Program Notes:

Drawing its title from Li-Young Lee’s poem “Furious Versions,” Memory revises me is a contemplation of exile and longing, etched with a memory that does not preserve the past, but rewrites the self. Inspired by my time in Rome while witnessing from a distance the United States' political and cultural fracturing, the work reflects a strange, quiet devastation: the yearning for home and the relief of estrangement, held simultaneously.

Each movement takes a literary source as its catalyst and is informed by the emotional core of each text. The first movement, “ut veniant patriae, veniant oblivia vestri” (translated by classicist Cynthia Liu as “let oblivion of the fatherland, let oblivion of you come”), borrows its title from Ovid’s Tristia, and examines the physical, geographic nature of exile and the impossibility of forgetting. “I’m sure | in another dimension” draws from Frank Ocean’s song “White Ferrari” and considers the temporal space, fragmentation, and possibility of memory that inhabits our most private, interior worlds. The final movement, “a history of rain,” returns to Lee’s poem, treating memory as accumulated, inherited, and sedimentary.