Full Schedule
Fri 27 Nov
Sat 28 Nov 7pm
Sat 28 Nov 11pm
Sun 29 Nov

The festival opens with a concert of Malaysian composers and their reflections on life in the city, performed by Ensemble Mosaik, a leading German new music ensemble.

Hear the cacophonies of the city in Adeline Wong's Paces, the dichotomies of city life in Ng Chong Lim's Morning Mist. Among others, CH Loh questions the legitimacy of the highrise structures in the city, while Ahmad Muriz escapes the choking Klang Valley smog for some refreshing sea breeze.

The concert features a Special Festival Commission from Tan Zi Hua, winner of the HSBC Young Composers Workshop 08 with his constantly thought-provoking inspirations. We Built This City will be an evening of kaleidescopic sounds, and includes collaborations with gamelan, zhong ruan and a myriad of sounds familiar or frightening.

Programme Notes:

Malaysian cities, indeed Malaysian life, epitomises harmony and discord at their most extreme. It is a dissonant symphony of wildly opposing voices in eternal fugue, unresolved, each constantly crying to be heard over the others. This unprecedented meeting of Malaysian composers attempts to present a tapestry of voices, some beautiful, some grotesque, for the two are never apart.

Programme

1. Ahmad Muriz Che Rose - Desir Angin Cina Selatan for 2 traditional players and flute

2. Tan Zi Hua - Under the Homotopic Silhouettes for flute (picc), clarinet, piano, violin and cello (Special Festival Commission)

3. Adeline Wong - Paces for piano and tape (2008) (Nicholas Ong, piano) *

Intermission

5. CH Loh - Illegal Structures III for flute (bass fl), bass clarinet, percussion, violin, viola, cello and tape

6. Tazul Izan Tajuddin - Torrent of Images - A Memorial for piano solo (Nicholas Ong, piano) *

7. Ng Chong Lim - Morning Mist for cello and piano

8. Ngiao Tzu-En - A Precipitation of Sparrows for flute solo

9. Hardesh Singh - Jasper Singh Pestonji for bass clarinet, cello and tape

All World premieres except *

1. Ahmad Muriz Che Rose - Desir Angin Cina Selatan (The Sound Of The South China Winds)

The locals who live by the sea shore of East Malaysia listen to the winds of the South China Sea, from which they comprehend the news that comes with the breeze, whether it is a good time to harvest the sea, or if a disaster is waiting to be unleashed. This work depicts the winds as 'spoken' by the interaction of the bonang, saron pekin and flute.

2. Tan Zi Hua - Under The Homotopic Silhouettes

During the daytime, Kuala Lumpur is a manic city. For most of the office-bound city dwellers, a remarkable uniformity prevails - everyone seems to be in a hurry and looks amazingly identical from afar. As the night falls, however, the city is blanketed by vast silhouettes of skyscrapers. Sharing the same starting points, these homotopic* silhouettes seamlessly metamorphose into others of varying shapes, textures and intensities at different points along the cityscape. Many of the inhabitants under the silhouettes - emerging from the homogeneity portrayed earlier - also diversify into unique individuals with personalities of every hue; that is, until the daybreak returns.

In this piece, sets of partials (each based on a single sound) serve as the 'common points' while the modulations of those partials paint a picture of the deformation process. The timbral and textural aspects of the piece are inspired by the mood emanating from the intricately woven silhouettes and all the happenings underneath.

This piece is dedicated to all those who safeguard the liberty of the people of Kuala Lumpur.

*Formally, two mathematical objects within a defined region are said to be homotopic if one can be continuously deformed into the other with the mutual points remain fixed.

3. Adeline Wong - Paces

Paces is a portrait of city life. Blaring car horns, sequences of traffic, the garbage of noise, the mechanical rattle, hum and distant rumblings of our electronic world, mobile ring tones - these are just some familiar sounds that you will hear in this work. The use of electronics and samplers suggest technology in our culture. The piano is treated as an individual coping and integrating with city life. At times the piano is playing together with the electronics, at times competing with it and at times intervening and being part of the electronic sounds.

