The Sound of Alexina Louie S Piano Compositions

Alexina Louie is a Canadian composer of Chinese descent. Born in Vancouver in 1949, she studied at the Jean Lyons School of Music as well as at the University of California. Her compositional works include pieces for orchestra and piano and may be labeled as being of a variety of different musical genres, from electronic music to string quartet to operatic works. She has also composed for film (Orford, 2014).

Her social and political context is situated in latter decades of the 20th century, from the 1980s onward, thus putting her at her creative height during the Reaganomic years, the post-Vietnam return of Establishment politics, and the fallout from disillusionment with both right and left culturally speaking (Stone, Kuznick, 2012). The 1990s were a decade of disenfranchisement, dissatisfaction, disaffection, and distaste -- expressed musically in the emergent sounds of the grunge rock era, and reflected in Louie's discordant melodies and atonal rifts (Kim, 2009).

Her style is situated in the post-modern collection of musicians and composers who develop an atmospheric sound, though Louie has borrowed from the classical composers of the past, such as Wagner and Mozart for her own mini-operas. Thus, she infuses a modern style into the Old World Classical-Romantic styles to create something new and fresh that resonates in an age that has been turned off from reality by the phony economic systems and betraying political systems of the modern era. There is a voice of protest in her music, but also a feeling of vitality, determination, and struggle for peace and transcendence.

Louie has worked independently for a number of years, producing scores for her sister's documentaries as well as her own works. Her husband is Alex Pauk, who is a conductor of the Esprit Orchestra, and they have worked together as well. Alexina Louie has a diverse resume that is as eclectic as her overall style. She has not written about music but a number of her scores have been published and other writers have written about her, such Esther Yu-Hui Chu (1997) who penned On the Musical Silk Route: Piano Music of Alexina Louie, which describes the various influences in the music of Alexina Louie.

In comparison to other composers of the past and present, her style is like a cross between Stravinsky and Philip Glass. It as though the creative genius behind those two artists crashed into one another and born from that collision was Alexina Louie. Her tastes are as vast and her influences as deep as such a collision would suggest -- which makes it exceedingly difficult to apply a label to her.

One of her recorded works, which I found on YouTube after a keyword search of "alexina louie" is a solo piano piece entitled "I leap through the sky with stars" performed by Andrew Focks. It is a very impressionistic piece that begins lightly with Focks tripping over the keys as though dropping crystal rainbows over the heads of the audience. But then the music shifts in tone and something dark and foreboding beings to persist and growl out of the keyboard, erupting with a menacing fury about midway through, sending the notes fleeing up and down the keyboard in an attempt to get away. The darker, deeper notes, like a cat then make a pounce on the lighter keys -- like the sinister something is there waiting to play this game of cat-and-mouse with the lighter tone that began the work. This portion concludes with a single note being hammered again and again as though the deep darkness has only one point to make and has just made it. Then silence for a few beats -- and slowly the lighter tone emerges, crawling its way up keyboard to the very highest notes, seeking to make some assertion of its livelihood and vitality. It is as though there is a battle of wills between the light and the dark, and considering the title of the piece, this makes sense, as one can imagine Louie actually dancing through the universe, leaping from start to star trying to outrun the encroaching coldness of the dark universe.

The tempo of the piece is very quick, although it does skip about, crashing to a sudden halt at times -- much like an action narrative, in which the pace is quickened and slowed for the sake of creating and easing tension. The tempo works in the same manner in this musical piece. The dynamics of the piano music consist of loud and soft notes, with quick sudden changes and a kind of staccato rhythm at times balanced by a discordant hammering of the piano anvils. There are crescendos that crash, decrescendos that suddenly explode or dip away into silence -- al niente.

As for melody, a listener would be hard pressed to discern one. The piece instead evokes a mood -- an atmosphere -- a game of cat-and-mouse between the universe and the light, the former trying to pounce, the latter trying to be itself: free, heavenly, at peace. Yet the piece concludes in a kind of draw, with neither levity nor darkness, but a kind of wondering, tapering off. However, the musical play of notes is not unsatisfying. On the contrary, it bursts and bubbles as it should -- and this could be defined as melody in its own right (but it is certainly not the same sort of melody that one would expect from a Mozart sonata).

The piece does have some harmony to it -- but in a more post-modern sense -- with the "light" and the "dark" sounds playing off against one another to create a harmonized visual picture in the mind of the listener. Harmony in terms of musical sync is not easily discerned either, mainly because of the discordant notes that Louie uses in order to reflect the sounds of what a universe at odds with itself might be.

The texture of the piece is rich, in spite of its lack of melody or harmony in the traditional sense. It relies, like much of modern music, on rhythm as a driving force -- but at the same time it is obsessed with sound (much like a young child is, who wants to hammer on one end of the keyboard, then softly strike a key or two on the other end). Louie reflects this childlike innocence in her work, engaging with the sounds of notes in a kind of chaotic manner that is, at the same time, restrained and constrained by a dynamic that is moving the listener towards an idea. And in this piece, that idea is clearly evident in the title.