The ideas in Legacy Quartet are taken from Bartok, Ligeti, and Messiaen, especially in terms of colors and texture. The first session after the introduction is a fugue combined with accompaniments. The theme is influenced by Bartok because his music always brings me power through a strong, rhythmical texture. Thus, after this session, I moved to a faster movement. The ideas are basically fragmental unisons with different layers of intervals connected with rhythmic pizzicatos. The powerful, rhythmic ideas and musical language are gradually broken in the transition coming from the next movement. Then finally it transferred to the slow movement based on the long notes with a slight color change by glissandos. The idea of all the instruments slowly moves to the top registers and then drops to the abyss, coming from Ligeti’s Atmosphères. At last, I brought the melodic theme from the Fugue part represented in the overtone system in the coda, in order to finish the whole piece. It is like a false recapitulation of the first fugue part, but only with one single melodic line, which sounds like some deep memories from far away. This philosophy and idea is the reality: All of history, including music, is a one-way road and we can never truly go back. Only memory remains and one sometimes receives a flashback.
I was attempting to compose a unified piece with very limited, yet logically organized musical ideas. To achieve this goal, I used a conservative approach to compose and manage every musical texture. This approach helped me to improve my understanding of music itself by adding more elements of humanity into my music. Today, many composers are writing more and more radical pieces, but it is also meaningful to pause and back up a bit, aiming to summarize the transformation of contemporary music in styles and textures. With my piece, I am thanking the master composers and the heritage that they left for us.