6 March 2024
Hong Kong, HKSAR

The light outside appeared as if through a sepia filter, and a heavy mist, the kind that would stick to one’s lips, traveled horizontally along the sidewalks and hugged each creaking, cracking building in Sham Shui Po. Two mornings in a row, we had 100% humidity. And earlier this week, I finished a string quartet that, itself, finished on a B Major chord. Whither happiness, or contentment, or at the very least- finality? B Major is, after all, such a bright key. It makes D look dour in comparison, and C- horribly banal. But the piece is done, and it will soon be printed, too, once its billion notes, too many in the treble clef, even in the cello part, find space on the digital page. And this spring, it will even receive its world premiere with the superb Quatuor Arod.

These sticky, stagnant mornings actually have felt strangely fresh, sandwiched in between cool, windy days and nights. Or this image of Angkor Wat at dawn, or barely a bit later (since I couldn’t bother to wake up in perfect time, and insisted on breakfast at a civilised pace). In between giant projects, interdisciplinary genre-busting things, groundbreaking this and revolutionary that, until one gets tired of the marketing-speak, it’s just nice to write chamber music once in a while. It’s even nicer to do it for true friends. 

Then we come back to the groundbreaking and revolutionary anyway; the wind insists on blowing through the mist, no matter how curious it is. We are in the final stage of editing, post-production, and CGI on the digital work for Hong Kong Ballet that, together with Giorgio Biancorosso, choreographer Yuh Egami, dancer Shen Jie, and the incredible artistry of Anandi Bhattacharya and Joby Burgess, we recorded in November. But the digital aspect is a work of creative production on its own. It is also sort of impossible to imagine precisely how it might go. Like any decent work of art, though, the unpredictability, the non-commodification, is why to do it in the first place. It may end in its own, proverbial, B Major. In a few weeks’ time, the world will see it.