Nanjing West Road, for soprano, mixed ensemble, and fixed media by Bobby Ge

Completed September 14, 2022
Premiered June 3, 2023 at Current Space by Danielle Williams (cond.), Mind on Fire, and recorded live by Jason Charney

Supported by New Music USA’s Creator Development Fund for 2022-23
Commissioned by Mind on Fire
Winner of a 2024 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award

Original text:

Movement I - The apparition of these faces in the crowd...

worn-down, faded bench
companion to weary travelers
catching their breath between stations
we sat together
laughing into each other’s shoulders
as we ducked beneath neon-singed clouds
of rush hour smoke
rolling, tumbling down
old-town alleys turned glass walkways
noodle bars turned Apple Stores

Taoist temples turned shopping malls
teeming
thrumming
into the night
our hands nearly touched
amidst the rhythms of the crowd
as indefinite and fleeting
as the skyline around us
my train arrives
I rise to leave
looking back through tinted plastic, I wonder
in this city of forgetting
will you remember me?

Movement II - ...petals on a wet, black bough.

when I returned
the bench was no longer there
they turned it into
a Starbucks
the largest in the world
I went in
a ghost among the rows of emptied Gravitas blends
silhouetted against the Roastery Bar’s harshly gilded tones
floating up the escalator past smoky mocha updrafts
and glimmering Tom Dixon fixtures
when through a tinted mezzanine glass panel -

I see us
past coffee-stained mugs and soft curls of wispy steam
together, sitting
undisturbed by the surrounding rush
of raindrops and unfilled orders
the moment suspended
a gentle warmth about us
unconcerned, content
as we laugh, sip, and remember -
hazily I saw their outlines rise
the pair evaporating with the last of the moisture
into the crowd, out the doors
as a gust of smog blew in
and filled their void

they built a bigger Starbucks in Chicago.