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The Boston Globe FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2018 Aiming high with a video game-inspired piece G4 BOSTON MODERN ORCHESTRA PROJECT At Jordan Hall, April 21, 8 p.m. 781-324-0396, www.bmop.org By Zoe' Madonna GLOBE STAFF Growing up in Taiwan, composer Yu-Hui Chang would pass by the entrance to what was then a new and novel place filled with colorful distractions: video game arcades, replete with buzzing, flashing game cabinets. But, she emphasized, she didn't spend much time in there. "I wouldn't have admitted it," she said with a smile in an interview near her Arlington home. "In an East Asian country, studying hard was a must.

Video games, especially arcade, had this kind of taboo image. Like, if you hang out in the arcade then you're not a so-called 'good But it all left an impression, and she looked to such games for inspiration in writing her new orchestral piece "Pixelandia," one of three works receiving world premieres at Boston Modern Orchestra Project's Saturday evening concert at Jordan Hall. The four-piece program, titled "A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams," is inspired by East Asian culture, and each piece was either written by an East Asian composer or features an East Asian soloist. BMOP artistic director and conductor Gil Rose, who related that he "dropped a lot of quarters" in arcades in his childhood, described "Pixelandia" as "very concentrated. It's really a symphony in miniature," he said via phone.

"There's no downtime." Chang, who is a professor of composition at Brandeis University, revealed that the first two movements CRAIG F. WALKERGLOBE STAFF world premiere at Boston Modern Orchestra Project's Saturday concert. boss came out," she said of her times playing games. "Like, oh my God, how can you defeat this thing?" said with a laugh. The fourth movement, she said, is a kind of epilogue: "Game Over," which begins with a score marking, "Insert coin to continue." When she did play games herself, she said, "I wasn't good at arcade games at all.

Even 'Pac-Man' stressed me out," she said. "There was a time when I was a grad student I loved 'SimCity' I was a good mayor. My people were always happy." Chang moved to the United States at age 24 to pursue a master's degree 'Handmaids Tale' remains dark, bold for BMOP, and, at approximately 20 minutes, clocks in as her longest orchestral work. Her chamber music oeuvre is much larger and includes music for East Asian instruments such as the Korean ajaeng and the Chinese erhu. "In the US there's a problem that women composers in general don't get programmed by orchestras," she said, adding that this is a sharp contrast to the environment in East Asia, where female composers don't feel like a rarity at all.

Any change, she said, needs to start with concentrated effort including by herself. "I find myself at fault, too. When I'm teaching, I keep going back to the same composers to look for pieces to teach the students. But we really have to actively break away from the habit of going to the same pool," she said. "Especially when it comes to breaking away from this kind of old, mostly male repertoire.

It's not necessarily that it's a sexist issue; it's an awareness issue." Zoe Madonna can be reached at zoe.madonnaglobe.com. Follow her on Twitter knitandlisten. Madonna's work is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation HIRO TANAKA I got into more ambient stuff, like Stars of the Lid, and I was listening to that a lot when I slept and when I was trying to calm down. Also, some records that ended up being mainstays when I was home and trying to decompress would be 'Terfect From Now On" by Built to Spill and "On the Beach" by Neil Young these records that open up. I've always had a hard time figuring out how to make something feel open in the context of punk.

I think listening to a lot of ambient music gave me a sonic idea of what space means to me. Something I had been craving personally is some time to reflect, so I thought it was only appropriate to try and stick that into the record. Q. Lyrically, you've been grappling with the anxieties of modern American life. What were you trying to articulate about that experience with A.

Just that empathy is necessary. It's trying to talk about being bombarded with the same terrible expletive over and over, feeling helpless about it, and just trying to be empathetic towards others about the expletive they're going through. Q. "POST-" ends with a defiant refrain: "We're not gonna let them win." How do you keep that flicker of hope burning? A. I don't know, I think everybody does it.

I personally feel super hopeful after March for Our Lives; I've never seen a more clear demonstration of the youth being like, "No, we got this" and the old idiots in power not taking it seriously. As a person who sometimes has to psych himself up to get out of bed in the morning, you've got to figure it out, because there really isn't another option. We have to find some sort of positivity, because if we don't, you just end up sitting around like "Oh, expletive." Interview was edited and condensed. Terence Cawley can be reached at terence.cawleyglobe.com. Follow him on Twitter terencecawley Yu-Hui Chang's "Pixelandia" gets its took inspiration from two particular games: the 1987 World War II-themed arcade shooter "1943: The Battle of Midway" and the 1999 strategy game "Heroes of Might and Magic 3." Rather than taking cues from the games' actual soundtracks, she drew on their atmospheres.

The "1943" sequence conveys "a lot of kinds of flying machines not smooth running kind of gears," Chang said. The third movement, "Boss," is tense and menacing, drawing on the video-game trope of the boss fight. "I would be frightened every time the TELEVISION REVIEW THE HANDMAID'S TALE Starring: Elisabeth Moss, Ann Dowd, Yvonne Strahovski, Joseph Fiennes, Max Minghella, Alexis Bledel, Samira Wiley, O.T. Fagbenle On: Hulu, premieres April 25 lieve she's encountering an increase in systemic sexism until it's too late. Now, we see her in weary survival mode, hiding her true feelings even from those, like Nick, whom she trusts, her cold stares a front for despair.

