Combustion Preludes depicts fire from five unique vantage points. We can experience fire in many ways – it can comfort, illuminate, animate, or destroy – and I tried to capture these experiences in my set of preludes.
The first movement, “Smoldering”, uses tremolo in the violin and cello to replicate the agitated energy of a slow burn. Movement II, “Floating Sparks,” is meant to feel weightless, like sparks rising from a campfire. We reach a more everyday experience of fire with Movement III, “Flint Strikes,” which depicts a faulty gas stove. The piano imitates the click of the igniter, provoking the violin to burst forth with energetic figuration. In Movement IV, I imagined the violin and cello as an exposed, wavering flame. The piano plays an incisive solo, and with each note it causes the sustained drone in the string instruments to vibrate, as if a puff of air has disturbed the flame. The final movement, “Song in Smoke – Immolation,” extensively quotes a four-note motif from Pink Floyd’s album Wish You Were Here – a favorite of Hui Shan’s. The motif spins out into a long melody that gradually becomes more heated, eventually reaching a climax and becoming engulfed in fire. I imagined the song itself on a funeral pyre, a blazing inferno that gradually burns away.