Máté Bella

Chuang Tzu's Dream

My composition Chang Tzu's Dream is a homage to the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu (4th century B. C.), who is one of the first important figures in Taoism. His work also influenced Chinese poetry and landscape painting. One of the earliest Chinese stories related to dreams tells of Chuang Tzu: in a dream he saw himself as a butterfly, then on awakening he could not decide if it was really he, Chuang Tzu, who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or whether now the butterfly was dreaming of being Chuang Tzu. Ever since I have been involved in music, I have always been fascinated by the variety of the world that can be created with sound. Is its true existence different from the materialworld? Can one be transformed into the other? These were precisely the questions I discovered in Chuang Tzu's dream. (Máté Bella) The work won first prize at the 2009 New Hungarian Music Forum composer's competition in chamber music category. It was premiered by Judit Szabó and the UMZE Ensemble conducted by Zoltán Rácz on 12 January 2009 in Budapest.