SINGAPORE COMPOSERS FESTIVAL 2026 / Morse Percussion & SYC Ensemble Singers

 

SINGAPORE COMPOSERS FESTIVAL 2026

Morse Percussion &

SYC Ensemble Singers

The Theatre Practice, 54 Waterloo Street

Sunday (7 June 2026)

11.30 am & 4.30 pm

This review was published in The Straits Times on 9 June 2026 with the title "Singaporean and South Korean talents on display".

Only in its second edition, the Singapore Composers Festival 2026 organised by Composers Society of Singapore (CSS) was an eight-hour affair that included two public roundtable chats and two concerts of contemporary music.

Singaporean and South Korean composers
with members of Morse Percussion.

The opening concert was a showcase for CSS and South Korean composer collective Space For Sound, with eight works performed by Morse Percussion, comprising Derek Koh, Joachim Lim, Cheong Kah Yiong and Yuru Lee. Those who regard music for percussion as just “banging on cans” will be surprised by the variety of sounds generated.

Photo: Amos Poh

Toh Yan Ee’s Atlas opened the show with timpani skins being scraped before proceeding to intricate rhythms on pitched percussion (marimba and xylophone) resembling gamelan, and drumming that extolled the majesty of the eponymous star constellation. Varying the sound palette completely, Won Jung Lee’s The Glittering Diamond Water delighted in extreme high registers. Minimalist textures emanating from marimba, slung gongs and bowed vibraphone keys, created a beautifully ethereal effect that bears repeated listening.

Photo: Amos Poh

The next two works were the most violent. Somin Lee’s Death of First-Borns was some orgy of militarist might, dominated by snare-drum, cymbals, triangles and xylophone employed strictly for beats not melody. The wanton biblical slaughter of Egyptians was its depiction. Hoh Chung Shih’s Rounding Round celebrated round objects, recurrent subjects as in a rondo (round dance) and three players rotating positions around a central axis of instruments. This later erupted into a free-for-all with mallets hurled in all directions.

Photo: Amos Poh

This concert was clearly a playground for exploring new sounds and techniques. Seung-ki Hong’s Resonant Ritual continued in its vein, tinkling on metal, tribal-drumming and walking in circles, now in a counter-clockwise direction. Hye-Jeong Hwang Lee’s Percussion Sanjo was a modern-day update of the traditional Korean sanjo instrumental essay with hints of melody emerging from a marimba, amid more drumming. All four works by Korean composers were world premieres

Photo: Amos Poh

Two local composers closed the matinee, with Emily Koh’s emoyo describing the emotional yo-yo involved in getting an American green card. Judging by the lack of angst, it was probably not such an ordeal. Tan Yuting’s Kotekan revelled in the repeated harmonic patterns found in gamelan, realised with mini-cymbals, temple blocks and a drum-set.

Photo: Amos Poh

The festival’s closing concert was the CSS Young Composer Forum, where budding composers were mentored by established practitioners in the creating music for choir. The 22-member SYC Ensemble Singers led by Jennifer Tham did the honours for seven works by mentee and mentor.

Photo: Amos Poh

Anvay Mathur’s Anahata, Sanskrit word for “unstruck sound”, relied on long-held syllables, vocal drones and sliding between pitches. Thomas Kai-ren Rettig’s Greenland used his friend Elliot Chew’s poem to eloquently describe a distant and unattainable goal, unrelated to Donald Trump’s territorial designs.

Photo: Amos Poh

The very dry acoustic in the venue’s black box theatre, while excellent for percussion, was far less conducive for voices. Despite the choir’s spotless diction, the first word of Bae Jun Soo’s Luminate, bi-cheul (빛을 or light), sounded like “bitch”, an unintended consequence. The next two works, Ding Jian Han’s Silenc(E)mpty? and Estene Cheong’s Why, had long stretches of spoken words, with the voices suspended in some form of sprechgesang (speech-song), a favourite technique of polytonalists.

Photo: Amos Poh

Alicia De Silva’s Quando La Rota used words from Dante’s Divine Comedy, closing in a devotional tone with visions of paradise within sight. To close, Danny Imson’s Ama Namin or The Lord’s Prayer in Tagalog opened with a very even unison. A mixed tape was slowly unreeled linking all the performers, before they walked off stage in a procession as the music dissipated into nothingness.

Both concerts at the Singapore Composers Festival were a veritable showcase of local creative talent, and long may that continue.

Singapore Composers Festival 2026 - Composers Society of Singapore

SYC & FRIENDS: 60 YEARS YOUNG / SYC Ensemble Singers / Review

 

SYC & FRIENDS: 

60 YEARS YOUNG 

SYC Ensemble Singers 

Victoria Concert Hall 

Saturday (1 June 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 3 June 2024 with the title "SYC celebrates 60th anniversary with modern music".

In a Straits Times article from 1992, the Singapore Youth Choir (SYC) was named as Singapore’s top choir. SYC, founded in 1964, appointed young choral conductor Jennifer Tham as its artistic director in 1986. As its leader ever since, SYC was renamed the SYC Ensemble Singers in 2004 to reflect its coming of age. 

