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29 April 2024
Kolkata, India
The end of the teaching semester in Hong Kong was an especially busy time, and escaping the first possible moment at a very early Saturday morning to Myanmar hardly made things feel easier- within that last twenty-four hours, moving out of my apartment (of six years!) on top of my academic responsibilities made for a rather harried start to ‘the vacation’. And, indeed, Myanmar is hardly a conventional vacation idea right now, given the sanctions, skirmishes, bombings, and sweeping poverty over this once-prosperous country. But then one has to see for oneself! And indeed, while the state of things in the nation’s cultural heartland around Mandalay have deteriorated considerably since my last visit in 2022, sipping a seven-year-old French Viognier in the palatial surroundings of Yangon’s best French restaurant, barely steps away from the former prime minister’s mansion where she endured over a decade of house arrest, remains a very strange picture in my memory.
This has been a slightly unpredictable time professionally, and while there are exciting things on the horizon, there are frustrations, too. The music industry is an exciting and rapidly changing thing but it is also deeply precarious. And while one can often rely on the good sense and kindness of others, it is a worrying trend in Hong Kong that the artistic and institutional leadership is trending in a worryingly provincial direction. It compels me to wonder whether there’s more to do elsewhere, at least in terms of planning projects with reliable partners. More on this later, hopefully, with positive updates!
I’m back to Hong Kong already later this week and excited to start new things in Taipei with the Quatuor Arod and later this year with the world premiere of Otherhood (2022) with Iris Oja, Martti Anttila, and Anna Kuvaja– in both cases, just waiting for some dates. These are perhaps slightly smaller-scale things but maybe a thirty-minute song cycle incorporating the latest tech and a new quartet for one of the world’s best groups are very much worth some excitement. As for the past, searingly hot days in beautiful but weary Myanmar, it is a temporary reprieve and pleasure to be in civilisation, and to move on to the next challenges.
5 April 2024
Oakland, CA, USA
It’s been an entire two and a half months since I last visited home, but it feels far longer than that, considering how packed the winter and spring have been so far. Aside from finishing the new string quartet for Quatuor Arod, I’ve been preparing various projects for further performances, especially developing The Once and Future (2021) into a more mature direction in terms of staging and costumes- a must in advance of its European premiere in 2025 in Antwerp, Belgium. At the same time, some things have slipped in terms of completion, like sharing the Vivacissimo (2023) performance (perhaps not until May! though it will also very likely come to Europe later this year), and the online project for Hong Kong Ballet, which will probably only release in the summer. But I’m also well aware that good things can’t be rushed, and one is only remembered for ‘what’, not ‘when’.
This is a brief trip home; I’ll already be back in Hong Kong for the culmination of the academic year next week, and, indeed, Hong Kong figures into many of the upcoming weeks of spring. At the same time, I’ll be back in Myanmar towards the end of the month for a long-awaited (though brief) trip; my first, in December 2022, was fascinating and moving, with the country in the depths of a civil war that, now, seems to have only regressed. At the same time, the incredible and gracious culture and the dependence on any foreign visitors to support a famished population lends a particular urgency to a trip. It’s just impossible to predict where things will go from here, but the beauty of the place is eternal, and profound.
Turning attention away from merely planning things to creative work once more, I’ll finally be working on the music for an interactive project-collaboration with Jeffrey Shaw, Katharina Schmitt, and Christoph Wirth, which will, let’s say, ‘soft’-premiere in Hong Kong this autumn but will get a proper run in Germany in 2025 as well (it threatens to be an especially busy year!). Lots of news regarding future performances for the summer and autumn will come in the next update which, hopefully, will find me in less of a state of constant jet lag!
21 March 2024
Hong Kong, HKSAR
I am, once more, in between things- in between new works, with the all-too-concise String Quartet no. 2 (2024) finished and to be premiered later this spring by the Quatuor Arod, but not yet at the stage of writing the next, large-scale multidisciplinary work for Manchester International Festival; in between travels, having just returned from a brief but rewarding trip to Delhi and Rajasthan, and looking forward to a return home to the United States for Easter; in between homes, almost, as I’ll be returning my Sham Shui Po apartment at the end of April, and moving to somewhere else, still unknown, in the late summer. It’s a (by definition) tentative place, this in-between, full of anticipation and anxiety but also healthy and exciting: this is where a pivot, a leap forward, takes place, something to turn that buzzing incoherence into a happy whole.
And that anxious excitement also extends into some other realms, like, soon, sharing the video+audio of Vivacissimo (2023) from its world premiere at the tail end of last year, as well as some announcements related to touring The Once and Future (2021) with new staging and costumes in Europe in 2025, as well as, in fact, a schedule of performances for the new String Quartet no 2 for the summer. All that- soon, indeed.
The precious few moments of silence and peace in between the travels, the work that seemingly keeps piling up, creative, entrepreneurial and occasionally academic too, allow a little bit of time for dreaming, too. New approaches to transcending (or, should I say, transgressing?) the classical music boundaries, new ideas for presenting work more ambitiously and fearlessly, not to mention new expectations of work ethic from collaborators and partners- on occasion I realise the privilege of even raising the issue of high standards and values which Hong Kong offers and many other places don’t. Even when so much of the city’s cultural potential is compromised or even buried by the unfortunate state of the cultural leadership, there’s so much that’s exciting, that’s good, that’s practically revolutionary. I’d rather be nowhere else.
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.
