By Fred Hsu
I was toying with the Chinese pentatonic scale on cello one day. I shifted the scale up one whole tone and it sounded Japanese. Two bars of Chinese scale and its Japanese counterpart eventually grew to become "A Taste of Asia". These scales are used as glue to piece together various short phrases of Asian-sounding tunes. Every phrase is purposely underdeveloped in order that it may leave you, the listener, mesmerized by just a taste of sound. The last part of this music, as often happens in my composition, took on a life of its own; I can't quite put my finger on a definite mode that describes it. But the music manages to end in the same major pentatonic scale it started with, bringing a happy conclusion to your listening experience.