Composition

揚子江頭楊柳春

楊花愁殺渡江人

數聲風笛離亭晚

君向瀟湘我向秦

— 鄭谷《淮上與友人別》

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《數聲風笛離亭晚》or Wind's Farewell at Dusk, titled after Zheng Gu's Tang-dynasty poem, is a meditation on farewell, displacement, and the quiet but inevitable dispersal of lives once intertwined. It emerges from the composer's lived experience as a diasporan while drawing deeply on the sensibilities of ancient Chinese poetry, where themes of exile, longing, and impermanence ripple through sparse, evocative imagery.

Inspired by the timbres of traditional Chinese instruments such as the sheng and dizi, and the aesthetics of ink landscape painting, the piece opened with breath-like textures and fragile resonances, before members of the quartet trace their own departure, gradually dispersing from the ensemble like dusk wind over an emptying landscape. The piece invites listeners to notice shifting spatial relationships and fleeting presences—echoes of a farewell not as an ending, but a necessary act of becoming, with the hope that life's path may someday cross again.