Composer Vivian Fung takes the flute in wild directions in Storm Within
The new flute concerto has its world premiere at Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming virtual concert featuring powerhouse women in music
Composer Vivian Fung wrote Storm Within during the peak of the pandemic while in lockdown. Photo by Geneviève Caron
Vancouver Symphony Orchestra presents Sun and Storm, featuring composer Vivian Fung, principal flute Christie Reside, and maestra Tania Miller, on June 4 at 7:30 pm PDT via TheConcertHall.ca.
VIVIAN FUNG WAS about seven years old when she first started writing music and 17 when she left her hometown of Edmonton to study composition at the Juilliard School, where she went on to earn her Doctorate of Musical Arts in Music Composition and join the faculty. It might surprise some to hear that the JUNO-winning composer considers herself a late bloomer of sorts.
Fung—who recently composed a new flute concerto for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra that will soon have its world premiere—explains that during her post-secondary schooling, she was immersed in Western musical concepts. While she loved attending one of the world’s leading arts-education centres, she notes that her studies were largely devoid of any Asian influence representative of her Cantonese culture. It was only when she began travelling abroad that her deepest learning began.
“New York is a very special place, so you can go to concerts every day, you can go to rehearsals every day, you have a lot of famous musicians and coaches and teachers passing through the school, so you can’t help but be inspired by that kind of environment,” Fung says of Juilliard. “That is just as important as the instruction you get from the school….It’s a real blessing to be able to have experience but at the same time, I have to say it wasn’t until I left school that I really discovered my own voice. The discovery came later. I feel like I didn’t really come to accepting myself for who I was, accepting my identity, until after school. When I started travelling, especially to Asia, that’s when I started to open up to what was possible.
“At Juilliard, you are versed in a Western canon and Western craft, which was great; I don’t regret doing that at all; it’s fabulous. But it was not until I got invitation to go to Bali for the first time that things started to open up for me. I started to learn about gamelan music and that really opened up a whole new way of learning music and experiencing music, and that was very healing for me. Combined with the sacredness of that, it was completely healing and it was a means to self-discovery. I began looking into non-western music and started that whole course of reconciling who I was and my upbringing in Canada and how to make sense of all that. I neither here nor there; I was kind of nowhere. At the same time, I had this urge to write so how to reconcile all that was a big question I had.” (She shares insights into growing up in Canada but having an Asian identity in an article called Embracing My Banana-ness: One Composer’s Experience Towards Finding her Identity, which can be found here.)
From there, Fung has gone on to develop a vast body of work inspired by her travels and her interest in cross-cultural understanding. In 2012, for instance, she went to Southwest China to study minority music and cultures, building on earlier research that inspired 2011’s Yunnan Folk Songs, commissioned by Chicago’s Fulcrum Point New Music with support from the MAP Fund. She has toured Bali three times, competing in the Bali Arts Festival with Gamelan Dharma Swara.
In early 2019, Fung traveled to Cambodia to connect with her roots; While Fung’s parents immigrated to Canada before she was born, her extended family was living as overseas Chinese in Vietnam and Cambodia. Some of her close relatives were forced to flee the Cambodian genocide in 1975. She drew on her family’s experience dealing with the PTSD stemming from that experience for new opera scenes as part of Edmonton Opera’s Wild Rose Opera Project (to be developed into a full-length opera) and is currently developing an oral history of her family. The Metropolis Ensemble commissioned Fung’s (Un)Wandering Souls for Sandbox Percussion to premiere at the Bongsokol Festival in Cambodia in December 2020.
“I have these influences that all get distilled into my process,” Fung says. “It’s who I am.”
Among the numerous organizations that have embraced her work are Chicago Sinfonietta, Philadelphia Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, Montreal Symphony, Detroit Symphony, American String Quartet, Staatskapelle Karlsruhe, and Metropolis Ensemble, to name just a few.
