Basil Athanasiadis

Book of Dreams II was composed in 2017 at the request of the flautist Lin Lin as part of her PhD research on traditional Chinese instrumental techniques. The musical material derives from a collection of traditional and modern pieces for solo hulushi gathered during the flutist’s fieldwork at a remote rural area in China, and video footage featuring daily-life scenes such as a young woman making yarn in the traditional way as well as aspects of the village and its surrounding nature.  The resulting work consists of nine movements inter-connected into a single-movement structure. The melodic material derives largely from short melodic fragments and rhythms taken from the original folk tunes. As reference to the imagery of traditional weaving, the string quartet material is built almost in its entirety on repetitive melodic patterns of varied lengths, superimposed to create a polychromatic tapestry, reminiscent of the imagery of traditional Chinese textiles. The melodic material has been composed in a flexible manner to allow the flautist’s interpretational input (i.e. incorporate extended techniques idiomatic to hulushi). The lack of melodic development and rational structural organisation shows an affinity to the eastern aesthetics rather than the western idea of cause and effect. The melodic simplicity, lyricism and modal harmonic character prevalent throughout the work is a reference to the folk character of hulushi.