Name: Lei Liang
Nationality: Chinese-American
Occupation: Composer
Current release: Lei Liang's new album dui is out via Islandia.

If you enjoyed this Lei Liang interview and would like to know more about his music, visit his official homepage. 



The borders between producers, sound artists, and even songwriters are becoming increasingly blurry. What does being a composer mean today, would you say?

These borders are fluid and interchangeable indeed! I compose and usually produce my own CDs.

This time is an exception. Working with Maya Beiser (who also performs on this disc) and Kristen Brennan of Islandia Records was a real collaboration – we conceived the ideas behind the disc together, coming up with the name dui as the title (a Chinese word which means “face-to-face”).

The cover design is also refreshing for me. I loved the experience!

[Read our Maya Beiser interview]

Many people perceive classical music and contemporary composition as having high barriers of entrance, both for listeners and musicians. What have your own experiences been in this regard?

I strive for the opposite: I always test my music with my young son.

We started listening to music together since he was very little, and he always has interesting things to say. For young ears, all music is new, and I love that state of mind!

He reminds me that sometimes my composition could use some silence (“too full,” as he calls it). That comment is as sophisticated as anything I have heard in grad school!

As of today, what kind of materials, ideas, and technologies are particularly stimulating for you?

The idea I always return to is “home” – what is our home? What has become of it?

For example, the music of Inner Mongolia and the sounds of Chinese poetry are very dear to me, and there are personal evocations of these ideas on this album.

With new instruments, new technologies, new collaborators, I seem to discover more about my own past – a place that seems both familiar and foreign at the same time.

Where do most of your inspirations to create come from – rather from internal impulses or external ones? Which current social / political / ecological or other developments make you feel like you need to respond as an artist?

I composed music about political suppression, about undocumented immigrants, and about America’s complex relationship with gun violence.

On this album, I focus on the richness of memory – that’s very much at the heart of everything I do; it is my starting point and my core.

The piece I composed for Wu Man (pipa) and Steven Schick (percussion), vis-à-vis, for example, consists of layers of memories – the sound of China where I grew up, its people and its sound, a place that is nearly unrecognizable to me due to the incredible transformations over the recent decades.



We especially miss our home when we are away from it. Perhaps it is a familiar feeling shared by most of us – aren’t we all living away from home?

Music has become a lot more global, and incorporating elements from other parts of the world or the musical spectrum is commonplace. Do you still think there are city scenes with a distinct, unique sound? How does your local scene influence your work?

I grew up in Beijing.

The sound of is dialect, the warmth of its people, the cicada chorus in its hot summer months, and the sounds of lively instruments are part of my music – something you can hear in Lakescape V, the last track on the disc.

Composing has always had an interesting relationship between honouring its roots and exploring the unknown. What does the balance between these two poles look like in your music?

The music of Mongolia, for example, has been an inspiration for me since my childhood. After studying it for a very long time, and having been deeply engaged with its preservation, I still find this music to be fresh, its profound beauty still waiting to be discovered. It anchors me.

I’ve written several works inspired by Mongolia, but I return to this source of again, with Mongolian Suite on this disc, performed by Maya Beiser.
    


How much potential for something “new” is there still in composition? What could this “new” look like?

I think it is endless.

For example, working with the double bassist Mark Dresser for the solo piece Luminosity on this disc, a new lexicon of contrabass was created: spectral flautando (draw bow quickly without pressure to activate harmonic rather than fundamental), threading (detach the bow hair and re-attach it underneath the strings), double-raking and multiphonic bowing, to name just a few new techniques.



Mark Dresser is an incredible innovator, and in my opinion, he re-invented the double bass and created several new instruments out of the old one.