SETTS #3 / Southeastern Ensemble for Today's and Tomorrow's Sounds / Review

SETTS #3

Southeastern Ensemble for

Today's and Tomorrow's Sounds

The Chamber, The Arts House

Sunday (1 May 2016)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 3 May 2016 with the title "Concert with an edge".

Simply put, Southeastern Ensemble for Today's and Tomorrow's Sounds (SETTS) is the most avant-garde of Singapore's new music groups. Its latest presentation was not so much a concert but a sitting within a creator's workshop and laboratory, half-expecting something to blow up in the face.

Composer Wang Chen Wei arranges a
microphone to record the string quartet.

The artists and technical crew of UFO Project
prepare themselves as an amused audience
(including Pearl Samuel and Peter Kellock) look on.

Tables and floor were littered with metres of cables and wires, a veritable spaghetti connected to computers, cameras, microphones, electronica and various paraphernalia. There were possibly more composers, performers, collaborators and support staff in attendance than actual audience, but nobody was counting.

The 2-hour programme performed without break opened with Waves, conceived by UFO Project, possessing the polystylism that described Russian composer Alfred Schnittke's works. A string quartet (violinists Christina Zhou and Nanako Takata, violist Janice Tsai and cellist Lin Juan), playing a Bach-like chorale, was being peppered by electronic sounds, and soon they were completely submerged.

A dancer dressed as an alien in pink polka dots then commanded the floor, spinning a globe attached to a slowly rotating electric drill. The quartet soon returned, closing in a serene C major chord, perhaps symbolising that peace and strife on earth comes in waves and cycles.

The longest work was Chow Jun Yan's Childhood Rhapsody, from which four of six numbers were performed by pianist Shane Thio alongside the real-time painting of four canvasses by visual artist Frank Lee Foo Koon. Using combinations of brushes, rollers, improvised styli and Pollockian drip technique, these were more than mere scribbles.  Possibly representing suppressed memories of past trauma, the sometimes violent music was achieved by scraping and striking the innards of the grand piano.   

The chamber was then plunged into total darkness for Malaysian Goh Lee Kwang's The Air (Singapore). Snatches of clarinet (Colin Tan), flute (Roberto Alvarez) and oboe (Joost Flach) tones punctuating the stilness as a projected electronic stop watch counted the time elapsed. Resembling forest sounds at night and John Cage's Ryoanji, the work concluded just past the 10-minute mark.

Wang Chen Wei's Cosmic Echoes employed Alan Kartik's French horn skills, transformed by Kittiphan Janbuala's manipulations into time-phased distant tones. These had an unearthly ethereal feel, as if heard from some faraway galaxy with digitally transformed images from the Hubble telescope. In a similar vein, transformations were applied to Christoph Wichert's bassooon and vocalisations in Ding Jian Han's Hanged,  using Eric Tan Wei Fang's poetry read by dramaturge Natalie Hennedige. 

The final work, E-lab-oration, was a joint effort by Hennedige, Thai composer Anothai Nithibon and Singaporean Hoh Chung Shih. Its title provides certain clues, as this was derived from a Facebook chat-cum discussion, with protagonists played by French horn, bassoon, piano and Iskandar Rashid on percussion. Whether solo, in conversation, or engaging in debate and gentle disagreement, here was a forum of ideas tossed up, discussed, accepted or rejected.

Composer Hoh Chung Shih works on his
personal composer as a silhouetted Shane Thio performs.

By wait, who does the fourth instrument represent? One guesses that to be the audience, the fourth leg of a stable table, without whom created music and performances such as these would cease to exist. The stars of SETTS #4 strike back on 26 September at Esplanade Recital Studio, so be sure to return. 

All the performers and artists of SETT #3

SETTS #1 / Southeastern Ensemble of Today's & Tomorrow's Sounds / Review

SETTS #1

Southeastern Ensemble

for Today's and Tomorrow's Sounds

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (27 September 2015)

An edited version of this review was published in The Straits Times on 29 September 2015 with the title "Sleepless in sonic garden".

SETTS is the acronym for Southeastern Ensemble for Today's and Tomorrow's Sounds, the latest new music ensemble in Singapore. Founded by violinist / educator Ruth Rodrigues and Singapore Symphony Orchestra bassoonist Christoph Wichert, its mission is to showcase the music of Southeast Asian composers, with performances by some of the nation's top professional musicians.

The small audience that gathered did not know what to expect when Hoh Chung Shih's Parts / Yuan began with eleven musicians dispersed throughout the hall playing seemingly random notes and sequences. The composer described this as a “sonic garden”, a sound installation with a combination of “fixed” or planted musicians playing from scores and “mobile” string players hovering around them and walking through the audience.

That piece of “surround sound” served as a bookend for the concert which also had more conventional ensemble pieces. The subject of sleep (or the lack of) occupied two young composers' works. