Learning to Love America is a reflection on a poem by Shirley Geok-lin Lim. When reading the poem, I was thinking, what does it mean to learn to love a country? In this piece, I reflect on imageries that Shirley Lim describes in her poem, and I translate them into sounds.
This piece is not a prescribed and fixed experience. None of the immigrant stories are the same, though there could be overarching similarities. To reflect it, Learning to Love America, has a prescribed path that features several cadenzas where performer takes the idea and unfolds it according to their personal experience. Moreover, multiphonics, the unusual for flute harmonic sounds, are not precisely notated because each flute and each story are different. Instead, the performer is given quotes from the poem which they interpret into complex sounds. For example, the first multiphonic that you’ll hear about 10 seconds into the piece will sound like “jacaranda bloom in April and May.”
You can read the full poem on poetry foundation