Program Note:

The word “cleave” means both to split and to adhere. At once attached and severed, identity can exist in a constant state of being cleaved: through separation, one may begin to unite the self. re: cleaving responds to Li-Young Lee’s poem “The Cleaving,” which explores this paradox through the lens of the Asian American experience and the metaphor of butchering meat. This piece also functions as part-orchestration and part-expansion of an earlier chamber work of mine, Yellow Peril—a musical response to the waves of anti-Asian hate during the early years of the COVID pandemic, which drew on Vietnamese funeral music as its source material. I examine this notion of being cleaved as it relates to being an Asian American and the tension of wanting to simultaneously embrace and detach from both sides of that label.