artist)
includes excerpt from: “A Swiss Village Is Warned to Flee Its Shifting Mountainside,” by Christopher F. Schuetze, New York Times, May 10, 2023
Acts of Speech
Questions for the making and listening: What meanings might non-verbal utterances and silences convey? What are the histories and inheritances that are carried through voice and language? What is passed down generationally through story, and conversely, what is passed down not through words but through affect? How does the architecture of houses and the terrain of landscapes inform possibility in our movements and in our relationships?
[Vocal hmms and utterances, accompanied by meandering, crescendoing theramin]
Meredith Bove:
Meredith Monk has recently re-entered my consciousness. We share a first name but no blood relation. She is a dance relation, performance relative, vocalizing kin.
There is a scene in her performance work Volcano Songs, in which she gesticulates wildly behind fogged glass that spontaneously clears at irregular intervals. I don’t know how it works. But the effect of this overlay of opaqueness interspersed with brief moments of clarity feels like thinking itself, or communication itself.
[Theramin fades out, hmms coalesce into more melodic, repeated lines]
Or that feeling, when you have a feeling that you feel like could be languaged, except that it might then disappear once you do language it.
I have not met Meredith Monk, even though we’re both living. If I did meet her, I might ask, hey Meredith, what does it mean when your voice makes those strange sounds? Did those sounds come from you, or from someone else? What are you trying to say?
[Hmms with echo and breath]
Maternal Grandmother (Elizabeth Shonnard) [clears throat]
I grew up on the farm in Weybridge, that one right there, in that picture. [Meredith in the background saying, yup, yup] And, ah, we would use a tractor and we’d use an old truck. [Hmms re-enter] And I could drive all that, so, so when I get up in the morning, I would have my breakfast and run outdoors instead of learning how to be a house lady.
[Sustained hmms with close pitch changes]
Meredith Bove:
In rural Vermont, where I grew up, there are fields that turn brown in November. These fields are not special—they are ubiquitous actually. Find them in New Jersey, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, or western Massachusetts.
[Hmms with added, higher harmonies]
I recently had a dream where I was wandering in an old house. I was with my family, or some people who represented family in my dream, but who in reality were not my true blood family. I
had never seen these people before, these supposed family members. We were in the house because we were hiding and running away from something. And there was an old innkeeper who let us in.
[Hmms with more higher harmonies]
At some point, as it sometimes happens in dreams, there was a wrinkle in the space-time continuum and I and my family split off from ourselves into another dimension. I saw myself and my family members from a distant new place in the house, traversing the same path, walking up the same stairway where we had just been. I ran into the innkeeper in this new dimension and felt I should keep this secret from her—to hide the other versions of myself and my family, and to not reveal that that there were multiple versions of us in multiple places at once, in multiple dimensions.
[Added harmony, hmm begin to fade out, return to earlier hmm motif with closer harmonies]
All of the women in my family tend toward the anxious. We worry, we wonder when the next problem to be solved will enter the frame of view. It is a way of life, a way of living. My mother, her mother, and my sister whose also a mother. As an adult, I now know that these mothers in my life have secrets they keep from their children. That these secrets feel necessary for the tending and growing to happen. There are things they will never say, secrets that they will take and have taken to their graves.
[hmms fade out]
It can be difficult to form sounds and vowels into full words and sentences. I imagine that it’s possible, and it becomes more possible. I imagine that it’s possible to catalog all the feelings housed in this body. [repeated synthesizer chord changes fade in] I take them out, one by one, try to trace their origins, give them a name, put a label on them, and then put them in a drawer like a paleontologists’ specimen collections. Each like a fossilized fish that’s distinct, yet connected to a larger lineage, and network, and timescale.
Elizabeth Shonnard:
Well, we would have gardens. My father…I guess I was always interested in the garden. But I wasn’t particularly, doing the planting and caring for it, until um, I got my own garden. We started having a garden up here.
Meredith Bove:
Close your eyes—I’m building a house. The stairway would go here. It’d have to be kind of steep, but I’d make it pretty. That would be alright wouldn’t it? And then the landing wouldn’t extend out so far. And on the other side of the wall, I would do built-ins, for books and things.
