Commissioned by the Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra and conductor Chih-Sheng Chen, with financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

The Grey Tree will receive its premiere on composer’s son’s birthday, April 7, as part of the 2024 Taipei Traditional Arts Festival 台北傳統藝術季, at Zhongshan Hall in Taipei, Taiwan.

Edward Top:

The focal point in The Grey Tree was to compose a piece for Chinese instruments with elements from my Dutch heritage. The heterophony of traditional Chinese music, where several instruments play different versions of the same motive simultaneously, is applied in my piece in a technique called the microcanon. In the microcanon, each time a player enters with the same motive, it is a beat, or a half beat apart, creating a canonic presentation of the material in polyphony, albeit on the microscopic level. You can also compare it with the delay effect of an electric guitar. A specific trait of this post-minimalist style in Dutch music is that it is more chromatic, creating dissonant swarms of music. A balance in The Grey Tree is found in the ebb and flow between this chromatic sound, and the pentatonicism of Chinese music.

The title of The Grey Tree is based on a painting by Mondriaan from 1912. Mondriaan grew up in Winterswijk, the same town as myself in The Netherlands, a hundred years before me. His work forms a transition between a figurative representation of the real world, to the abstraction of the spiritual world behind it. In the painting, The Grey Tree, I was mesmerised by the symbolism of timeless life and wisdom. The tree is brought back to its essence through a tapestry of grey waves, lines and geometrical shapes. This tapestry is transferred to the music, where individual instruments are absorbed into a fabric of swirling tree-branch lines, creating constantly shifting shades and shapes like the murmuration of flocks of birds or schools of fish.

The work is dedicated to my wife Wendy.