Quinnuance: The Music, Our Works: Looking Deep Into My Roots
- albertlwj7
- May 25, 2013
- 2 min read
THE MUSIC, OUR WORKS: LOOKING DEEP INTO MY ROOTS
QUINNUANCE
LIVING ROOM, THE ARTS HOUSE
23 MAY 2013
This review was published in The Straits Times on 25th May 2013 under the title "Forget Fancy Titles, Focus on The Music"
No group has been more active in promoting and performing the works of local composers than Quinnuance, formed by a group of compositional alumni of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.
The challenge for any composer is to give his music a unique identity without sounding either cliched or totally random. Several of the works had titles which drew attention more to the composer's thought process than the music.
Ernest Thio's three-movement The Bean Suite and his experimental piece for percussion and tape, Divination, had moments of ingenuity. The boisterous middle movement of the former was effective with its hypnotic rhythms and Hokkien text about wedding festivities, sung ably by soprano Chloe Toh. But what connection would a listener make with its title The Bean Sprout?
Over There Where I Looked Upon That Eternity and And Suddenly, Of Night In Acceptance of Nothing by Bernard Lee had a more distinct identity. But they sounded similar in their angular shifts and accents. Ideas were well-presented, but the lack of development left one unsatisfied.
The most successful compositions were less-pretentiously named works. Alicia De Silva's A Sacred Triptych for choir was a hauntingly beautiful work set to the Latin text of three prayers: Kyrie, Ave Maria, and Agnus Dei. Her composition displayed a firm grasp of the choral idiom, whether in setting dissonances to text or her play on articulated words with rhythmic interplay.
Dreams by Luo Enning was a playful work that exploited the qualities of the various instruments. While it began with all four - the flute, French horn, glockenspiel and piano - later movements saw more duet pairings. Some clever and thoughtful writing resulted in all four instruments being clearly heard, despite the French horn's more powerful dynamic capabilities.
Lu Heng's The Nature Of Ambition was an easy-listening attempt to chronicle the composer's discovery of his passion for music. Its use of different modes, or scales, was seamless in their application. Althought at times reminiscent of New Age music, its concept was consistent and clear throughout and avoided the sterotypical atonal tendencies of 21st-century writing.
Music should be self-explanatory, without the need for lengthy exegesis. While the compositional process would be of interest to academics, composers often fail to deliver what is most important to listeners: the end product
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