Lotus Prayer
Xi Wang (b. 1978)
Lotus Prayer
Bold and dramatic, the music of Xi Wang is rooted in a storytelling instinct that conveys a compellingly autobiographical impulse. “Composing for me is a journey to tell my own life story,” she says, “a mirror of what I have gone through emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. It’s a musical novel of my life.”
Xi points out that she’s spent about half of her life in her native China, the second half in the United States, where she came in 2003, without connections, to pursue graduate studies in composition at the University of Missouri in Kansas City under Chen Yi, completing her doctorate at Cornell. Currently. Xi teaches composition at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
“I think there’s a deep blending in my music of where I come from and where I have studied and now live,” she says.
Coming of age in the post-Cultural Revolution era, Xi had the opportunity to study music that had been denied her parents — before she was born, they had been sent to the countryside as heavy laborers — and they encouraged their daughter when her talent was discovered at an early age. Xi started piano lessons at five and was sent to Shanghai Conservatory as a ten-year-old. The next year, she began composing.
But it wasn’t until she had left her homeland, Xi says, that she gained a deeper appreciation of Chinese culture and her roots: “Sometimes you don’t see the shape of the mountain until you are distant from it and then look back. I came to the US because I wanted to learn about Western symphonic repertoire and the history and background of European and American music. But in recent years, I’m finding that my music is becoming more Chinese in a way.”
Xi has likewise been drawing more and more on ideas and imagery from Buddhism, although she does not think of herself as religious. The lotus is a ubiquitous symbol in Asian culture. A prominent image in Chinese poetry and legend, the lotus carries particularly profound associations as a sacred symbol Buddhism. The Buddha himself as well as bodhisattvas are often portrayed achieving a state of enlightenment while seated on an open lotus. Lotus Prayer offers a musical depiction of the symbolic connotations of this iconography. Xi prefaces her score with this quotation from the Buddha: “As a lotus flower is born in water, grows in water, and rises out of water to stand above it unsoiled, so I, born in the world, raised in the world, having overcome the world, live unsoiled by the world.”
“I found that saying resonates deeply,” says Xi. “While the lotus itself is very beautiful and pure, it grows out of mud, out of the water. In the world, we have so many conflicts, struggles, pain, all kinds of emotions. Where is inner peace? We have the awareness that you can grow out of the mud and let the blossom open. Inner peace and beauty really come from inside.”
Although Xi completed Lotus Prayer in 2019, its premiere has been delayed until now because of the pandemic. Her subsequent orchestral work, YEAR 2020, reflects a drastic change of tack, reflecting the turbulence of the first year of COVID as well as the protests against racial injustice; the composer’s mother had meanwhile been diagnosed with lung cancer. With Ensō, a work premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in December 2022, Xi says she sought to regain the balance she had found in Lotus Prayer. She once again took up a Buddhist theme — the Ensō is a hand-drawn calligraphic circle representing enlightenment and the void — and developed the language of Lotus Prayer on a grander scale.
What to listen for
Lotus Prayer starts slowly, its rich harmonies expressing a recognition of the serene beauty of the world. Low brass and strings suggest the early morning prayer chant of monks, while the winds play a freely floating melody on top. The middle section represents the situation of being in the world of conflicts and struggles, but these eventually dissolve and the serene state depicted in the opening is again attained.
---notes written by Thomas May