Program Notes

Dream Weaving: Fragments/Finding

The works of noted Houston artist James Groff inspired this new work.  The affinity between Groff’s visual art and music is evident through the rendering of lines in counterpoint and shapes within larger structures-all aspects of music.  These aspects of his work render a feeling of motion through time captured on canvas, which is evoked through strikingly diverse collections of tone colors and contrasting play of light and dark.  Chen’s music, which draws heavily on jazz idioms, sonically reflects Groff’s energetic palette. 

In Groff’s “Dream” series, he works with layers of transparency and opaqueness that represent different degrees of conception and consciousness, like visions and ideas rising out of dreams, hence the origin of Chen’s title for her composition.  These emerging ideas, or “finding” spin the thread, which “weaves” the various sections of the composition together.