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> concerts > 29 Nov 09
Sun 29 Nov
Building the Future
The new generation takes on the city
Performed by Ensemble Mosaik
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Programme Notes:
The young are our only hope. In the first-ever regional Young
Composers Competition nine outstanding representatives of a
pool of budding talent pitch their skills and scales against
one another under the guiding hand of a panel of regional adjudicators.
Listen to their response to the theme cityscapes and find out
how they stack up against the jury's expert hand.
Programme
Young Composers Competition Presentation:
1. Kittiphan Janbuala (Thailand) - Motion
in Statis for flute, viola and percussion
2. Juro Kim O Feliz (Philippines) - Sa
Kanyang Paglingon (In Her Glances) for flute, bass clarinet,
violin, cello, piano and percussion
3. Lee Chie Tsang (Malaysia) - Autumn's
heart.Maple.Fragrance for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello
and percussion
4. Thatchatham Silsupan (Thailand) - Because We Are Together
for flute, violin and piano
5. Chow Jun Yi (Malaysia) - A Night Without
Voices for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano & percussion
6. Zurazak Ut-Sa (Thailand) - Urban Silhouettes for violin,
viola, cello and piano
7. how Jun Yan (Malaysia) - When Stillness
Meets Motion for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano &
percussion
8. Tan Tuan Hao (Singapore) - And The
Sleeping City Dreams… for flute, clarinet, viola, cello
and percussion
9. Neo Nai Wen (Malaysia) ) - The Forgotten
Sound for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello and percussion
Intermission
Jury Showcase:
10. Johan Otman (Malaysia) - Neutral
Space for piano solo
11. Dieter Mack (Germany) - Trio IV for
flute, percussion, piano *
12. Anothai Nitibhon (Thailand) - Mut(e)ual
Dialogue for clarinet, cello and piano
13. Moritz Eggert (Germany) - Interior
at Petworth - 8 variations on a picture by William Turner (2005)
for flute (picc), clarinet (bass clt.), percussion, piano, violin,
viola, and cello *
All world premieres except *
Young Composers Competition Presentation:
Category A (Malaysia)
1 Chow Jun Yan: When Stillness Meets Motion
I have conceptualised this piece by drawing an imaginary frame
around a city, and in that frame there are static elements such
as a tree or a building, and there are also subjects in motion
such as animals, cars, people and so on.
All the subjects are carrying out their own tasks, sometimes
working individually, sometimes in interaction with others.
Therefore in this piece, overlapping motives and unique sounds
present themselves in various permutations.
2 Chow Jun Yi: A Night Without Voices
Have you ever talked to yourself?
This work represents city dweller whose outer appearance looks
happy and content, but his inner self suffers from the pressures
of life in the city.
The piece begins with a Music Box theme that represents sweet
memories, along with a Darkness theme. The Darkness theme initially
covers the Music Box theme, just like how a person cannot escape
from his outer tensions. In the middle section time freezes
as the person stops himself from the daily pressures and attempts
to escape from reality into his world of sweet memories. However,
time never stops. In the final part, the two themes exist alongside
each other as the person realises that although he cannot stop
time, he can hold on to his memories, however brief.
3 Lee Chie Tsang, Isaiah: Autumn's Heart.Maple.Fragrance
The city I come from doesn't just contain sounds of its inhabitants.
It is itself a city of voices. ?o?o? carries with it a glimpse
of these voices. It presents an image of a city whose spirit
accepts not only one, but many; who smiles at a thousand scents
whose sweetness cannot be named, carried through the wind as
they glide around falling maple leaves.
It asks its listener to abandon the authority of singular descriptions,
and allows that which is of variety to be heard. Their sounds
are that of differences, of mixtures, of light at the same time
dark, of delight at the same time sorrow, of colours visible
and invisible, and of feelings that cannot be grasped.
4 Neo Nai Wen: The Forgotten Sound
If a city had a voice, It would be the voice of expectation
or of hope. In this work, I try to create an extremely chaotic
atmosphere at the beginning of the piece, because when we listen
to noise, we always expect or hope for silence or calmness in
its wake.
Therefore my conclusion is modelled like a Buddhist chant;
this is the voice of the city that is in my imagination. It
is in essence the sound that has long been absent from our city
life. My music attempts to create, contrast and find balance
between chaos and peace, and to explore elements of Buddhism
in music.
Category B (South East Asia)
1 Juro Kim O Feliz: Sa Kanyang Paglingon (In Her Glances)
...sa kawalan na nasisilayan sa kaligiran (...to the abyss as
seen beyond the horizon)
Saan pa ba hahanapin
Kundi sa sariling panaginip
Lupain na abot-tanaw ang kawalan
( Where else does one find
Except in one's own dreams
A place where nothing exists beyond the horizon)
2 Kittiphan Janbuala: Motion In Stasis
The inspiration for this piece comes from environmental pollution
such as a noise, expressed in timbre changes and musical expressions.
The work consists of simple materials such rolls, trills, increasing
lines, decreasing lines, rhythmic repetitions and tiny Thai
melody within that.
3 Thatchatham Silsupan: Because We Are Together
As someone who has been growing up in different landscapes,
both suburban and urban, I am always impressed by the sound
structure of the environment that surrounds me. It prompts me
to think about the beauty of emancipation in the sound itself.
The sound can be broadly ranked from dense noise to one pure
beautiful sound, which also changes with our perception at the
moment of listening. What I found quite interesting is that
we actually contribute our own sound to this sonic environment.
So that we are not only listening to it but am also sharing
and contributing to it. So when thinking about this piece I
am also speaking my voice into that environment surrounding
me, 'because we are together'.
