City Veins (2022)

City Veins is a suite for voice, piano, guitar, bass, and string quartet written for my senior thesis for Princeton University. It was inspired by many things: the city of New York, the communal spaces that make such a dense environment beautiful, real and imagined stories, and an awe for the creative process. The text imagines the city waterworks as a circulatory system that connects people and stories. I imagined how people might interact with communal spaces defined by their water works, and in a surreal way, envisioned their stories “entering” the waterways. Near the end, the speaker reveals that she has written these songs as she ‘drinks’ the city’s stories through its pipes - a surreal image of creative observation and description. I hope that City Veins conveys a sense of beauty in the everyday stories of city life and expresses a feeling of community and connectedness.

Written for voice, string quartet, bass, piano, acoustic guitar | 18’

Performed by Anson Jones, Brandon Cheng, Dane Jacobson, Andrew Jung, Bryant So, Alex Morovcsik, and Andrew Kaneb.