In modern Chinese history, composers were dislocated by war, exile, studies abroad, competing ideologies, and the Cultural Revolution, and expressed their cultural and ideological constructions of home, isolation, and war resistance, while being caught in intersecting webs of forces that compelled them through both coercion and affiliation. “Heaviness,” in this paper, refers to how composers were weighed down by politicized identities. For the composer Chiang Wen-yeh, who was born in Taiwan in 1910, this weight consisted of the following: 1) a “colonial” identity as a subject of the Japanese empire; 2) a Western compositional identity; 3) a Taiwanese identity; 4) a Chinese identity. In contrast to the weight of all these, I argue that what Chiang sought for throughout his life was a mystical Confucian-Buddhist-Scriabinesque transcendence into—as he put it—a music beyond sound, that manifests as “gas” and “light” in the cosmos.