Mo Suo's Burial Ceremony (score & parts) - WW5

Mo Suo's Burial Ceremony
for woodwind quintet: flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon
by Xinyan Li - Chinese composer

Hailed by The New York Times as "bubbly quintet", Mo Suo's Burial Ceremony was composed in 2006. Inspired by the unique funeral customs in Mo Suo, a Chinese southwest minority, this wood quintet depicts Lama's reciting scriptures to release souls from purgatory, Daba monks' dancing to expel ghosts, as well as Lama's cremating corpse which are tied up like a fetus into a wooden cage for reincarnation. I tried to create various colors and dramatic tension and express the touching emotions. In this work, winds are considered human beings' voices that contain joy, sadness, anger, and fear etc. They cry, they laugh, they talk and they dance. In addition, this work is based on three pitches---B, C, and F, initials of Burial, Ceremony and Funeral. The first and last note both use C, which symbolize a life cycle.

--Xinyan Li

This work won International Music Prize for Excellence in Composition 2011, American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) Morton Gould Young Composers Award in 2007; In 2008, Quintette K won 2^nd Prize in 5^th Lyon International Chamber Music Competition, in which they played my wind quintet as one of the five pieces they played in the competition.

This work received numerous performances in U.S., France, Germany, Norway and China since its born in summer 2006. It is also highly acclaimed by the performers and audience. The July 2007's performance at Aspen Music Festival are by five principals from Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, Montreal and Bergen Orchestras.