Inheritance is what we carry forward: and what we make new. At the center of this evening is the world premiere of Chen Yi's My Childhood Memories, a new solo violin work commissioned for violinist Rabia Brooke.
The evening begins not with music but with a film. Nova Linea Musica's first documentary, produced with Bitter Jester Studios, was made while the piece was still taking shape. It follows the work from conversation to workshop to first performance, and it draws on Chen Yi's own archive: family photographs from her childhood in Guangzhou, images of her earliest years with the violin, and the drawings and games that gave the piece its title. Watching a composer explain a work and then hearing the work performed live, minutes later, in the same room, changes what the listening feels like. You arrive already knowing something.
Chen Yi's music has spent five decades holding two traditions in one hand. The folk melodies, the instrumental colors, and the speech rhythms of Chinese music live inside forms shaped by Western training, and neither is asked to give way. The program surrounds the premiere with her other work, so the new piece arrives with its lineage audible around it.
Then the premiere itself. A world premiere is a small, unrepeatable event: a piece that has existed only on paper and in private practice becomes, for the first time, something an audience has heard. Chen Yi will be at The CheckOut for it, in the room, hearing her music meet listeners at the same moment they do.
The CheckOut is the right size for this. Close quarters, short sightlines, and an audience near enough to see a composer's face while her music plays. Nova Linea Musica commissions new work because the repertoire is not finished, and presents it this way because the first hearing of a piece deserves a room where nothing gets lost.
Wednesday, March 31, 2027, 7:30 PM at The CheckOut.
My Childhood Memories was commissioned for violinist Rabia Brooke.