Elizabeth Shonnard:
Started planting…as soon as we could be up here enough to manage it.
Meredith:
The windows would be facing the stream.
Elizabeth:
And let’s see, where else we would have a garden
Meredith:
And I’d want to do a lofted area for sleeping.
Elizabeth:
We had a garden in Marietta
Meredith:
Would you want to help me paint?
[repeated synthesizer chords fade out]
Elizabeth:
In ’45, let’s see, the place had burned down, stuff had grown up. The boathouse, um my dad had kinda started that. Let’s see, he move—who moved it off the foundation? That was Emil Desidel, and it was after we got it, that I think…but the problem was the water risin—seemed to be getting into the boathouse. And what did—did we have a garden?
[background laughing and indecipherable conversation]
[Hmms motif returns with additional looped, layered vocal track, full and warm] What is your early memory of coming up here?
[layered vocal track fades out, hmms remain before cutting off]
11:06
Meredith Bove
additional voice by Elizabeth Shonnard (maternal grandmother)
over and out
To be listened to as you wash the dishes, weed the garden, take a walk, or commute somewhere. . . or as an additional layer to any otherwise quotidian experience. over and out is a contemplation of time as vast and fleeting, and of life as precious, brilliant and mundane.
10:41 (episode 1)
6:42 (episode 2)
Adrienne Westwood
Voiced by Meredith Bove, Jing Dong, Daniel Maseda, O.C. Nunn, Marissa Truitt
UNI 28
A moment to many moments, a place to many places, a snapshot of memory.
20:37
Jing Dong
including excerpts from
Peony (5 petals)
- The Garden: Mudan Ting
- Keening
- Commentator Erotics
- Infernal Judgment
- The Garden of Flowing Fragrance
Peony (5 Petals) Transcript
- The Garden: Mudan Ting
minutes: 0:00 – 3:27
form: collaged sound bed
style: slow, intimate, detailed
solo voice, VOCALIST (Lemon Guo), whispers very slowly and lyrically in her interpretation of traditional Kun operatic style, sliding high and sighing low, recorded close to the mic, lush with consonant textures, layered, and repeated throughout
VOCALIST: Muse Erwang (慕色而亡 / “die of desire for beauty”)
ceramic bells (sampled from Tan Dun’s earthsounds instrument library) of four different low and mid-range tones ring, repeated throughout
voice, PRONUNCIATION SPEAKER (Cindy Ye), speaks phrase in the style of a language pronunciation tape, repeated throughout
PRONUNCIATION SPEAKER: Mudan Ting (牡丹亭 / “peony pavilion”)
bells sound in unison with the tonal phrase of the PRONUNCIATION SPEAKER
loop of whispering high erhu bowing, some tonal, some textural, and soft, eery pulsing electric bass emerges, throughout
song (“Buds of Peony,” see section 4) in reverse emerges, keys and sung vocals (unintelligable), bittersweet held tones, harmonizing with the bells, VOCALIST, and instrumental loop
all parts cut out except final whispering of VOCALIST
- bell echoes to transitionKeening
minutes: 3:27 – 6:50
form: collaged sound bed
style: ominous, unpredictable, doleful
group of CHORUS SPEAKERS (HH Hiaasen, Jules White, Michi Osato, Alexis Scott) recite lines in unison, heavily distorted by crunchy echoing filters
CHORUS SPEAKERS: when I am dead / the moon / the moon / no more / no more / the mirror / dead souls / music of the flesh / spring is ended / coin / lily / lily / milk / crystal / ashes / spirit / fleshly
higher pitched ceramic earthsounds bells sound in pairs throughout
improvised trio of empty glass vases played with sticks, hands, and murmuring voice looped throughout
eery erhu descending slides and fluttering bass looped throughout
opening phrase of song (“Bed of Sickness”) in reverse starts then stops, starts then stops, and finally starts and plays through, with melancholy vocal melody (unintelligable) and roving bass keyboard line
PRONUNCIATION SPEAKER: the word for desire / is Se Qing (色情 / “sexual desire”)
song fades out, replaced by throbbing bass and whispering erhu drone loop
CHORUS SPEAKERS: in sickness / fear disturbance / seek rest / avoid the gossip’s chatter / but let us ask / the east wind to desist
prior loop replaced by slow swinging bass and sliding descending erhu loop
CHORUS SPEAKERS (more distorted): in sickness / fear disturbance / seek rest / avoid the gossip’s chatter / but let us ask / the east wind to desist
- vases loop and bass/erhu loop continue and overlap with the beginning of Cheng Qiong’s monologue before fading outCommentator Erotics
minutes: 6:50 – 13:03
form: narrative monologues from historic women readers and commentators interwoven with instrumentals from through-composed song (“Glacial Erotics” composed and performed by Leslie Allison) which culminates in the song’s chorus as the finale