The first section is entitled Construction, Industrial where sounds of construction and piling sounds are heard. The second section Metal Grating fuses into the sounds of gamelan, which leads to the third section, Piano Solo. Sounds of digital mobile phones, playstation and gameboy provide soundscapes for the next section Gameboy, Digital. The last moments of the work closes with sound of children's voices, which signifies the future generation who would determine the sounds and pace of city life to come.

4. C H Loh - Illegal Structures III (The bigger of the three)

This work takes off from my earlier piano piece 2 Portraits for piano subtitled Chris Dances, Illegal Structures and an unfinished vocal piece Illegal Structures II (hence the subtitle perhaps, or not?). The title is borrowed from a phrase that I had read in the local newspapers, which I turned into a musical joke about formal structures in music.

And similar to the first piece, which was based on a collage of quotes from various pianist-composers of the past such as Liszt, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, this makes references to Shostakovich's 14th Symphony, Nielsen's 4th Symphony as well as sounds common in Malaysian life. The connection with Shostakovich's symphony goes deeper into the structure, mirroring his 11 movements with 11 sections in the piece that alternates between meditative calm and uncontrolled chaos. Illegal Structures III was inspired by footage of the autopsy report of A Kugan, excerpts of which is heard in the closing bars of the piece. This work is dedicated to my dear friends from the town of Kapar and to my late father Loh Kum Wah, who passed away in 2007.

5. Tazul Izan Tajuddin - Torrent of Images - A Memorial: Irrational

This piece was written in tribute to the victims of the tragic terrorist bombing of the holiday resort in Kuta, Bali on 12 October 2002. Planned in three sections, this presents the first, called Irrational. This piece is constructed using a Balinese gamelan scale, which is transposed, permutated and dislocated. There are 12 small sections (patterns) in which the scale is distributed, and there is also a hidden structure: the piece is built around a series of 5 numbers. Erratic, randomness and displacement of notes are characteristic, associated with the word "irrational".

As the title suggests, metaphorically, it is like a torrent of images flooding one's mind after such a tragedy that affected everyone. The piece irrationally goes from an obvious Balinese pentatonic scale and to more obscure suspended clusters when the scale is played a doubling shadow and the sustaining pedal. The images become more intense and eventually the tension is released, with a loud chord played in the lower register. This gesture is complemented by a solemn, repeated octave that ends the section. The gesture (repeated octaves) is symbolically (and perhaps metaphorically), a thoughtful reflection, a meditative and mourning gesture for the tragedy and the lost ones.

6. Ng Chong Lim - Morning Mist

A short poem by Denise Levertov (from The Life Around Us) inspired me to compose an impression on these few simple and subtle verses:

white stillness; vanishing trees & hills; tranquil in solitude

During the last few years, I have written several pieces based on or inspired by nature, such as A distant voice
of the rain forest, Daun (leaves) and Rimba (forest) and this work continues the thread. A particular motif in the piece is the Chinese character "Yi" which means to change or to shift. As the 3rd Century Taoist philosopher Chung Tzu once said, with every movement there is change; with every moment there is alteration.

7. Hardesh Singh - Jasper Singh Pestonji

This piece celebrates life. There is an Iban saying that goes, "agi idup, agi ngelaban," which loosely translates to while I breathe, I fight. I am fascinated with the idea of perfection and the spirit of striving for it even though we know we can never really reach it. This piece is dedicated to my nephew, Jasper Singh Pestonji, born in February this year and who will have a lifetime ahead of him dedicated to the pursuit of perfection as a human being.

8. Tzu-En Ngiao - A Precipitation of Sparrows

This piece is based on an Islamic tile work from the Middle East. The breathtaking and hypnotizing depth and space of the tile work is achieved through an intricate superimposition of vine tendrils interspersed with flowering blooms in blue. The complex and multitudinous intersecting segments of curling tendrils appear to be more a web weaved in mathematically precise punctuations than a mere chaotic assembly of spiralling lines.

Viewing these curling tendrils in terms of a mathematical approximation of a spiral according to the famous Fibonacci Series, the entire artwork has been reconstructed on musical terms by deriving all spiral tone-rows, rhythmic structures, counterpoint and harmony from the Fibonacci numbers and weaving them into a coherent canvas based on a set of mathematical and algorithmic rules also extracted from the tile work itself.