Imosu

In October of 2024, I received news that my mother - an impenetrable fortress of strength and will - had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Distraught, confused, and angry at the world, I found myself haunted by the same nightmare for weeks: grieving her absence. I wasn’t strong. And yet, she was fighting.

When I came home for Thanksgiving break, I didn’t find her bedridden or hopeless, but instead up at sunrise, raincoat on and spade in hand, tending to her garden. To her cosmos flowers. To her 모수 (mosu).

I thought to myself how beautiful that was - how the garden housing her 모수, named after galaxies and stars, had become her world, where, at dawn, she lived and breathed even as her body was racked with chemicals and disease. In contrast, that recurring nightmare had become my world, filled with desperation for answers.

To cope, I turned to music. I was enraptured in the world of Beethoven’s radical transcendences, Unsuk Chin’s dazzling concerti, and John Corigliano’s sweeping American epics. I realized these pieces, like my mother’s garden, were my world, my cosmos, my 모수.

After nearly a year of searching for inspiration for an orchestra piece, naturally, a piece began to form in my head: a synthesis of both my musical and emotional realities. An homage to my mother’s battle, a reflection of all my musical fascinations and emotional struggles, and a tribute to what is suspended in between.

Mahler once said the orchestra should contain the world. While I could never claim to capture the world itself, I hope that with Imosu, I offer a musical 모수 of my own - a musical blossom bearing within its notes my stars and galaxies - my world.

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The piece unfolds between two contrasting sound-worlds, moving in and out one another.

The first is driven by angst: overwhelming rhythms - the heartbeat, the breath - and relentless converging glissandi, the mind unable to escape.

The second offers shelter: a lyrical refuge, my mother entering a garden enclosed from outside. Here, I turned to my musical 모수: free improvisation. The melody - the first one I composed from an improvisation - became the seed for a theme, reshaped and woven directly into the orchestral fabric.

One note anchors both worlds: F#. My mother once captured on video my very first musical act - me, transfixed at the piano, repeating a single tone: F#. In this piece, that pitch becomes oxygen, soil, gravity - sustaining both realities of angst and refuge.

The excerpt provided comprises the opening seven and a half minutes: the anxious first arc, the passage into refuge, and the initial blossoming of the nascent melody.