About this Piece

In 2016, while still a student at the Royal College of Music, I had the opportunity to compose a piece in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery in London. I was inspired by a portrait of a newborn infant, which led me to reflect on the passage of time. In the baby’s gaze, I sensed not only the time of its beginning but also the time within me and the time around us. This fascination deepened through my encounter with the film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring by Kim Ki-duk, which explores the cyclical nature of life. It brought me to the Buddhist concept of samsara: the cycle of birth, return, and rebirth, where time flows as an unbroken, ever-evolving continuum.  

This inspired me to compose Spring for flute, clarinet, and cello, aiming to evoke the idea of birth and return through shifting modes while exploring various temporal qualities to capture the vitality of the season. At the time, I envisioned this piece as the first in a larger work—a cycle of seasons that would explore the passage of time and the inner transformations that accompany it. 

As time passed, the idea of a cycle of seasons continued to evolve. Nearly a decade later, after my grandmother—who was very dear to me—passed away last spring, I felt the moment had come to bring the idea of Spring to life, now shaped by my personal experience of loss.  

My grandmother had left her hometown of Haeju, now in North Korea, at the age of 20 and was never able to return before her death. She often spoke of how much she missed her parents and siblings, and of the beauty of her hometown, with spring flowers blooming along the hillsides. Her longing and sorrow stayed with me, and after her passing, I felt the need to channel that grief—by imagining the spring landscape she had once cherished, emerging after a long, cold winter.  

In this piece, I aimed to capture the sense of birth and return by employing shifting harmonic structures, such as the circle of fifths and pentatonic modes. These elements transform and evolve throughout the work, like branches of trees, reflecting the cyclical and ever-changing nature of the seasons. 

I imagined the orchestra not just as a canvas, but as a multidimensional space—where sounds travel from one space to another, constantly shifting and transforming. In that space, I traced both the landscape of spring and the inner world of my grandmother, her quiet yearning for the spring that never came. Whether spring truly arrives or whether we remain in winter is left open—much like my grandmother’s longing to return home, which was never answered. —Whan Ri-Ahn