style: dramatic, sensual, embodied
CHENG QIONG (Ying Liu): I am aware that my years in this world are limited / I cannot attend to all the ladies / of the future / in person / therefore I make this commentary version / using the space in the upper margins / of The Peony Pavilion / I proceeded to work on one scene per night / using five ink colors / by and by / the entirety of this forefather’s book / was filled / with my feminine point of view
enter low organ bass line, roving, layered and occasionally harmonizing
TAN ZE (Cindy Ye): I found his first wife’s unfinished commentary / on The Peony Pavilion in a drawer / and became obsessed / I was never seen without it / I longed to consummate / what Chen Tong had begun /
enter low bass drum
but needed the same edition of The Peony Pavilion / sister Chen had used / when my husband finally found it and brought it home / though I am not good at drinking / I was so happy / I drank eight or nine cups of wine / I then stayed in my southern tower / and imitated elder sister Chen / in writing commentary on The Peony Pavilion / I wrote on small pieces of paper / after I finished /
enter syncopated high hat
I read them through and through / I am so happy
QIAN YI (Christine Zheng): I dreamed I went to a garden / in front of the pavilion / bloomed peonies / of five different colors / Suddenly a lady emerged from behind the pavilion / her beauty was such / that the peonies / were ashamed / While I was wondering whether this lady was Du Liniang / she bent a stem from the plum tree / and played with it / she just kept smiling / then a wind blew the peonies up to the sky / and the petals fell down like a shower /
enter tom drums
it is no coincidence / wetting my brushes with ink / I paint to keep my memory / happy for finally knowing a heavenly face / my heart breaks at the awakening from the dream / I told my husband /
enter hand claps
my elder sister Chen Tong wrote commentary for the former half of the play / and elder sister Tan Ze finished the rest / it is all because of you / that their names have remained hidden / if we do not reveal the truth / and make my sisters known to the public / won’t they feel unfulfilled in the underworld? / I am willing to sell my jewelry to pay for the printing
instruments fade out
layered echoing treble vocals sing “stay”
fade to silence
CHEN TONG (Lemon Guo): I love mountains / whenever I want / to take an expedition / my mother scolds me / for being naughty / the scenery / will remain the same forever / but once I die / I shall never return / my silk slippers are only two inches long / I used to commentate on The Peony Pavilion in my leisure / now I realize it is not easy / to awake from one’s dream / my commentary is unfinished / my spirit / if sincere / will stay forever / under the moon or by the flowers / I will not bother / leaving behind / a portrait of mine
single high hat rumble
organ bass line begins again
all voices simultaneous, partially intelligable
CHENG QIONG: “Never did spring torment one so” alludes to the sexual organ; “coverlet” means pudendum; “cloud” refers to cum; “pear blossom,” the same; “willow” means the sexual organ / The gist of The Peony Pavilion is essentially / that this thing called Seqing / sexual desire / deemed shameful by laws of this world / will not necessarily be condemned by the netherworld / The only ones who are really condemned / are those who have no beauty / to love / no passion to be / stirred by
QIAN YI: joy is born as heart of plantain flower / secretly unfolds / stain deeper red / apricot fills the mouth / willfully I bend to me / your fragrant softness
CHENG QIONG: I share my name / with the moon goddess Cheng’e / I long / to transform into tens of thousands of colored clouds / to block moonlight from reaching earth / and becoming soiled
PRONUNCIATION VOICE: Du Liniang / Liu Mengmei / Tang Xianzu
QIAN YI: on New Year’s Day / 1695 / in the evening / I set up a table in the garden / placed on the table an ancestral tablet / inscribed with the name Du Liniang / I offered stems of flowering plum, fruits, wine, and a copy of the newly-printed / Three Wives Commentary / then I worshipped the tablet / as if Liniang had been an ancestress / my husband mocked me / I told him / “The spirit of this cosmos dwells / with whatever is empathetic / be it a stone / or a piece of wood / The poet Qu Yuan once wrote an ode to the river goddess Xiang / so did Sung Yu compose a eulogy / for the mountain goddess Wu / these goddesses may have been just the poets’ imagination / but they are dignified by poems / so people worship them anyway / How can you or I judge whether Liniang exists or not?”
