kilobyte (2014)

Commission: Singapore International Violin Competition 2015

Instrumentation: solo violin

Duration: 6 minutes

Program Information:
kilobyte is written for the 2014 Singapore International Violin Competition. It is inspired by today’s social currents in youth, such as the proliferation of byte-sized information, embodied by social sites such as Twitter, tumblr and Facebook, that are commonplace in social media today.

kilobyte is made of many short snippets of ideas that interweave with one another, forming a whole. Since this piece is written for a violin competition, I feel that it is important for each rendition of the piece to be unique, just like there is more than one way of presenting materials on the internet. In addition, improvisation and composing is a skill that performers should embrace as part of being a whole musician. As such, the section “Introspect 2” is one that can be freely improvised by the performer, thus also allowing them an opportunity to be in total control of every aspect of music making.

Premiere: January 14-16 2015 | Singapore International Violin Competition | Singapore

Performance: January 5 2017 | Lijia Phang | Ann Arbor, MI
May 4 2017 | Anh-Thu Pham | Paris, France
August 21 – 22 2020 | Lilit Hartunian | Haverhill, MA