A select list of music scores

The music of this 12-minute piece for the Chinese zither zheng, flute, clarinet, harp, violin and violoncello is a unique mixture of Eastern and Western traditions. The striking instrumentation provides surprising and interesting tone colours which captivate especially Western European listeners.

The music of "Colorful Sutra Banner" is the recollection of the composer's journey to the Tibetan Plateau. The flutterling Colorful Sutra Banner are viewed as the most sacred symbol to the Tibetans, and they make the most beautiful scenery of Tibetan landscape and mindscape.

Datura was commissioned by Accessible Contemporary Music and was written in a unique way. Ye composed the piece in installments over the summer of 2006 and emailed them to Seth Boustead who forwarded them on to the ensemble. In this unique way of working he was able to have time between each installment to think about what would come next and to get feedback from the performers about the music. This is a very new and different way for a composer to work. He usually writes the piece in solitude and then hands it to the performers but writing in installments allows more communications between the performers and the composer and allows the audience to hear the piece as its created.
Datura is another series of pieces composer written about Asian plants and flowers. Datura is a very common houseplant in south China and very beautiful but it can also be used as a hallucinogen, usually with unpleasant results. In this piece, Ye juxtaposed the other beauty of the plant with the intense inner would it can create by using alternately tranquil and intense musical passages.

This work is among the subtropical plants series of c Ye’s works, which include Enchanted Bamboo, Hibiscus, Datura, December Chrysanthemum, Scent of Green Mango,etc. These works show the Southern-originated musician’s sensitivity and attention to the natural environment in a country of the Far East. Gardenia indistinctly means eternal joy in Chinese context. It is born in a moist natural environment with a kind of faintly fragrant scent and its white colour is of high aesthetic value to Asians. It is usually used as food and medicine in South Asia. The Gardenia is also a city flower of Yueyang City, which is a quiet and distant small city located in Hunan Province, south of China. When composing this work, the composer adopted folk operas and folk songs in the area of Yueyuang, showing his yearning and a sense of loss to the beautiful scenery in south China.