Nanjing West Road
ensemble 1.0.1.alto sax.1, perc., kybd., e. gtr., soprano, cello, bass, and fixed media
written summer 2022
duration 16 minutes
Commissioned by Mind on Fire
Supported by New Music USA’s Creator Development Fund for 2022-23
Winner of a 2024 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award
text
mvmt I - ‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd…’
worn-down, faded bench
companion to weary travelers
catching their breath between stations
we sat together
laughing into each other’s shoulders
as we ducked beneath neon-singed clouds
of rush hour smoke
rolling, tumbling down
old-town alleys turned glass walkways
noodle bars turned Apple Stores
Taoist temples turned shopping malls
teeming
thrumming
into the night
our hands nearly touched
amidst the rhythms of the crowd
as indefinite and fleeting
as the skyline around us
my train arrives
I rise to leave
looking back through tinted plastic, I wonder
in this city of forgetting
will you remember me?
mvmt 2 - ‘…petals on a wet, black bough.’
when I returned
the bench was no longer there
they turned it into
a Starbucks
the largest in the world
I went in
a ghost among the rows of emptied Gravitas blends
silhouetted against the Roastery Bar’s harshly gilded tones
floating up the escalator past smoky mocha updrafts
and glimmering Tom Dixon fixtures
when through a tinted mezzanine glass panel -
I see us
past coffee-stained mugs and soft curls of wispy steam
together, sitting
undisturbed by the surrounding rush
of raindrops and unfilled orders
the moment suspended
a gentle warmth about us
unconcerned, content
as we laugh, sip, and remember -
hazily I saw their outlines rise
the pair evaporating with the last of the moisture
into the crowd, out the doors
as a gust of smog blew in
and filled their void
they built a bigger Starbucks in Chicago.
program note
There used to be a run-down bench next to Shanghai’s Nanjing West Road Station that held a great deal of personal significance to me. In 2014, I had my final meaningful interaction with a long-time crush of mine there, sitting together and reminiscing. We both moved away shortly thereafter and lost contact. Years later, when I returned to the same spot, the bench was no longer there. In its place was a Starbucks - the largest in the world at the time.
Exploring the cafe and the surrounding station, I was reminded of one of my favorite poems I had encountered while living in Shanghai - Ezra Pound’s brief Imagist masterpiece, ‘In a Station of the Metro’:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Though Pound was writing about early 20th c. Paris, I read the poem as a portrait of Westernization in present day Shanghai. I saw Apple Stores, semiconductor firms, and strip malls replace dumpling bars and rice paddies over the 12 years I lived there. I was not wholly against all the change - I enjoyed the conveniences of MacBooks, fast food chains, and rapid transit - but I could not deny a growing sense of alienation as Shanghai became ever more ephemeral. Friends moved to and from the city constantly; commuters seemed to walk just a bit faster with each passing year; skyscrapers themselves emerged and receded into the skyline like sand dunes. As with Paris in the 1910s, there was a persistent and paradoxical loneliness that followed, spectre-like, all the glamor of a newly urbanized Shanghai. ‘In a Station of the Metro’ captured this contradiction succinctly: despite so many people being in such close proximity, connections were difficult to build, and memories even more so.
Nanjing West Road is an edifice to my memory of Shanghai, crystallizing that which no longer exists: old cityscapes, old benches, old relationships. Many thanks to Mind on Fire and New Music USA for commissioning the piece.