Program Notes

Phantom of Utopia I: The Emergence (2024-2025)

Ka Hei Cheng

The Phantom of Utopia series consists of three movements that depict and reference a Chinese poem, The Peach Blossom Spring, written by Tao Yuan-ming in 421 CE as an exploration of mythically celestial and unrealistically ideal utopia under the cruelty of social unrest and political instability during the Jin Dynasty.

Phantom of Utopia I: The Emergence is the first movement that illustrates a fisherman discovering an enchanting sight: a peach blossom forest. He was fascinated by the secrets and mystery of the forest, the ethereal space, where fragrant grasses beautifully and vibrantly complement fallen petals. Formation of Chinese characters are pictorial, ideological, and semantic of the meaning of the words. Therefore, they are used as part of the visual cues of the storyline along with the particle and line movements at the background that is interactive with the audio. The piece decodes the sonic properties of the pronunciation of Chinese characters by fragmentation and encodes the crystalized sonic reimagination along with visual effects through the portrayal of the story of Peach Blossom Spring.

Ka Hei Cheng

Ka Hei Cheng holds a PhD in Experimental Music & Digital Media from Louisiana State University. She previously studied at Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Bowling Green State University. Raised in Hong Kong, her multicultural background shapes a practice that blends artistic, technological, and philosophical approaches to sound.

Her compositions and projects span concert music, interactive media, and research-driven work. In 2020, she composed Nibiru for the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and created promotional music for CNA Group. Her works have been presented internationally at venues such as International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, International Community for Auditory Display, The Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States and New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival.

Cheng’s broader research explores artificial intelligence, generative arts, digital fabrication, extended reality, and motion tracking. She has composed for laptop orchestras, including Who is the Leader?, commissioned by EdUHK. Her collaborative installation Shifting Datum was exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans.

She also contributed to Contingent Dream, a project that uses a collaborative robot to translate urban sound into algorithmic sumi-e drawings, presented at TEI 2023. Her paper “Resonance: Collaborative Musicking Through Tactile Ecologies” was accepted to TEI 2024. Her Phantom of Utopia series was presented at LSU, SEAMUS, NIME, ICMC, MOXsonic in 2024-2026.

beyond the accident of time (2025)

Leilehua Lanzilotti

This work honors Isamu Noguchi’s never fully-realized Bell Tower for Hiroshima, 1950 (partially reconstructed 1986). The original bell used for the first movement is Noguchi’s Bell Image (1956–57). Noguchi imagined the bells for Bell Tower for Hiroshima coming from all over the world. In my piece, I interpret the sculpture not as a physical object, but as a sonic concept that could be recreated by bells around the world. As we listen and recreate this space for reflection, we honor and remember what the sculpture represents.

For the 8-channel electroacoustic installation version of beyond the accident of time, I combined excerpts from concert version performances in Chicago, New York, Tokyo, and the UK with field recordings of a version of the work that invites community members to enact the piece in their urban environment. Artists in Oceania, Sweden, the UK, and Canada sent me their field recordings that you hear in this installation, where we hear the sonic environment within which they have found their object—a resonant railing, pipe, or bridge.

August of 2020 also marked the 75th Anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 6th, my sister went up to the Cemetery of the Pacific with my mother and aunt to commemorate the Hiroshima bombing. As they were leaving, the cathedral bells began ringing down in the valley. Halfway around the world in Folkestone, UK, my friend Sophie Stone was pointing her video camera to the sky, sounding a bell amongst the singing birds.

Leilehua Lanzilotti

Leilehua Lanzilotti (b. 1983) is a composer and multimedia artist whose works often explore dramatic expanses of color and timbre, engaging with themes of place, displacement, and layered time.

Lanzilotti was a 2022 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Music for with eyes the color of time (string orchestra), which the Pulitzer committee called, “a vibrant composition . . . that distinctly combines experimental string textures and episodes of melting lyricism.” Other prestigious honors Lanzilotti has received include a Creative Capital Award, a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation’s SHIFT – Transformative Change and Indigenous Arts Award, and recognition as a 2025 USA Fellow. Lanzilotti has received additional distinguished fellowships & residencies through The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Casa Wabi, the Merwin Conservancy, the McKnight Visiting Composer Residency Program, Copland House, and the MacGeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne among others.

As a composer, Lanzilotti’s works have been presented at international festivals such as Ars Electronica (Austria), Sonic Arts Biennial (The Netherlands), Un-Earthed: a festival of listening and environment (UK), Ojai Music Festival (USA), and Thailand International Composition Festival; and in halls such as the Philharmonie de Paris and Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre. In fall 2025 Lanzilotti’s “luminous new piece” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker), of light and stone opened the New York Philharmonic’s season and Gustavo Dudamel’s first concert as the orchestra’s Music & Artistic Director designate.

As an experimental sound artist, Lanzilotti’s projects include performing with object instruments created by Isamu Noguchi, Toshiko Takaezu, Harry Bertoia, Adam Morford and Maika Garnica; and with Gahlord Dewald as a member of The Yes &. For a complete bio, please visit: https://leilehualanzilotti.com.

Okinawa Blute Note, Recalled (2025)

Yerim Han

This audiovisual fixed media work is based on recollected memories following a trip to Okinawa and a subsequent viewing of the film Okinawa Blue Note. Using sound materials extracted from travel videos, the piece explores how memory—already shaped and idealized through recollection—is further manipulated and restructured over time. The audiovisual system integrates TouchDesigner for video processing and Max for audio playback and signal routing, enabling sound-driven transformations within the visual domain. Conceived as a dive into memory, water functions as a medium that distorts and contains remembrance, while layered and transformed sounds construct an emotional landscape of mediated recall.

Yerim Han

Yerim Han is a Seoul-based composer currently pursuing her master’s degree at Hanyang University. She explores the boundless possibilities of sound through a diverse range of genres, including contemporary, electronic, and film music, while maintaining a flexible and open-ended approach to her musical practice. Her creative process begins with observing natural phenomena from a sonic perspective. Rather than mere imitation, she focuses on uncovering the hidden structures and textures within nature, meticulously designing them into her own musical language. With the fundamental question “What is musical beauty?” at the core of her work, she continues to experiment with harmonizing lyrical foundations and modern experimental techniques.