4 Tan Tuan Hao: And The Sleeping City Dreams...
Perhaps a city is a living thing. Each city has its own personality,
after all ...
So, if a city has a personality, maybe it also has a soul. Maybe
it dreams.
- The Sandman, by Neil Gaiman
By day, Southeast Asian metropolises are icons of dynamism
and change, seen for example by the continually changing skylines
of all our major cities. This piece, however, focuses on the
dreams and nocturnal musings of its people; dreams in which
the ancient voices of convention and tradition speak as loudly
as those of progress and modernity. Against the gradually fading
backdrop of Western colonialism or influence, these voices converse
and discuss, agree and disagree, and even temper each other's
manifestation in the everyday lives of any city's citizens.
5 Zurazak Ut-Sa: Urban Silhouettes
This work is a reflection of Bangkok, the city that never sleeps.
The city dwellers' lives, like automatons, are in constant restless
loop. The music consists of two parts. The first is a portrait
of the city, the bustling activity and chaos of passers-by,
its various cultures and languages, created in music using numerical
additives of 1,2,3 and so on. In addition the word BANGKOK is
decoded into primary numbers and mapped to sets of notes (0,1,2,5,6,7)
and (0,1,2) and they form composite elements.
The second part represents the silhouettes of the city in the
form of abstract and impressionistic processes of minimalism.
This part of the soundscape reflects the atmosphere of a city
at dusk, with echoes of loops from the first part swirling around
the city's melody till the end.
Jury Showcase:
10. Johan Otman (Malaysia) - Neutral Space
There are parts of the city where a space does not have any
particular identity. It is generally neutral in terms of its
look as part of a city. It does not give away any hint of belonging
to a specific country, culture or functional identity within
a city. These spaces can be identified as part of a city and
yet have the possibility of belonging to another. These spaces
also contain signs that do not spell out specificity in relation
to other spaces nearby or in other parts of a city.
In this piece I am exploring the concept of neutrality of spaces.
The idea of movement is also being neutralised by an attempt
at placing the piece within the state of stasis within movement
and movement within stasis. Generally to spell out the idea
of a soundscape that behaves similar to a neutral space.
11. Dr Anothai Nitibhon (Thailand) - Mut(e)ual Dialogue
From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked
out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans
of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
- 1984,George Orwell
Inspired by the her recent curatorial works relating to the
sounds of urban Thailand, Anothai sets out to explore the frequently
unheard entity of urban environment, namely 'People,' and the
sounds that can reflect Bangkok's urban mentality.
She derives her musical materials from the computer analysis
of three sounds: 1) the word brothers shouted during the street
protests, 2) the sound of the Instant Messenger signal, and
3) the Thai word khaa, meaning the servant of the lord.
In the first part of the work War is Peace, the music starts
with the memory of the Red, Yellow protests in Thailand, reflecting
the situation in which people are bombarded by political conflicts
that ultimately leave them with nothing but poorer and defenseless.
The second part Freedom is Slavery depicts the life of city
dwellers who subserviently surrender to the magical influence
of technology, using it to communicate but yet creating no dialogue.
The final part Ignorance is Strength reflects the most common
symptom of the city's mentality, where ignorance becomes the
tool for human survival, a shield against the wicked reality
of society.
12. Moritz Eggert (Germany) - Interior at Petworth: 8 variations
on a picture by William Turner
"I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished
to show what such a scene was like." - J.M.W. Turner
Interior at Petworth is the most mysterious of painter Turner's
late works and one that has puzzled generations of art scholars.
The puzzle begins with the fact that no one really knows for
sure what is being represented in the painting.
Far more than the picture itself, the idea of such a painting
has always fascinated me. It is a space completely free of boundaries,
a more or less associative collection of apparently recognisable
objects which, even in their arrangement, break out of the corset
of the recognisable. "I did not paint it to be understood,"
a famous statement of Turner's, is fulfilled here to a greater
extent than in any of his other works. Its intention as a kind
of farewell to something that was once full of meaning is painfully
clear.
In certain way, my 8 Variations on a Picture of J.M.W. Turner
are an expression of my increasing discontent with what increasingly
comes across as a self-reproductive, self-referential "genre"
in "new music." It is an expression of my boredom
with pieces the beginnings of which already evoke a definite
ending, a clearly defined "style," a definite course,
along with a frequent lack of vitality, feeling of freedom and
genuine surprise. At the same time, my work represents distrust
towards a task of any significance in favour of an utter indeterminacy,
perhaps in the sense of Cage, since a removal of boundaries
is of course only possible within recognisable limitations.
It is not for nothing that the "Interior" at Petworth
is indeed an interior turning up towards the outside, as it
were.
Interior at Petworth is not an intentionally puzzling piece;
everything is in fact presented nakedly and openly, but it renounces
any form of pre-drilled meaning. They are variations, but no
theme. The piece constantly breaks the rules that prescribe
a "proper" composition, but not for the sake of a
joke or an "action" or performance - more in the sense
of fathoming the boundaries of meaning itself. A quoted biography
of a contemporary composer (completely interchangeable in its
wording), fragments from piece-texts of diverse composers, quoted
catalogues of instrumental effects, instructions in the score
which are invisible to the listener and puzzling for the interpreter
- these are not used in the sense of a persiflage, but stand
for symbolic "husks" of something that, in this form,
should perhaps be finally overcome in the traditional designation
"new music." A farewell, therefore, founded upon a
certain sadness, but behind the open coffin light breaks out
and the removal of boundaries is not an end but a new departure.
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