high hat rumble
epic erruption of fully orchestrated tonal/melodic song with bass organ drone and bass driving keyboard, treble keyboards, toms, hand claps, and harmonizing treble vocals
VOCALS: Stay with me / counting peaks / who knows / on which / the goddess / makes her home / on which / the goddess / makes her home / on which / the goddess / makes her home
organ continues on single low note
- layers of irregular breathing sounds recorded through different vocoders emergeInfernal Judgment
minutes: 13:03 – 18:38
form: spoken dialogue from The Peony Pavilion with shifting sound bed
style: uncanny, patient, bureaucratic, rebelious
organ fades out
vocoder breathing increases and continues through the spoken dialogue (all parts performed by Leslie Allison)
CLERK (robotic-sounding monotone vocoder voice): They’re flogging the dead souls / in Ninth Court next door
JUDGE (more erratic vocoder voice): This is the “music of the flesh” / everything has been satisfactorily disposed of / are there are any other cases?
CLERK: your honor, all we have are some minor offenders / here is the female prisoner
JUDGE: step forward! / what kind of sickness brought you here?
echoing ethereal treble trilled ah vocals
DU LINIANG (higher, lusher, more tonal and harmonized vocoder voice): the dream / falling into longings / I lost my life / but there were indeed flower petals
echoing ethereal treble trilled ah vocals
JUDGE: call for questioning the Flower Spirit / come list for me / the flowers in your bag of tricks!
FLOWER SPIRIT (lower richer tonal vocoder voice, slow with pauses): I will list them / double peach / pink flowering pear / gold coin flower / embroidered ball viburnum / peony / brushtip magnolia / water chestnut / jade hairpin lily / rose / wintersweet apricot / shear spring narcissus / lantern flower / yeast flower / golden goblet / brocade sash weigela /
echoing ethereal high trilled ah vocals
joyous union mimosa /
breathing fades out
fade in of distant, slowed down, and pitch-lowered song “Buds of Peony,” with bass, erhu, and voice, simultaneous to Flower Spirit’s list
VOCALS: buds of peony / inset / along the balustrade / strand up strand / of weeping / willow / elm seeds / tossed like coins / at spring’s / sweet fragrances
FLOWER SPIRIT: willow / trumpet flower / pepper flower / smiling magnolia / sunflower / convolvulus / crape myrtle / son-bearing lily /
echoing ethereal high trilled ah vocals
lilac / mace / milk flower / gardenia / patience / orange blossoms / crabapple /
echoing ethereal high trilled ah vocals
baby flower / two sisters /
echoing ethereal high trilled ah vocals
pink /
song cuts out
lotus / pomegranate
echoing ethereal high trilled ah vocals layers and repeats
- loop of field recording of wild geese emergesThe Garden of Flowing Fragrance
minutes 18:38 – 26:50
form: field recordings taken in The Garden of Flowing Fragrance, Huntington Botanical Gardens, Los Angeles, during afternoon erhu performance (Yunhe Liang), poem written during performance recited and chanted (by Leslie Allison)
style: romantic, floral, philosophical, warm
adults speaking, unintelligible
ERHU PLAYER: …modern, like pop music…called The Moon Represents My Heart. It’s a love song…
slow, pining erhu song plays
people speaking (unintelligible) in English and Chinese
wild geese
child squealing
erhu and sound bed fade out
solo voice enters speaking softly
slowly a second layer of unison spoken voice emerges
then a layer of low chanted singing
then a layer of higher harmonized singing, all same text roughly in unison
VOCALS: thrum / copper heart / lands on viened stones / sun drops / into the water / a goose dips over / call to her mate / caught / in the curve of her neck / silken hands flutter / to find what memory to unfurl next / eyes cupped in softness / weep / unload their tautness / earth owl who /emerges in black silk / to chat with his young friend / wait for the rain to quilt / the moon’s arch / scoop beneath the long surface / we are all two strings / but one is hidden / impossible dance / carried / by rich vibrating feet /
