Snow In Boston, Op. 08 雪落波士顿, Op. 08

Composer's Note

Written in April 2025, Boston.
I was occupied with a heavy workload this semester and barely had time to go out. Most of the time, I sat alone on the wooden chair in my dorm, leaning against the window, gazing at the world outside through the corner of the pane. Winter in Boston sees frequent snow. On those days of heavy snowfall, the world between heaven and earth was blanketed in white. Occasionally, a vehicle would drive by on the street, its exhaust rising in the cold air. Pedestrians were few and far between, walking in haste. While depicting the snowy scenery through music, I wanted even more to convey the sense of loneliness upon first arriving in a foreign land, and the poignant beauty of love.

In my previous works, the climax was usually created through the collision of different materials introduced earlier or complex textures. However, in this piece, I chose to do the opposite—introducing collisions and counterpoints between various materials before the climax. The actual climax (2:22) strips away all existing materials and the most representative rhythmic textures, building tension solely through long notes and simple upward scales.

When writing this section, a scene from the first half of Makoto Shinkai's animation 5 Centimeters per Second came to my mind: after a blizzard, the male and female protagonists meet under a cherry blossom tree. As a gust of wind blows, countless cherry blossoms slowly fall, enveloping them from above. Therefore, I designed a brief pause followed by a fierce unfolding, attempting to evoke that sensation of a fleeting moment of falling.

Premiered on April 17, 2025, at the New England Conservatory, conducted by Zibo Yuan.
Re-recorded in June 2025 at JZTC Studio, Beijing.