We can always see the resistance lurking somewhere in her eyes, offering the only sense of hope in the entire story. She personifies the horrors of Gilead while her stubborn defiance provides most of grace points we encounter on the show. Like so many dystopian dramas, "The Handmaid's Tale" strikes parallels to today's news. That's one of the points of creating a dystopia to take our current reality and stretch it into frightening possibilities. The nightmare world of Gilead speaks to present-tense fears about authoritarian leadership, about men in power making laws about women's bodies, about the crossover between religion and government, and the list goes on.

But, while those parallels continue to add resonance, they don't overwhelm "The Handmaid's Tale," which is TV storytelling at its boldest. Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbertglobe.com. Follow him on Twitter MatthewGilbert. GEORGE KRAYCHYKHULU from the second season of Hulu's "A at Boston University and a PhD at Brandeis, and she planned to return to Taiwan after completing her education here, but got a job in the United States and never left. She looks at composition as a process of self -discovery.

"What my music revealed to me is that I'm an intense person. I didn't know I was. I thought I was easygoing. But I'm sure my husband would roll his eyes when I say I'm easygoing," she said. "I like to have multiple things going on at the same time, largely, and I like to create a sense of richness." "Pixelandia" is Chang's first work A.

It's weird because I'm not trying to come up with a set of rules or anything. I'm just trying to approach each situation like: What's the stuff that we've done that has meant something to fans of the band? For example, having records for free, or stuff that as a fan of music I would be appreciative of, like all-ages shows and doing my best to keep ticket prices cheap. It seems like the stuff we did early on in Bomb led me down a path where those decisions all led to where we are now. So I don't want to ditch any of that. Me and my wife, who is our tour manager and does merch and logistics, we talk all the time about, "How do we keep our merch cheap now that we're playing rooms where they charge you a percentage to sell merch?" We all think about, not trying to cling to ideals because you've labeled them as ideals, but just trying to do the thing that seems best for the situation.

Q. Did knowing your audience had grown affect the writing process for A. Most of the record was written before that had really sunk in, so I don't know; I'll let you know on the next one. I'm usually musically a year back when the stuff finally gets recorded, because I'm always trying to collect ideas. The less I think about it, the happier I will be, so I'm trying my best to not let it faze me.

Q. "WORRY." was stuffed full of short songs, while "POST-" has several long tracks with almost ambient passages. Was one of your goals with "POST-" to create something a little more spacious? A. Oh yeah, definitely. I started listening to ambient music on tour, particularly Brian Eno's "Music for Airports" because I'm in so many airports.

Then Punk artist Rosenstock has a lot more to give "HANDMAID'S TALE" Continued from Page Gl nist nightmare, and by how fragile our moral balance is, there's nothing better out there, even the miraculous "Dark Mirror." And "The Handmaid's Tale" isn't intriguing on a conceptual level only; it's a deeply personal story about a few women who've been abducted, most notably June, and a few who've been co-opted, including Dowd's tormented Aunt Lydia, who turns the maternal into the infernal. Some future-shock stories forget to fully humanize their characters in service of the big idea; not this one. The show enters season two with the same cool, precise aesthetic that made the first season such a visual gem, including a masterful use of the color red for blood, for martyrdom and sets that are simultaneously old and sterile. The camerawork remains chillingly effective, as it tightly frames the characters' faces so we can see every flinch and deflection and the acting continues to bear up beautifully under that scrutiny. At this point, most of the story line has moved beyond the book, but you nonetheless feel a great sense of momentum as June, known in Gilead as Offred, fights to escape and to retrieve her daughter.

She is pregnant by driver Nick (Max Minghella), but their baby will go to the couple to whom she is enslaved, Commander Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) and his wife, Serena (Yvonne Strahovski). I can't say enough about Moss, who delivers a seamless, beautifully modulated performance as a woman in extremis. In the flashbacks and there are many this season we see a gentle mother and wife who can't quite be- Alexis Bledel, as Ofglen, in a scene Handmaid's Tale." By Terence Cawley GLOBE CORRESPONDENT As leader of the ska-punk collective Bomb the Music Jeff Rosen-stock, 35, became a paragon of DIY generosity. He gave away albums online (years before that became commonplace) and let fans bring instruments and join him onstage. He'd even spray-paint that T-shirt you brought to the show.

Yet it wasn't until his second post-Bomb solo record, 2016's "WORRY," that Rosenstock's exhilarating, deceptively thoughtful music truly began earning the attention it deserved. Before his sold-out show Saturday at the Paradise in support of his excellent new album, "POST-," we called up the Long Island native for a predictably entertaining chat (from which many expletives were deleted) about staying true to himself, integrating ambient and punk music, and the impact he felt from March for Our Lives. Q. You're constantly on tour, yet onstage your energy level never seems to flag. How do you maintain that pace? A.

I think it's just because I'm useless during the day. I'm no fun if you try to have a conversation with me, it's just like, "Whatever." I store it up for the night. Q. How has the success of "WORRY." changed your life? A. It's nice when people respond to something you put out in a positive way, especially when it's a noticeable jump like with "WORRY." I live in the same apartment and I still tour and take on too much work.

It's made touring easier financially, but aside from that we're all still the same bunch of schmucks in a van. Q. Has getting bigger made it harder to maintain your DIY ethic?.