(Un)Wandering Souls

Revised version premiere (2024)

Original version premiere (2021)

Work Overview

Instrumentation: percussion quartet
Commission: Cambodian Living Arts and Metropolis Ensemble
Premiere: March 18, 2021 (online), revised version premiere January 31, 2024
Duration: original version - 3 minutes; revised version - 6 minutes

Program Note

My extended family – maternal grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins – lived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in the 1970s as part of the overseas Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. They were there quite happily, in fact, until the Khmer Rouge stormed the capital in April 1975 and drove everyone out. Those events changed the course of my family forever. I was born in 1975 so my birth and childhood were most definitely affected by these events even though I was born and raised in Canada. I have been increasingly trying to piece together my family history and how it affected my family members' subsequent lives.

My extended family miraculously survived an arduous journey – over a month on foot in the countryside of Cambodia, traveling only in the dead of night, and then in Vietnam. Ultimately, they ended up in Paris and Canada. I went to visit Cambodia for the first time in 2019 with my family – parents, son, and husband – and with some sleuthing, we were able to find my family’s former home and the hospital that my aunt ran, still standing all these years later but now abandoned. I look forward to returning and to continuing to understand more about their past.

My connection with Metropolis Ensemble and Andrew Cyr has been a long one, and when Andrew heard of my trip, he wanted to let me know that he also worked on a project involving survivors of the genocide, including the composer Him Sophy and the film director Rithy Panh. Bongsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia was an international success in 2017 and onward.

The Cambodian Living Arts organization commissioned the work premiered by Metropolis Ensemble and then wanted to mount a 2020 online festival based on the Requiem. Metropolis Ensemble and Cambodian Living Arts joined forces to commission a series of works, ‘variations’ if you will, that are inspired by the Requiem.(Un)Wandering Souls is my 3-minute response to the Requiem – the melody is taken from the last scene – and the virtuosic treatment of it is my own.