Swaying Flower Petals (2020)

Li’s program note:

This piece uses metaphors such as flowers and winds to depicts women’s oppressions in old Taiwan. How they couldn’t show and express their struggles due to the conservative social environment. The opening motif can be treated as an idée fixe for the setting sun, a metaphor for women’s fates. It appears multiple times throughout the music with different texts and variations. The repeated patterns in the guitar is a “spinning wheel” like gesture like in “Gretchen am Spinnrade”. It represents her hopelessness and helplessness, which would later turn into hysteria as the music progresses.