The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra co-commissioned a new flute concerto from Fung with support from Hugh Davidson Fund at the Victoria Foundation. Storm Within has its world premiere at June 4 in a virtual concert called Sun and Storm, with three powerhouse women in music. The program also features VSO principal flute Christie Reside and conductor Tania Miller (who has a doctorate in orchestral conducting from the University of Michigan; has appeared as a guest conductor across Canada, the United States, and Europe; and was music director of Victoria Symphony for 14 years), who will also lead the VSO in a performance of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony.
Fung wrote Storm Within during the fall and winter of 2020, when COVID-19 pandemic was at its peak and California, where she now resides with her husband and son, was in full lockdown. During those isolating days she found herself feeling overwhelmed by news of deaths, violence, protests, resistance, and protests. She directed her emotions into her composition, which she describes in program notes as beginning and ending with “lyrical and placid moments for both flute and orchestra, bookending a journey that is at times percussive and harsh, at times playful, and at times soaring with expressive lines for both flute and orchestral instruments.”
The flute solo, meanwhile, is “laced with fast runs, glissandi, large leaps, and rhythmically charged lines”.
Vancouver Symphony Orchestra principal flute Christie Reside likes highly virtuosic music, which Vivian Fung wrote for her in Storm Within.
During the writing process, Fung worked closely with Reside. Reside has been principal flute of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra since 2004. A passionate chamber musician who earned her Bachelor of Music degree from McGill University, she’s also a member of Vancouver’s Standing Wave Ensemble and is on faculty at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver Academy of Music, she has performed as guest principal flute with orchestras around the world, including Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, and Montreal Symphony Orchestra for their tour of the Americas.
Fung asked her what she liked to play; Reside said she likes fast, virtuosic, challenging. Fung went with that, no holds barred.
“I was sitting in my own studio getting all this news filtered in and not having any contact with outside world while all these intense, milestone events were happening all through the world, the tumultuousness of it but also there was an acknowledgement that music is a consoling art to turn to,” Fung says. “All of this fell into the flute concerto. Above everything else, I really wanted to showcase the flute….Christie said to me afterward this is the probably the hardest thing she’s ever done.
“It’s highly virtuosic, it explores timbres of the flute that are maybe not what you would normally associate with conventional flute writing,” Fung explains. “It’s more percussive; there’s a lot more percussive qualities of different attacks of the flute. She is also speaking while playing; there’s something called jet whistles, where she’s whistling into the flute or outside the flute. So it’s exploring the limits of the flute….It’s a dialogue between the flute and orchestra with the flute taking centre-stage. Christie did an amazing job.”
The world premiere and commissioning of Storm Within (which is dedicated to the memory of Hugh Davidson) shares the Sun and Storm program with Schubert’s Symphony No. 5, which was inspired by Mozart. Schubert called for a small ensemble for the Symphony in B Flat Major comprising one flute, two oboes, and two bassoons, two horns (instead of four), plus strings - the same arrangement as Mozart’s Symphony No. 40.
Fung, who won the JUNO award for Best Classical Composition 2013 for Violin Concerto, has been extraordinarily busy despite the pandemic. She recently completed a new piano trio for L’arc Trio in San Francisco and a piece for the UK’s Tangram Collective. This past season alone, she has seen the UK premiere of Birdsong, performed by violinist Midori at Kings Place in London; the world premiere of a new trumpet concerto with the Erie Philharmonic; performances of Dust Devils by the Philadelphia Orchestra; Fanfare with the Florida Orchestra and Aqua by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, among other highlights.
In light of the recent rise of anti-Asian sentiment, Fung has never felt more compelled to compose.
“It really affects us because of the fears it instills in people,” says Fung, who in June will help moderate a roundtable with Asian American artists through the American Composers Forum about racism. “I know colleagues and friends who are carrying around mace just to protect themselves. My mom is saying ‘I shouldn’t go to Chinatown anymore.’ There’s really this idea of instilling fear in us.
“I refuse to be afraid,” she says. “It really emboldens me, especially this project with my family oral history and the storytelling of our perspective. It’s very important for us to share and to acknowledge. It validates what I do. And it makes me feel like there’s even more reason to be doing what I’m doing.”
For more information about Sun and Storm, see the VSO.
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