By Lori Wood
On a cold day in December, composer Byron Au Yong welcomed our guests to a special dinner in the Lucas Artists Program (LAP) dining room as a conductor would orchestrate a choir—hand in the air, commanding. The guests fell silent, surprised. Then Au Yong started with a sound, one long tone that rose in volume as he handed it off to us, and we took it up and carried it as Au Yong introduced new musical lines, layer over layer, and conducted our untrained voices in an extemporaneous composition. For many of us, it was the first experience performing under the direction of a musical conductor. At the end of this journey into sound, still leading the vocalizations, Byron Au Yong led us into the LAP library.
|
|
There Au Yong, a Lucas Artists Composer Fellow, spoke about his latest project in process, Activist Songbook , and talked about his explorations of the inspiration to activism with people in communities from the East to the West Coast. Activist Songbook , created by Au Yong in collaboration with poet Aaron Jafferis, will explore the themes of Asian-American experience. Au Yong conceives of Activist Songbook as a process-oriented work whose resulting music will offer ways to gather individuals and collectives to energize efforts towards social change. The work will be informed by the contemporary pan-ethnic Asian-American movement. Living between oppression and imagination, Activist Songbook will call for justice and respond with beauty through an instructional score, live performances, and interactive recordings that honor the legacy of Asian-American activism and point to future possibilities.
|
|
From the library, we moved to the table to share a meal together, where under our plates, each of us found long strips of paper with intriguing prompts—fragments of text, like the surprises in fortune cookies:
The revolution will be uncomfortable.
Sometimes we cannot save the world.
You can quit, or I can fire you.
When we sing, we’re time traveling.
Change yourself to change the world.
|
|
Over a dessert of persimmon pudding, we went around the table and each guest shared their response to these sometimes strange and poetic reflections. Some recounted experiences in their lives when they were shut out. Others acted out what they should have said in difficult situations. At the end of the evening, fortified by this experience, we all went back out into a world out of balance, with a renewed sense of what community makes possible.
Click the images to view enlarged versions.