No One Owns The Current (2025)

for String Quartet

Duration: 20 min

Program Note

I composed No One Owns the Current in collaboration with Lucas Fang, Houston’s 2024-25 YouthPoet Laureate. The piece responds to the four poems from Letters Folded Into Water, a collection Lucas wrote in celebration of Houston’s historic Vietnamese business district. Drawing from his own experience, Lucas’s poems explore the nature of belonging within an immigrant community, capturing a relationship to language, tradition, and family that is simultaneously full of warmth and longing.

A string quartet felt like the ideal medium to express this shifting experience of belonging. The instruments’ wide range of techniques - bowing, plucking, rolled chords, metallic timbres, pitch bends - become musical identities for each player. At times, all four instruments share a unified sound world, embodying collective identity; at other moments, one instrument slips outside that shared space, finding itself just beyond the world that the others inhabit.

Additional Information

The title No One Owns the Current comes from the fourth poem in Lucas Fang’s collection, in which he reflects on the history of Vietnamese immigration to Houston. Houston’s Vietnamese-American community began to take shape in the late 1970s, when the city welcomed thousands of refugees from the Vietnam War. Many belonged to the second wave of immigration, when millions fled Vietnam by water - crossing the East Vietnam Sea in small fishing boats, hoping to find asylum in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, or the Philippines.

While composing the music that responds to this final poem, I tried to imagine what it might have been like for those refugees: packed together on a small boat with dozens of others, unable to return home, uncertain whether they would survive the crossing, unsure if they would be welcomed on the shore, and with no idea what the rest of their lives would become. Fast forwarding to today, Houston’s Vietnamese community is both thriving and integral to the city’s cultural identity. There is profound beauty in that arc, and also a tension in knowing that something that brings Houston such pride grew out of tragedy.

My musical response to Lucas’s poem “no one owns the current” bookends my quartet. I chose to depict the ocean with rolled chords that suggest churning water. Searching for the right harmony, I experimented with microtonal possibilities and landed on chords built from stacked “neutral thirds,” intervals halfway between major and minor. These harmonies carry the brightness of major sonorities and the longing of minor ones. To my ear, they feel unsettled, oscillating between optimism and sorrow, and that sense of emotional ambiguity mirrors the feeling I have when reading Lucas’s lyrical expression of Vietnamese immigrant history.

Performances

Premiere: 11/2025 Lawndale Art Center, Houston TX