This trendsetting choir has been committed to new music, its 60th anniversary concert being a showcase of 20th and 21st century works. The show opened with works by three Singaporean composers. SYC alumna Diana Soh’s Vak (2013) comprised three short pieces, some with no actual words. 

Singers strolled onstage for its Salutanya Prelude, just mouthing single syllable tones. This was followed by seemingly random tongue-twisting consonants, whistling and oral clicking in Vak (Sanskrit for the goddess of speech and utterance), before a more traditional folksong-like close in Salutanya Postlude. 

Joyce Koh’s Le or Yue (1998), after the Chinese word for happiness and music, was a wordless melisma of long-held tones. Merging and coalescing into a mirage of sound effects, its progression as a dreamy meditation of joy was punctuated by well-placed strikes of five Tibetan brass bowls. Simply mesmerising. 

Described as a contemporary madrigal, Leong Yoon Pin’s Si Nian (Nostalgia, 1988) was SYC’s first ever commission. Sung in Mandarin, this work led to SYC winning first prize at the International Music Eisteddfod in Llangollen (Wales). Full of reassuring harmonies, these were premised on the words wo de gu xiang, reflecting love for one’s homeland and a mother’s embrace. 

Joined by its youth wing, a vastly-expanded SYC offered well-known American choral composer Eric Whitacre’s The Stolen Child (2008) with words by William Butler Yeats. With verses sung by a smaller subchoir backed by a larger body of singers, its refrain Come Away, O Human Child! was a lament on lost childhood youth and innocence. 

Venezuelan composer Cristian Grases’s Lux Aeterna (Eternal Light) from Canticles Of Light (2024), in Latin as with all Roman Catholic liturgy, received its world premiere. Its cascading and echoing harmonies provided a warm homogeneous blanket of sound, serenely closing a very eclectic first half. 

The main work on show was Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum (1984), performed by three choirs including alumni, Singapore Management University Chamber Choir and guests, backed by Wayfarer Sinfonietta’s string players and B-L Duo (Bertram Wee and Lynette Yeo) on prepared piano and windharp. 

Photo: Law Kian Yan

This Ambrosian praise hymn of 29 lines in Latin was a solid half-hour built upon the D triads (both major and minor) with drones in his trade-marked tintinnabuli style. Reliving the ethereal sound of bells, the music had a bit of everything, voices in unison and triadic harmonies, string meditations and calmly ecstatic outbursts. 

Photo: Law Kian Yan

The overall effect was a hauntingly beautiful one, so calming that it risked being soporific in parts. The music kept flowing under conductor Tham’s firm guiding hands till its conclusion of ultimate solace. For SYC’s intrepid programming and committed performances, may there be another 60 years of great music-making.

BLACK & WHITE / SYC Ensemble Singers / Review

BLACK & WHITE

SYC Ensemble Singers

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (30 March 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 1 April 2013 with the title "Songs profane and sacred".

Choral conductor Jennifer Tham (left) was deservedly awarded the Cultural Medallion in 2012 for a life’s work in the field of music. The fruits of her passion is the SYC Ensemble Singers (formerly the Singapore Youth Choir), which she first conducted in 1986 and has led to a long string of artistic successes. Their strengths lie in an unstinting commitment to new music, including those by Singaporean composers, and continually redefining the a cappella choral repertoire.

A sizeable audience attended this 90-minute concert with a contrasted programme that dichotomised, as its title suggested, darkness and light, despair and hope, death and life, and profane and sacred. Its first half was dedicated to music set to biblical or liturgical texts, with age-old medieval vocal traditions updated to confront present times.

Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo’s Unicornis Captivatur (right) began with plainchant, and then embraced polyphony in a madrigal-like setting which was essentially a celebration of the Easter season. Life trumps death in the Alleluia refrain, with its allegory of dying lamb and victorious lion. The choir immediately made its mark with its confidence and well-disciplined entries.

Although there were some intonation problems in Lorenzo Donati’s Lamento di Cecilia, the feel good factor continued into Mikko Heinio’s Luceat (left). Using passages from the Requiem mass, the work juxtaposed the breathy sound of exhalations with intoned words that sought the peace of eternal rest. The singing in high registers was excellent, and its heady climax showed that its emphasis was on illumination rather than the spectre of death.

The harmonic austerity of Antonio Russo’s Beati Quorum was brought in sharp contrast with Singaporean Kelly Tang’s The Angel (right), the latter a setting of William Blake’s texts. Simple and succinct, the all-women’s voices shone in this exquisitely beautiful and serene meditation about ageing.

A mark of a true leader is in grooming the next generation, and Tham provided opportunities for her two young assistants to conduct the choir. Chong Wai Lun led in Peteris Vasks’s Ziles Zina (The Tomtit’s Message, left) which harnessed disparate influences and styles, which included long portamenti (slides) and passages of aleatory or random utterances.

Choy Siew Woon ably helmed in four pieces of Suite de Lorca by Einojuhani Rautavaara and Bo Holten’s Hermit Peak (right), with its broad bold harmonies. It was Tham who had the last say, closing the concert with the Dane Holten’s First Snow, which began with a wordless sequence of cascading tones and despite its cold subject matter, later generated a good deal of warmth.

