Composer’s Note:

Only Apricots Fall In The Autumn Wind, Five Songs On Korean Zen Poems, for voice and piano is based on poems that I selected from Because of the Rain, A Selection of Korean Zen Poems, compiled and translated into Korean by Daljin Kim, and then translated into English by Won-Chung Kim and Christopher Merrill.

In the Translator’s Preface Christopher Merrill writes, “what these poems offer is a distillation of Zen doctrine and practice, glimpsed through a Korean lens” a form of compression akin to the aphorism” a style of thought congenial to the contemplative life, a music that depends upon stateliness and surprise””

I wanted to express these qualities through the music and perhaps touch with sound the meaning, which, as Mr. Merrill later writes, is “like the waves of moon light that ripple across the sea and vanish into the scrollwork of the solitary monk.”