Jason Kao Hwang/Burning Bridge

World Premiere: blood

Jason Kao Hwang - composer/violin Taylor Ho Bynum - cornet Joe Daley - tuba Andrew Drury - drum set Ken Filiano - string bass Sun Li - pipa Wang Guowei - erhu Reut Regev - trombone

blood meditates upon the emotional traumas of war retained within the body as unspoken vibrations that reverberate throughout communities and across generations. Through blood the violence of deeply held memories are not relived but transposed into our sound and liberated into song. blood in our sound rises within our voice to protest and defy humanity’s constant state of war. blood regenerates to entrain an infinite spectrum of waves into wholeness and strength.

One evening, while driving down an unlit highway, my headlights flashed upon the bleeding carcass of a deer. My heart rate thundered and air abandoned my lungs with explosive force as I swerved away, narrowly avoiding a collision. This experience made me reflect upon my mother’s harrowing experiences in World War II in China. She was in a pharmacy that was bombed by the Japanese. Knocked unconscious, she awoke as the lone survivor surrounded by the dead. I also thought about the musicians who fought in Viet Nam, like Billy Bang and Butch Morris. The magnitude of shock and sorrow that they endured is unimaginable.

Extreme danger triggers a “fight or flight” response, powerful, diametrically opposed forces. This intense conflict can produce an immobility response, which can penetrate and remain within the body as emotional trauma. Similarly, when a bomb explodes, there is blast wave outward that leaves a near vacuum in its wake, which is filled by an equally deadly blast wind in the opposite direction. Within an explosion, blood was created.