Marion von Tilzer: “Ten Songs of Change is a Concert Poem. It is based on the Yi Jing, the ancient Chinese book of wisdom, possibly the oldest book on the planet. Like other monuments of human culture, it was a cooperative effort spanning many centuries. The oldest ideas in the book were probably handed down by the elders of nomadic tribes. These early authors observed the stars and tides, plants and animals, various cycles of natural events, as well as patterns of relationship in families and societies, the practice of business, craft of government and the grim art of warfare and the eternal human dramas of love, ambition, conflict and honour. And instead of creating a fixed chart of the cosmos, they put together a guide to the way things change: a fluid interconnected system of relations: the 8 trigrams and 64 hexagrams.
My inspiration for the music came from the emotional aspects attributed to the eight trigrams, which form the basic elements in nature. During the process of writing the music, something special happened: the energy of each trigram I was composing the music for, appeared in various areas of my life. Having such tangible experience of the trigrams enabled me to transform the experience in a very direct way into music. The order of the trigrams presented in our performance forms an entire cycle of day and night, as each trigram also represents a specific time of day. We begin and end at nighttime.”