It is quite a challenge for me to write for the chamber organ in Lee Hysan Concert Hall. In a rather dry acoustics for pipe organ, I attempt to utilize various layers of delays to mask the harsh release of tones, complement with the clarity of the consonant of the melodies and enrich the color of the rather plain instrument.

Mon étoile, ça sera pour toi une des étoiles (for chamber organ and Max MSP)

Thoughts and ideas will brew when one stays quietly in a certain space. In order for these thoughts to take shape, they must be supported by physical space. Alternating between “space” and “thoughts”, the music toes the line between fantasy and reality. As we journey through various spaces, we can look forward to the kind of thoughts and emotions that gradually develop or suddenly blossom into being.

Tranquility (for Chinese strings ensemble)

Wu Guan-zhong’s paintings always evoke the quest of simplicity through
expressing more through less, as well as the pointillistic, linear and planar representation of space through brushstrokes. The composition departs from the above concepts, using Wu’s synonymous painting as medium. I questioned the quality of the spatial emptiness on the painting as well as answering to Wu’s approach to the physique of brushstrokes. I intertwined staccato elements and metallic echoes which portrait the small irritations on the field with the long linear gestures that suggest the slow-flowing yet stagnant shallow water. To research on the empty space of the paddy-field, I illustrated a sentimental emotion of ‘hometown’ in the section that follows. After the calm opening, remote resonances ringing brought in new rhythm which propels the music into a cantabile which reminisces human lives on the field and their individual stories.

Paddy Field (for chamber ensemble)

Michael Lai: Love Story (Theme from the RTV television series Love Story 1980)	

Michael Lai: Kites (Theme from the RTV television series Love Story 1980 II)	

Lowell Lo: Love Is Oh So Sweet　

Kei Ogura: Oretachi no Tabi (Our Journey) (Theme from the Japanese television series of the same title)

Youthful Days Suite (for Chinese orchestra)

Even though I am not born in the era when the traumatic massacre happened in China, the fear of my hometown – Hong Kong being converted into a city deprived of freedom is constantly heart-beating inside each of us. In recent years, the darkness of the society emerged and surfaced, arousing global concerns. This dystopian work is named ‘Lullaby’. It is intended to be a simple ‘song’ that a mother would sing to the child. But to the fact that we are being forced to accept our step-mother, the lullaby becomes hidden in all sorts of hatred and web of noises. It is therefore also a ricercar, to search for the real lullaby of my city. The music content follows the sentiments of several lines from the poem Broken Home, a vivid account of a Hong Kong-er’s vision to the 1989 Ti’anmen Event in China. The several short motives of the ‘house’ were presented, followed by rapid exuberant heterophonies of the main motives. The inner voice of us is then gradually unveiled through the late-romantic pianoforte melody. Only when we are able to talk on the front porch, not out back in the alley can one hear the ‘real’ lullaby of our city. Yet all is destined for the hometown, like the music diving deep down into an abyss of toneless world abruptly, my hometown would one day be shattered to void in all of a sudden.

Lullaby (for chamber ensemble)

There are words that yearn to be said yet cannot be. Le motif disparu, as the title suggests, veils a hidden monody. From the start till the end, it is not revealed to the audience. Only various multi-layered metamorphosed forms are being stated and restated in the string quartet, merged into an organic creature-like texture, which constantly searches, fails, evolves, and searches again.

I attempt to use mutes as a tool to create an active sound-producing agent which participates in the shapes of the “wooden” quality of the quartet as well as a “counterclimax” for the piece, to which the music culminates, however not the volume nor the timbre. The timbre settles onto its final form with the Bachian violin solo laying out the lamentations, in dialect with the beginning’s viola solo full of angst.

le motif disparu (for string quartet)

This composition draws its inspiration and title from a repeating line in a poem Images of Hong Kong by a late Hong Kong poet, Ye Si. The concept of different points of view represents a crucial value today as well as a core of my music-making: to surpass boundaries of expressions. The constant reinterpretation of quotidian matters and the stay at the alteration between the brink of marginalization and transformation in the poem resonate with my experience in the 21st century Hong Kong. The personality of Ye Si is being vividly captured, through everyday objects, questioning himself and his existence in the rapidly changing and developing Hong Kong in the ’90s, for example, in this poem: “with neon dancing in the back-churning waters of the Star Ferry, on the old depot, with Repulse Bay Hotel rendezvous produced on cue. All this exotic stuff, of course, is for export. We change our stances. We need a fresh angle, nothing added, nothing taken away, always at the edge of things and between places.”

The words of addition and deletion, akin to musical augmentation and diminution, pairs up with the objects that are rich in sounds which can then suggest music materials that are stand-alone in meaning: maybe, “the waters” of soft undulating figures, “the depot fading in memory” of shifting and dissolving block chords al niente, are some imageries that one may find helpful while navigating through the piece. Music gestures of polar contrasts (mainly (1) familiar versus foreign to our ears, and (2) resonating versus dampened) are stitched together with sweeping long-winding chordal ambience transformations. In this 7-minute journey, the work is modeled as constantly shifting tectonic plates consisting of different timbral and pitch materials striving to achieve a balance through reframing and repositioning, which reflects a change of the viewing angle of the receiver, thus the title “searching for a different point of view”.

