Thoughts on the work:

Hyo, meaning filial piety in Korean (효), is a processing of my family’s immigration story that was triggered by anxieties around my family’s health and safety due to COVID-19 and the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes. This caused associated confrontations with life’s impermanence, genealogy, and regret painfully magnified by my mom’s struggle to recover from COVID-19 in November of 2020.

The first movement expresses my confrontation with this grim reality, and the title, “We don’t notice the tree rings growing below us,” comes from the lyrics of the song “TOMBOY” (2017) by Korean indie band Hyukoh that encapsulated my feelings at the time.

The second movement is based on the Christian hymn, “Blessed Assurance/예수를 나의 구주 삼고” (1873) by Phoebe Knapp. My mom, who was the choir director of our tiny Presbyterian Korean church in the middle of Kansas, sang this hymn throughout my adolescence. I never identified as Christian unlike the rest of my family, and was obliged like many kids to participate in church, and my particular role was to accompany the worship on the piano. In my piece, the music based on the hymn is preceded by an introduction featuring a wide vibrato from Korean traditional music which Christian missionaries in the 1800’s deemed to be “unclean.” Thus, I wrote this piece fully aware of the colonialist origins of Christianity while not denying its importance in my family’s story. I thought this hymn had an interesting arc having been composed in the 1870’s in New Jersey, making its way to Korea trans-Pacifically through missionaries, and then back with my mom in the 1990’s to the heart of America in Kansas City, Missouri where she has called home for the past 30 years.

The last movement of my piece, titled “I’m cheering you on,” endlessly repeats an ostinato from Hyukoh’s song “TOMBOY” where the lyrics shift and touch on a glimmering fragment of optimism on the same melodic material: “나는 사랑을 응원해” roughly meaning “I’m cheering you on/I support love.” By repeating this fragment over and over again throughout my last movement, I wanted to express my desire to stay suspended in a more hopeful state of mind.