Eve Beglarian is a composer, performer, and audio producer whose chamber and orchestral music has been commissioned and performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the California EAR Unit, Relāche, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, Orchestra X, Sequitur, Dinosaur Annex, and the New York Festival of Song, among many others.

Forgiveness, performed at the Asia Society from August 28-31, was composed by Eve Beglarian and directed by Chen Shi-Zheng. Forgiveness is inspired by a classic Chinese ghost opera of murder and revenge, and gives voice to the complex collective memory and emotions of a post-World War II generation of Chinese, Japanese and Koreans.

Read an interview with director Chen Shi-Zheng.

What prompted your interest in developing a project like Forgiveness?

The initial connection was personal: Shi-Zheng and I had worked together on a project in Beijing. So when he started talking about the Forgiveness project I became interested because we had worked together and because I felt there was much more for us to explore together.

What happened gradually was as I started researching to develop some kind of context for this work I became interested in the notion of 'warrior culture.' I started reading about soldiers' experiences - not just Asians in World War II, but American, British, German soldiers, and one thing that became clear to me is that the people who are the 'good' guys in one circumstance may end up being the 'bad' guys in another circumstance. The characteristics that you need to develop as a human being in order to be an effective warrior transcend the particular culture that you are living in. So that in a sense all warriors are brothers with one another.

How does your own perspective - perhaps developed during the course of this project - on the role of collective mourning and forgiveness for crimes against humanity inflect your work in this piece?

Until you can recognize that the story told by the victim needs to be heard, acknowledged and comprehended by the people who were the perpetrators, you have no way of making any progress at all. But similarly I think it is extremely important to recognize that the perpetrators by and large are not pathological mass murderers but people who think of themselves as conducting themselves honorably. The pathological mass murderer is, in a way, an exception, and the evil we do to one another very often gets done under the aegis of being an honorable and good person, a hero, in fact. That is what is so dangerous about martial heroism; it can make you do things that only later you realize are appalling.

How does this differ from other work you have done?

I had worked with traditional artists from other cultures before but this time I spent a lot more time exploring how we fail at being able to inhabit one another's cultures. So, for example, the full piece of Forgiveness, not the one being presented here, begins with a solo Korean singer and what it is based on is a Korean song which I sang, and then I asked her to imitate my singing. So that in fact I had failed at translating the Korean song in the first place; it was an actual instrumental piece that I had sung, transcribed by singing. Then I asked her to sing what I was singing. It was sort of a multiple translation and that was the way that I ended up at a new place that was neither Korean nor American. What it does is acknowledge my inability as an American to fully hear the original, traditional Korean, and her ability as a Korean to translate my American version of the Korean.

So I am interested in failures of translation and the artifacts they create as being new and potentially wonderful things.

How do you think the combination of different traditions - Korean, Japanese, Chinese - in the form of this piece impacts the message you wish to convey?

As I was saying earlier, the notion that warrior culture transcends the particular national culture that it comes from is something that I very specifically tried to explore. I have the Japanese performer reciting a poem called the 'Samurai Song' which is by an American poet. I have another version of that same poem performed by the Chinese warrior accompanied by a traditional Shakuhaji piece so that again it is no longer Chinese or Japanese, it is some conflation of the two. This strongly makes the point that once you're a warrior, you are not part of a particular culture even though you think you are fully inhabiting that culture, are an avatar of that culture. This is not the case.

Do you believe that artistic creations such as this can be a useful medium for political and social commentary?

I think that all good art is transformative. I hope that this is a piece of good art. I am not much interested in art as propaganda for a particular point of view, no matter how virtuous, no matter how much I might subscribe to that particular point of view. I think what art does best is connect us to stories and emotions and experiences of otherness that do have the capacity to change us.

Interview conducted by Nermeen Shaikh of AsiaSource