20 February 2024
Hong Kong, HKSAR
Around this time, or just a little bit after, four years ago, I would be sitting at the far end of my Hong Kong apartment; the intense rays of the early spring sun soaked the ersatz wooden table and lit up the white cloth notepad into which the first measures of Russia: Today (2020) were written. There wasn’t much to do outside as Hong Kong struggled with the ‘first wave’ of the pandemic, with locals hopelessly cowering in fear and stocking up on toilet paper, but to write music, and within a month and a half, that entire hour-long composition, now having graced the New York Times and beyond, was completed. I’m thinking of those somewhat-lonely, surreal days as I set out on the new string quartet, a piece far shorter, but with seemingly just as many notes. Same place, same sun, same white cloth notepad. Just that the world outside has (mercifully) moved on and so have I. Perhaps the music has, too.
The above photo comes from Mianshan, a group of Taoist monasteries and other religious structures deep in Shanxi province- even on the absurdly busy Chinese New Year holidays, it was somehow empty in the morning, like a postcard, or even better- like a dream. The dry mountains covered in specks of snow, the deepening silence of each successive layer of the temple structures, the reprieve from modern society which has invaded even the most ancient places, seemed like a mirage. There is an interesting parallel, a paradoxical unity, with the act of composition. I attempt to find an utter silence to ‘receive’ a new creation, which is truly born out of what is both a vacuum and an impossibly messy inner self, and yet around me, and the world into which this new work is born, is a cacophony and a crisis, too. So this is also how I explain to myself why increasingly, tonality makes so much sense: tonality at the cost of complexity and cacophony, or maybe is it vice versa? One can tolerate the other as long as there is a reprieve, a Mianshan.
The new piece, it doesn’t have the absolute tragedy of Vivacissimo (2023), an emotional cry that I didn’t even realise I had written until I heard it premiered this past December. It has something else, though. I’m barely a minute and a half into the music, so I can’t really tell you yet how it goes, but it is an anxiety, a tension, maybe it gives up or it holds on. When I wrote my first String Quartet (2013) over a decade ago, it ended in a sort of a holy postlude. This one would be lucky to find its resolution at the last breath.
5 February 2024
Hong Kong, HKSAR
January somehow whizzed by already but last year’s final brilliant memory – the world premiere of Vivacissimo (2023) by LiLa with the Hong Kong Dance Company – has finally returned with a recording that I’m excited to soon share, once the video also becomes ready. For the next few weeks though, as the cool, somewhat grim weather settles over Hong Kong, I’ll be working on the new, rather concise, piece for Quatuor Arod which will already be premiered later this year. Reminded of the first weeks of the pandemic in 2020 during which I frequently went out to a local coffee shop to work on the sketches and the score of Russia: Today (2020) in contravention of the prevailing hysteria, I think it will be a beautiful thing to add one more double bar to the many works I completed in my Sham Shui Po apartment before I finally hand it back and move further afield in the SAR.
Also earlier this month, I found myself defending this place that I call home to a group of surly German academics who had duly imbibed the Western media propaganda that all things-China are bad and Western Europe (and its allies) are blameless. The reality is of course complicated and quite gray, and despite the fact that much of what goes on here is frustratingly provincial and occasionally even preposterous (HKCCO inviting the queen of banality, Alma Deutscher, for a disastrously-selling concert being this month’s cherry), Hong Kong is also a leader in arts funding and a place with a completely open and honest mind about what culture should and might be. The drastic and endless arts cuts that made it clear that I had no future in the United Kingdom attempting even the slightest ambitious project, or the unearned snobbery of much of the Western European music scene, these are of course also by no means representative of the countless incredible artists and organisations at the very cutting edge of art and culture. But that call was anyway a nice reminder that living here, results, not talk, matter.
Some other good news- the world premiere of Otherhood (2022) which I wrote across continents, but mostly during an incredibly inspiring time in India in the spring of 2022, will finally take place at the Musiikkitalo in Helsinki in autumn of this year. A number of large projects are anyway moving forward, as well as existing ones returning to the stage, especially in 2025-26. But if anything, I’m excited to have the chance to hear some new, smaller-scale projects be heard and shared this year across Europe and mainland China.
22 January 2024
Hong Kong, HKSAR
The University of Oxford screening and discussion of Russia: Today (2020) came and went, and the last couple weeks back in Hong Kong have been already full of life and promise. And aside from (or, perhaps, because of?) the record low temperatures due tomorrow, I have rarely been as excited to be back as I am now. Vivacissimo (2023) will be released online later this winter, and the new ‘demo’ work for Hong Kong Ballet will also finally see the light of day in the spring. Meanwhile, I am excited to start writing a new piece for string quartet, pure and simple, for the Paris-based Quatuor Arod, to be premiered at the Eslite Chamber Music Festival in Taipei, Taiwan before going on tour with this wonderful group over the summer. Something different for me, to be sure.
There’s progress on future performances for The Once and Future (2021) on the horizon in Europe in 2025, and with a reinvigorated staging and, especially, a new, truly tech-forward costume. All this is surely thanks to the continuing and robust support for culture and research in Hong Kong which continues to keep me (mostly happily) here, and quite busy.
After so much of last year spent planning and producing work, I really hope for 2024 to allow me to focus on what, and who, matters to me most. Loved ones, family, music, making the most out of every day. A recent conversation with some European counterparts on courage in the arts was unintentionally indicative of how great a gulf there is between the everyday reality and so much of artistic creation, and not in a good way. This commitment to being grounded and being involved, being true, will, I hope, fill the coming days, weeks, and months, and lead to new compositions that are not only deserving of their own creation, but equally so of the world’s attention.
