Dear Adam,

Duration: 5'

Read by UBC Symphony Orchestra​​

I was rereading an old letter from my sister, which was a congratulatory letter about my acceptance to UBC. She wrote about how excited she was to study together, show me around campus and to have a fun university experience together. But now, she’s already graduated, living away from home and all those happy memories are in the past. This swell of emotions overcame me as I reminisced over the many happy memories and people from my high school, past jobs and childhood that are lone gone. I realized that I will never get those days back, and the only joy I could get from them were by the bittersweet thoughts of those
faded memories.

 

This piece explores waves of various musical elements to portray the fleeting memories and emotions fading in and out of view. Large chords cascade up and down across the strings and then are outlined by the winds, each saturated with waves of texture within them. The harmony fluctuates between dissonance and consonance often abruptly cutting each other off and merging together. Movement from various rhythms and tuplets spread across the orchestra, building to a grandiose climax of the full orchestra with free rhythms travelling across the soundscape. The music slowly fades away with twinkling colors and shimmering harmonics in the strings, leaving us with the cold reality of this distant memory