La voûte éthérée

This piece, written in 1998, is a required piece for the final exam in the piano department at the

Royal Conservatory of Brussels. It is dedicated to my friend and pianist Alessandro Cervino.

Since my two-piano duet “Yin-Yang” in 1991, I have discovered a compositional technique that I call
“multiple appoggiaturas.” It is a method of composition that reverses the traditional distinction between the “main sound”
and the “decorative sound.” The latter has seen its importance expanded to the extreme, and its
manipulation is entirely free. This concept arose from a comparison I made over a long period
between traditional Chinese aesthetics and Western musical culture. I tried to use this observation
to create music in my own style.
The entire work primarily illustrates the gradual process of “transformation” of sounds with multiple dependencies
from a simple function to a complex one. The entire piece is performed in a single breath,
devoid of a traditional structure with a clear subject and melodic development. The flowing notes,
like snowflakes drifting naturally to the ground or spring rain watering the earth,
fully express the free imagination of “space and freedom,” of “traveling clouds and flowing water,”
and the expressiveness of music “without constraints but without excess.”
In 2002, the work was awarded the Arthur De Greef Composition Prize by l'Académie Rotale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.
Zhang Haofu 1998 in Brussels