Making History: how the project began
About the pieces
About the recordings
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Making History: how the project began

Over the past decade I have been writing about music composed by Malaysians. It was never an easy task - in the mid 90s information about Malaysian composers was practically non-existent. We did not have a visible contemporary music scene, and at the time any composer who was active was either being performed abroad, as in the case of Dr Valerie Ross, or working in the quiet seclusion of their own inner circles, for example Razak Abdul Aziz.

In Search Of

My first encounter with a Malaysian work happened quite by accident, when i was invited to attend a rehearsal of the amateur chamber group the Camerata, led by oboist Joost Flach. Amidst the standard baroque repertory the band suddenly played a work recognisably non-Western, I later learnt it was an original composition by one of the Camerata members. That was, for me, the highlight of the evening.

As usual with local compositions even today, their existence in concert programmes usually take a back seat to their canonised Western counterparts, and in the case of that first encounter the name of the piece and the composer never came to my attention. This, sadly, still happens today.

Obviously something had to be done. My only other encounter with a Malaysian composition in the 90s was a work briefly covered in the press by Dr Valerie Ross, if I recall, a piece for piano and tabla. Again, in those pre-internet days information was scarce, and memories were (and still are) short. Even in our highly advanced www age googling Dr Ross's name yields scarce information.

The Forum for Malaysian Composers will be recognised as a a milestone for our music scene, if because of the jumpstart it has given our composers into believing that their music could find a place in their home country. However, it soon became evident that much more needed to be done, and it was increasingly clear that no one was going to do it for us. As a friend of mine once said, if you wanted something done you had to do it yourself.

So over a glass of teh tarik, under the starless suffocating KL sky with my collaborator Hardesh Singh contemplating his banana leaf rice, it dawned on us that we had a shared vision. We both wanted to make recordings of Malaysian music. A few sips of tea and a cleaned out banana leaf later, the Malaysian Contemporary Music series was born. That was May 07. A month later I had secured the commitment of Off The Edge to go ahead with the project, and by June I had a draft of the programme.

It was hard work putting together an anthology that would reflect the vast diversity of our contemporary music. To quote the ever eloquent Antares, that we suddenly have so many contemporary composers in our midst is a "happy fluke". Foremost at the frontlines of the avant garde we have composers like Tazul Tajuddin, closer to the American minimalist school we have the kaleidoscopic sonic colours of Adeline Wong and Johan Othman’s music. Bridging of ethnic and atonal we have Saidah Rastam’s groundbreaking work, and much more.

Far From Rojak

I received scepticism for attempting to put them all on the same piece of plastic, but I was confident that in the high quality of our composer's work, such a venture could succeed. The sheer artistry of our composers and the commitment of their performers meant that what could be rojak, a typically Malaysian multi-ethnic offering so tiresomely paraded at every official function, could actually present a well-rounded programme of great distinction.

Far from being rojak, the pieces in the programme fell into a sort of inner logic that became only apparent after they fell into place next to one another. I had originally intended to open the programme with Yii Kah Hoe's showstopper, his Buka Panggung for Chinese Orchestra, which would have been a real curtainraiser complete with fireworks. Unfortunately the orchestra was irrideemably and incomprehensibly adamant about supporting our project, so I went back to the drawing board.

It was somewhat upsetting, because I had built the whole programme based on the different moods of each piece starting with Yii's. Chong's dreamy poetic Metamorphosis VI seemed was a prime candidate as it did not upset the programme that I had assembled too seriously. But when Hardesh Singh came up with his quirky Nation Building I knew it was a perfect opening statement.

In a happy coincidence, Nation Building's key fit neatly with the first note of Chong's Metamorphosis VI, acting like a prologue to the programme, and suddenly my initial conception seemed to sit on solid ground once again. In fact, little has been moved around since my early draft. The mood moves from poetic juxtapositions of avant garde and traditional, eastern and western, contemplative and bold. Adeline Wong's cello pieces from 5 Letter For An Eastern Empire make a strong statement in anchoring the music to a classical foundation, namely Bach.

Hardesh Singh's indian classical composition for the Chemman Chaalai soundtrack brings about a turning point midway in the programme, a sort of modulation to an Eastern classical mode that would be picked up by Saidah Rastam's gamelan orchestra powerhouse from M! The Opera. Ng Chong Lim's 3 Sketches and Chong's Monodrama are both heavily influenced by gamelan, each in its own way transforming the traditional to the avant garde.

Johan Othman's jazzy piano miniature Composition For Piano Nr 8 acts as a bridge, or in symphonic terms, a Scherzo to the Finale that is Adeline Wong's lush symphonic statement Synclastic Illuminations, a touching grand gesture that I felt brought the programme to a satisfying close, the big finish. In a sense, it is a sweet reward for the listener for having travelled so far through the challenging programme. The ravishing final bars seem to sigh of satisfaction at a hard won battle.

As I have always felt my own Toccata to be a sort of Encore piece, here it makes a closing statement and provides a lighthearted afterthought. Again the logic magically fell into place, Hardesh's piece as a prologue, mine as an epilogue.

What's in a name?

The packaging of the CD was itself an adventure. I finally found a name for the CD when I read Nick Choo's Off The Edge review of my Toccata's premiere in Wellington. Faith, Hope and Chaos somehow describes our journey and our aspirations and the many challenges that we have to overcome. And magically, Hardesh Singh's opening piece seems to have predicted the title.

The final piece in the jigsaw fell neatly into place when, as we fretted over the cover designs, photographer Pang Khee Teik provided me with three randomly selected photos that turned out to be exactly what I had in mind. Call it premonition, but their poweful imagery spelt the title in turns - faith, in the glassy-eyed front cover mannequin is hilarious irony, hope that is destined to never arrive is bizarrely captured in the roadworks of the back cover, and chaos in the Factory Installation so poetically articulated. Is this the invisible hand of fate? Was our project predestined? Or was it simply that our limitations became our ultimate artistic salvation?

- CH Loh, Jan 08

Making History: how the project began
About the pieces
About the recordings
Press coverage