To Saint Augustine

ensemble soprano, flute, clarinet, bari sax, percussion, piano, violin, viola, cello, and electronics
written summer 2023
duration 17 minutes

Commissioned by the Virginia Tech School of the Arts as part of the 2022 Yee Memorial Commission

I have a complicated relationship with Christianity. There are few, though, who could purport to have as complicated a faith as Saint Augustine’s. He was a thinker blessed with the two attributes needed to ensure one’s legacy: a relentless, obsessive, autocannibalistic thought life, and the need to write it down.

And write, he did: Augustine’s seminal texts, the Confessions chief among them, are difficult works, filled with surprising vulnerability, heady hermeneutics, and harsh self-flagellation. A searing streak of humility - indeed, bordering on self-hatred - runs throughout, as Augustine believed that the existence of evil on a global and personal scale stemmed solely from human weakness.

Unlike many of my churched peers, I did not inherit my faith - rather, I had been the first in my family to convert, and I eventually realized I might be one of the first to step away. I was well- acquainted with the kind of Augustinian guilt that pervaded Christian thought, and I experienced firsthand the kind of painful self-loathing that came with such emphatic doctrines of sin.

I was deeply struck when I encountered Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo’s wryly meandering poem simply titled To St. Augustine. Liu had been an insistent thorn in the Chinese Communist Party’s side for much of his life, though his contrarian nature meant that he was equally critical of Western ideology - including, naturally, Augustine. I was fascinated to see someone outside the faith engage with it so candidly, and I identified closely with his oblique perspective on Augustine’s work.

I chose to interpret Liu’s poem from my perspective as both an insider and an outsider to Christianity. The music veers between rumination and outcry, mashing together abrasive, distorted samples of hymns with floating, dreamlike textures. Though the piece searches for some kind of equilibrium in the contradictions of God, it ends with a perhaps inevitable ambiguity.

This piece is dedicated to my brother, who was always a step or two ahead of me in matters of faith and philosophy. Many thanks to the Virginia Tech School of Performing Arts for commissioning and realizing the piece through their Yee Commission.