Playing Carnegie Hall

P.Q. Phan’s ‘When the Worlds Mixed and Times Merged’ written in reaction to tragedy

By Jayne Spencer

He was at New York City’s Carnegie Hall, and on stage was the American Composers Orchestra playing the world premiere of his When the Worlds Mixed and Times Merge.

It was the second work by the Indiana University School of Music professor to be performed at Carnegie Hall.

“I was very happy for what the orchestra has done,” Phan said of the performance. “The audience enthusiastically responded to my work and was moved by its powerful musical reflection on hate crimes in the Midwest in the summer of 1999. I was touched and o n cloud nine with its result.”

Phan was teaching at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana the summer of 1999, just ready to move to Indiana to assume his current teaching position. He was beginning to work on the musical piece, which had been commissioned as part of the orches tra’s “20th century snapshots” series that would document historical and societal touchstones of contemporary life.

In early July of that year, a white supremacist named Benjamin Smith went on a three-day shooting spree. Smith shot at Orthodox Jews, African Americans and Asians on a Friday night in the northern suburbs of Chicago, killing Ricky Byrdsong, a former baske tball coach at Northwestern University. Then on Saturday, Smith shot at African Americans and Asians near the University of Illinois; a Taiwanese man was wounded a block away from Phan’s office in Urbana. On Sunday morning, a July 4 holiday, Smith returne d to the IU campus in Bloomington, where he had once been a student, and randomly killed Korean graduate student Won Joon Yoon outside a local church. Later, Smith would commit suicide.

“This event turned the direction of my piece completely,” Phan told the New York Times in a feature story Oct. 12. “I felt as though, after 18 years of establishing a good foundation for my life in America, suddenly I might be in danger because I am Asian . I felt that the music I was writing had to reflect that.”

The work includes an overture of metal and membrane percussion instruments akin to a morning ceremonial inauguration at a traditional Vietnamese court. A sharp musical contrast interrupts, the sounds Phan uses as reminiscence of the tragic July events. < p> Violent conflict is no stranger to Phan.

He was born in 1962 in Da Nang, South Vietnam. His earliest memories include the routine sounds of shellings from North Vietnam. At 14, he and family members were imprisoned for trying to escape the country by boat. When released, the young man began stud ying architecture, but was drawn to the symphonic music he heard on the radio, spent hours transcribing borrowed scores and taught himself music. He has lived in the United States since 1982.

His newest work is included on a new CD, Banana Trumpet Games, published by Composers Recordings, Inc.

You can also join the Phan club by going to this IU School of Music Web site for an audio stream of an earlier work:

http://music100.music.indiana.edu/som/composition/facaudioclips.htm