Ganzhi (干支), for saxophone and piano will be composed and recorded in early 2027 with the collaboration of Prof. Susan Fancher, an appointed Lecturing Fellow of Music in the Duke Music Department.
The title refers directly to the sixty-year cycle of the Chinese lunar calendar; the work will be composed using a technique derived from the calendar’s underlying structure.
Ganzhi (干支) will engage compositionally with a foundational aspect of Chinese thought: the mathematical system underlying the traditional Chinese calendar. The calendar combines lunar and solar elements and is based on a sixty-year cycle generated through the interaction of two overlapping systems: the ten Heavenly Stems, which represent the five elements (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water) in their Yin and Yang manifestations, and the twelve Earthly Branches, which were originally associated with the houses of Jupiter and later became linked to the animals of the Chinese zodiac.
If we number the stems from 1 to 10 and the branches from A to L, the cycle unfolds according to the following pattern, where the red and blue colors signal the beginning of a new cycle of stems and branches:
1A, 2B, 3C, 4D, 5E, 6F, 7G, 8H, 9I, 10J, 1K, 2L, 3A, 4B…
Because the two series have different lengths, the associations between their elements are always different and reset after 60 years. For this piece, circa 20 minutes long, I plan to write very short, characterized motives for each of the branches, and five additional motives for the stems, each that can then be inverted (i.e., read from right to left) to represent the Yang and Yin polarities.
The resulting composition will become a large-scale process of constant musical transformation, as these motives interact, combine, and evolve in ever-changing ways according to the polarity and stem associated with each branch.
