Penelope

The work is based on the text of Molly’s Monologue from the final chapter of Ulysses by James Joyce. The monologue conveys the situation of Molly’s stream-of-consciousness and without any punctuation in this chapter.

 

In this work, the composer focuses on the contrasting relationship between the linear-time world Molly stays in and the nonlinear-time world based on Molly’s stream-of-consciousness. The composer intends to expand the possible dimensions of the performance space, and constructs the ambiguity simultaneously.

 

The composer divides the performance space into three different layers. The first one is the single speaker which stands along at the center. The content of the speaker is only the speaking of Molly’s monologue. The second layer is the scenarios which are constructed when the composer reads the monologue, Molly might think of. All the rich sounds are distributed in the ambisonic system after delicate considering about distance, reverberation, direction, etc. The last payer, and hard to be perceived, is an air sound follows the trajectory, which analyzed from the sentence, “yes, I will say Yes”, roaming in the space.

 

Through the time passing, the content in each different layer starts to move to blur the boundary which was constructed in the beginning. The strategy echoes the initial idea, the relationship between the physical world and the inner world, however, eventually we cannot recognize the difference quite easily when the boundaries dissolved in the ambiguity.