Searching for a different point of view (for chamber ensemble)

I owe a large part of my music upbringing to Hong Kong Youth Chinese Orchestra and The Music Office. Taking this precious opportunity in being jointly commissioned by The Hong Kong Composers’ Guild and The Music Office, I wrote a piece sparkling with creativity and new sonorities to mark an end of my 12-year journey with the orchestra as a player, and to encourage younger members to continuously put in effort in music-making and self-reflecting to perpetually improve themselves. 

The inspiration of the work comes from the first part of a phrase from Yi Jing, “While the universe is ceaselessly in motion, the enlightened on Earth would make untiring endeavor for advancement”. The vastness of the constantly moving universe makes human being in comparison negligible. Yet we should all bear our own roles and contribute to a better whole by day-by-day advancing. Musically, apart from the vibrant faster passages, one can discover fragments of upward scales which symbolizes the power of advancement appearing throughout the piece. Also, there are quieter moments that link up the former. These rarely seen static chordal moments in Chinese orchestral context are sketches of the tranquil night sky, in which all the playing parts are equal, and no one should be the foreground. One can shut their eyes and try to imagine the gigantic, endless universe full of stars. 

Hope you will all enjoy this 9-minute journey and I dedicate all my blessings to Hong Kong Youth Chinese Orchestra, for her continuous prosperity and the rays she radiates onto later generations.

Les orbites éternelles (for Chinese orchestra)

deRE-construction takes an existing phrase in Cantonese and deconstruct it into phonetic units – the signature six tones which nearly symbolizes Cantonese speech, the starting consonant of each character, the quality of the vowel following it, and the closing consonant. The separated elements would then be permutated against each other, which form the pitch organizational materials for the piece. The pseudo-discourse setting of the music would feature mainly the fixed media of real human voices and instrumental sounds as “call” and the string quartet as “response”, in which the string quartet would play, and sing in real-life situation an “other”-text that supports or opposes the original. Hence, the title “deRE-construction” has to be taken literally, where the permutated fragments of the characters not only deconstructed and destined to become unintelligible of the phrase’s original semantic meaning, it also gives rise to reconstructed text, which are multiple unexplored secondary “texts”, be they meaningful texts that can make new senses, or gibberish texts that merely resemble the identity and form of Cantonese, like Cantonese copies of Lorem Ipsum.

deRE-construction (for string quartet and fixed media)

Aurora 0: Search for light is the first piece of my Aurora series of compositions. The piece for erhu and recorded sound explores the non-literal meaning of ‘light’, and which ‘search for light’ become a mental process instead of a physical one. It portrays also my situation as an exchange student in Sweden, where is a place at first foreign to me, but gradually finds my way out as a peaceful resolution.
In the music, the process of struggling is represented by the rhythmic refrain in the middle section where resembles the Chinese jindamanchang (the background music moves faster than the foreground), which listeners may try to decode the electroacoustic version of it in my piece.

Aurora 0 - Search for Light (for amplified Er-hu and pre-recorded surrounded sounds)

Mixing in microtonal intervals from the Cantonese opera traditional yi-fan mode which portrays despair and sadness, the piece takes several impression of brass instruments into consideration as starting point: the long-stretching wandering harmonies, the short and piercing declamations of the trumpets, the low foundations of the trombones and tuba, as well as the softer ‘variants’ of the group, and develop the character of evolving distant traumatic memories through a transformation of the heterophonic microtones to a richer harmonic form. And interspersed by several short episodes of brutal and stormy atmospheres, the music steers through a metamorphosis of a fictional distant memory, thus the title lointain.
Idea-wise, it is an extension of my string quartet piece Oblivion, yet in a different interpretation and medium. You not only see the memories being corroded, but rotten into something new and dystopian.

Lointain (for brass ensemble)

Oblivion, describes both the state of being unconscious and the state of being forgotten as faded memories. The piece scored for string quartet begins with trauma-like atmosphere and a corresponding aftermath. Through some kind of metamorphosis, the trauma resolves into other forms, which represents the faded memories, or the state of oblivion. The lyrical sense hidden in multiple parts of the piece represents the unconsciousness, which is unreal but transcends us to another land of peace and heal ourselves. The music shifts rapidly between the lyrical fragments and the cruel reality where we are ‘forced’ to forget the past.

Oblivion (for string quartet)

Drawing on several motives from the Ring, such as the signature interval of Hagen and the lyrical melodic flow of ‘Brünnhilde in Love’, the orchestra flows in different speed in thick texture, developing vast number of sonorities. ‘You first lost in time’, as said by Sue Elliott, in which Wagner artfully crafted for the audience to immerse in the world of Wagnerian Opera, the music flows in no tempo and nostagia. The first few chordal sounds from the Götterdämmerung unweaves into lines of woodwind melodic shapes.
The dissonant Hagen motif interferes and hence begins their rivalry. The first halt is marked by a short appearance of a fixed tonality at a relaxed atmosphere by the woodwinds, not long before it is again taken up by rapid variants of the Rhine motif by the strings, the music suddenly runs into a fast wind, and the Hagen motif struggles with its consonant version.
At last, same to the Sun rises, the music burst into joy and ecstasy, leading to the highest climax. The music ends with sublimation of all feelings and senses, all into the empty perfect fifth that represents the void of love that Hagen’s motif resolves into.

All But Love - an Epilogue to the Ring (for large orchestra)

Hong Kong composer, conductor, huqin performer and organist

Wong Ching Yin - composer | conductor | performer

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