The choir’s encore, the gospel hymn-like Angel by Sarah McLachlan, showcased lovely unison singing and sent the audience home happy.  

Dobrogosz Plays Dobrogosz / SYC Ensemble Singers / Review

This review of the Saturday evening concert was published in The Straits Times on 28 March 2011 with the title "Hola Halo Singapore?"

It is not often that a local musical group devotes an entire concert to music of a living composer who is not a Singaporean. However the American Steve Dobrogosz (born 1956), now resident in Sweden, has written enough choral music of note to merit that kind of attention from the Singapore Youth Choir Ensemble Singers.

A classical composer who crosses comfortably between genres of serious music and jazz/gospel, Dobrogosz was also the pianist for the concert. He began with a spot of solo improvisation before the young singers of SYCES led by conductor and Young Artist Award recipient Jennifer Tham came centrestage for Dobrogosz’s Mass, the programme’s longest work.

Masses in Latin do not have to be entirely solemn. The rhythmic riffs of Kyrie Eleison were sung with repetitious vigour recalling minimalism but coloured with the groovy soul of the Beatles. In Gloria, some semblance of plainchant alternated with bluesy replies from the piano before polyphony gradually took over. Upbeat syncopations in the Credo completed the joyous piece that breaks with stuffy tradition.

Lux Aeterna from the Requiem continued in this happy hallowed manner, rising to a life-affirming crescendo and the purity of a solo soprano’s line. The hymn Only Love Is True luxuriated in its country and gospel leanings. While the lights at Esplanade were dimmed for Earth Hour, luminous voices lit up the stage.

The lighter second half of the concert presented the World Premiere of Singapore Songs. Dobrogosz himself admitted to not having visited Singapore previously, and might be forgiven for writing music to nonsense lyrics like Mocca Bonny May, Hola Halo and Haiku Luna Jah. Listening to these entertaining and heavily rhythm-driven songs, one might guess that Singapore is some mythical exotic locale in the South Pacific, the Caribbean or sub-Saharan Africa. Should one be insulted? No, unless we still live in treetops, subsist on coconuts and wear pineapples as headgear.

Bassist Tony Makarome and drummer Tamagoh were also on hand to accompany Dobrogosz in the purely instrumental Road Song. More improvisation and ad libs before the choir returned in four Gospels. Hallelujah, Too, Father Down, Mighty River, Roads and the encore Lord, I’m Free. Written in the best tradition of Afro-American spirituals, these closed the concert with much gusto and verve.

SYC Ensemble Singers Concert: Birth and Death / Review

BIRTH AND DEATH
SYC Ensemble Singers
JENNIFER THAM, Conductor
Esplanade Recital Studio
Sunday (8 March 2009)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 10 March 2009.

Way back in 1992, a Straits Times article named the Singapore Youth Choir (SYC) as the land’s top chorus. The choir’s commitment to new music and ability to galvanise young singers into a dynamic a cappella force were major reasons. Known as the SYC Ensemble Singers today, its conductor Jennifer Tham cited over 40 new works commissioned since the 1980s. Ten of these were given world premieres in 2004 alone, on the choir’s 40th anniversary.

One was Singaporean composer Hoh Chung Shih’s Birth and Death, a 5-movement meditation on texts by Vietnamese peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, providing the title and framework to this concert. The movements were divided into three blocs, in a way reminiscent of Mahler’s view of his Fifth Symphony, incidentally a journey from death to rebirth.

The choir had two Chinese words to sing – sheng (Birth or Life) and si (Death) - but the ingenious treatment stood out. In the 1st movement, three lines of singers whispered the consonants “sh” and “s” while snaking around three islands of voices that sang the words. The brief 2nd movement issued beautiful harmonies in an antiphonal manner with half the choir placed behind the audience.

Italian composer Corrado Margutti’s D’Amore e d’Ombre (About Love and Shadows), with texts by renaissance artist Michaelangelo, contrasted soothing textures in O Notte (O Night) with madrigal-like runs in Fugite Amanti (Flee From This Love). The dissonances of the former provided a strangely surreal respite, while a semi-chorus of 4 in the latter held their own through much intricate counterpoint.

Hoh’s 3rd movement saw the choir in two concentric circles with their backs facing the audience. Then came arguably the two most accessible works, Lithuanian Vytautas Miskinis’ Time Is Endless, with its highly reassuring F major chords, and Australian Stephen Leek’s Burrinjuck, a paean to the glorious outback.

Back to Hoh, the aleatoric 4th movement featured the 28 singers striking pebbles in a random manner, while singing the two words on command from Tham’s hands (left). Shades of Gyorgy Ligeti’s metronomic masterpiece as the sound of stone gradually dissipated into silence. The final movement channeled the spirit of John Cage; absolute silence as the conductor’s strokes drew out the Chinese characters on the studio’s backdrop with the aid of Gavin Lim’s multimedia projections.

While appreciative applause greeted the performers, all that remained was the word sheng, boldly emblazoned. The cycle of life, death and birth continues in perpetuity.