wild geese loop briefly underneath
of glassy leather / shuddering / sliding on slate / the wall between us / and the sky is false /compounded canopy / blind cat / wiggling into existences lap / as we embroider our songs / up to meet / the other countless other songs /
wild geese loop underneath, ongoing
we practice so hard / to make a resolution / at the melody’s tail / swaying in balance / carrying it with us / did you hear / it wiggles between thoughts / elderly murmuring / the moon represents my heart
low chatter
wild geese loop
ERHU PLAYER testing two notes for tuning looped in sync with wild geese
same four voices (two spoken, two chanting) repeat poem, the singing voices are in tune with the erhu song and create a low drone underneath its melody, this time the text is largely unintelligible, but certain lines (bolded) come forward louder and are clearly audible
over top of vocals, Erhu song with medium tempo, mood peaceful, contented, and contemplative, wide ranging in pitch and dynamic level, some light trills, some long held notes
sounds of young children in garden running and vocalizing
VOCALS: thrum / copper heart / lands on viened stones / sun drops / into the water / a goose dips over / call to her mate / caught / in the curve of her neck / silken hands flutter / to find what memory to unfurl next / eyes cupped in softness / weep / unload their tautness / earth owl who /emerges in black silk / to chat with his young friend / wait for the rain to quilt / the moon’s arch / scoop beneath the long surface / we are all two strings / but one is hidden / impossible dance / carried / by rich vibrating feet / of glassy leather / shuddering / sliding on slate / the wall between us / and the sky is false / compounded canopy / blind cat / wiggling into existences lap / as we embroider our songs / up to meet / the other countless other songs / we practice so hard / to make a resolution / at the melody’s tail / swaying in balance / carrying it with us / did you hear / it wiggles between thoughts / elderly murmuring / the moon represents my heart
vocals end
erhu plays vibrant dancing song with swift tempo, mood is delighted and expansive, texture is full of trills and elaborations
ends on long held resolved note
26:52
Leslie Allison
Speakers (in order of appearance): Cindy Ye, Michi Osato, Alexis Scott, Hannah Hiaasen, Jules White, Ying Liu, Christine Zheng, Lemon Guo, Leslie Allison
Vocalists: Lemon Guo, Leslie Allison
Instrumentalists: Cindy Ye (experimental erhu, vases), Jace Arouet (bass, vases), Leslie Allison (keys, organ, vases, drums, ceramic bells sampled from Tan Dun’s earthsounds instrument library), Yunhe Liang (classical erhu, performed live in the Garden of Flowing Fragrance at Huntington Botanical Gardens)
Texts:
Poems by Leslie Allison
Dramatic dialogue and excerpts from The Peony Pavilion (Mudan Ting) by Tang Xianzu (1598)
English translation by Cyril Birch, second edition from Indiana University Press, 2002
Excerpts from The Three Wives Collaborative Commentary (1695) by Chen Tong, Tan Ze, and Qian Li & The Genius’ Version of the Peony Pavilion (1723) by Cheng Qiong
As translated and excerpted in Wei Hua’s “How Dangerous Can the ‘Peony’ Be? Textual Space, Caizi Mudan ting, and Naturalizing the Erotic,” in Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 4 (Nov 2006): 741-762 & Jingmei Chen’s PhD Dissertation “The Dream World of Love-Sick Maidens: A Study of Women’s Responses to The Peony Pavilion,” from University of California Los Angeles, 1996
Compositions
Music, lyrics, improvisational scores, and audio loops by Leslie Allison
Song in the Underworld is adapted by Leslie Allison from an excerpt of the 1994 recording “In Pursuit of the Dream” from the original The Peony Pavilion music composed by Wei Lianfu, as performed by the Lan Ting Troupe
transcript