St:ill Life (2016)
“Still Life”, the main feature of the work is to express the concept of how one sees Cantonese as sound. Capturing the essence of Cantonese expressions is very challenging. To be able to do so would be the breakthrough achieved through this performance. With an emphasis on the minute inflections and nuances of Cantonese speech, this work features a violinist and a speaker, with the violinist playing in response to the pitches and rhythm of the speaker’s monologue. The audience will be able to hear a musical incarnation of familiar Cantonese phases. Instead of using Cantonese language solely as a way to deliver meaning and emotions. In this work, I will treat speech as a musical input by examining the inflections/ nuance/ and pronunciation of Cantonese language as a musical element. With composition techniques such as repetition, I aim to recreate the "Jamais Vu" phenomenon: a sudden lost of recognition of familiar elements when one is exposed the same “trigger” too frequently in a short period of time.
This piece is part of an ongoing experiment on a developing technique called Woven Composition. Its main focus is to examine and to find new solutions so that different medium could work together to form a more structured approach to multimedia performance. Instead of the more traditional “patchwork” approach, the woven technique allows the composer to handle music and extra-musical elements in a “contrapuntal” way.
The extended version of the work (newly written for the Adelaide Fringe Festival) will also attempt to incorporate dramatic elements as the music unfolds, thus creating a multifaceted, sonic-drama driven performance. Experimenting with how the aforementioned “sonic jamais vu” could become part of the story-telling.
