“Where Water Falls”: A Digital Dialogue on Ecology and Culture and the World Premiere of Works by Chen Shih-Hui

In July 2025, the “Taiwan Lecture Series” and the Heidelberg branch of the Joint Center for Advanced Studies project “Worldmaking: A Dialogue with China” (project “CATS Kolleg Epochal Lifeworlds: Narratives of Crisis and Change”), in cooperation with the Heidelberg Klangforum, invited Taiwan composer Chen Shih-Hui (Rice University) for a Digital Dialogue and the world premiere of her new composition “Where Water Falls”.

The Digital Dialogue took place on on July 2, and was titled “Where Water Falls: Perspectives on Man and his Environs: Crisis, Culture, and Change”. It focussed on the importance of “water” as a concept and a concrete material presence across different cultural traditions. Composer Chen Shih-Hui, pianist Marc J. Reichow, eco-critical Tibetologist/Buddhologist Rolf Scheuermann, and sinologist Barbara Mittler engaged in an interdisciplinary online conversation. Inspired by Schubert’s “Gesang der Geister über den Wassern” (Song of the Spirits over the Waters), which sets Goethe’s poem to music, Chen’s new composition “Where Water Falls” interweaves classical Chinese poems by Li Bai, Su Shi, and Zhang Jiuling on Mount Lu’s waterfall with citations from both Goethe and Schubert and reworks them intricably.

Beginning from this literary and musical constellation, the participants explored how different cultures understand, interpret, and utilize water, examining its rich symbolic significance in literature, music, and the arts, as well as its deep entanglement with ecological and religious narrative practices. The discussion built a new bridge across time and culture between the Mount Lu waterfall in classical Chinese poetry and the Staubbach waterfalls in German poetic tradition. It further traced how the waterfall motif has been continually remediated, from Chinese to German literature, from contemporary musical composition to environmental humanities, generating new meanings in each context. This exchange provided a philosophical and aesthetic foundation for the two concerts which offered further deeper reflections on water, nature, and ecological consciousness in an era shaped by climate change.

On July 19 and 20, the Heidelberg Klangforum presented the world premiere of Chen’s “Where Water Falls” in Heidelberg and Mannheim respectively. In addition to the premiere, the concerts featured different versions of Schubert’s “Gesang der Geister über den Wassern”. Drawing on literary texts as their starting point, the performances unfolded a “dialogue of waterfalls” across time and space.

The scholarly dialogue and the two live performances resonated closely with one another. Through the theme of “falling water,” they connected diverse cultures, narrative traditions, and artistic forms, demonstrating the continual renewal of dialogue between literature and music within ecological thought. As Chen Shih-Hui noted, the work seeks to evoke “a profound spiritual connection between humans and nature that transcends temporal and cultural boundaries.”