• Piccolo, 2 Flutes, 2 Oboes, English Horn, 3 Bb Clarinets, 2 Bassoons
• 4 F Horns, 3 Bb Trumpets, 3 Trombones (3=Bass Trombone), Tuba
• Timpani + 3 Percussion
  • Percussion 1: Vibraphone, Suspended Cymbal
  • Percussion 2: Marimba, Glockenspiel
  • Percussion 3: Bass Drum
• Harp
• Piano
• Strings

Across the Bridge is built from one of the few remnants of my early childhood in Vietnamese: the beloved folk song “Qua Cầu Gió Bay.” I forgot how to speak Vietnamese not long after entering school—English quickly replaced the language I first knew—but this song remained with me. My parents kept a cassette tape of Vietnamese folk songs in the car, and its melody was a constant companion on long drives and short errands, almost like a quiet thread tying me to a culture I could feel but no longer fully understand.

Its lyrics tell a charming story:

Loving you, I gave my dress to you.
When I went home I told a lie to dad and mom
That when I crossed the bridge…
The wind blew it away.

It’s a small, sweet vignette—someone offering a gift to their lover and covering their tracks with a playful excuse—but that image of crossing a bridge stayed with me as I began writing this piece. I started to think of the music itself as a kind of bridge: a span between the work I create as an American composer, shaped by the world I grew up in, and the cultural memory of my parents and ancestors. These two parts of my life rarely align neatly. Throughout my career I’ve felt a kind of unspoken tension between who I am and what people expect me to be based on my name, my face, or assumptions about the music I “should” be writing.

Across the Bridge became a space to sit with that tension—much like my experience composing Autumn Triptych, where reconnecting with the Vietnamese language through poetry opened an unexpected emotional doorway. But unlike the Triptych, where I treated the language with careful fidelity, here I approached the folk song from a slight distance. I worked with it the way a memory works: fragmenting it, reshaping it, letting it drift in and out of focus. For most of the piece the tune appears in glimpses, as though carried by the same unpredictable wind in the text—but at the work’s largest arrival, the melody finally emerges in full in the horns, unbroken and unmistakable. There was something poetic about allowing it to bloom there, as if the music itself had finally crossed the bridge and found solid ground.

In writing this piece, I came to better understand that identity is rarely singular. The music I am compelled to write will always reflect the place I grew up and the artists and traditions that shaped me here. But inside that is also the echo of the culture my parents carried with them when they crossed their own bridges to build a life in America. Across the Bridge is my attempt to let those two truths meet—if only for a moment in sound—and to honor the complicated, beautiful in-between space where many of us live.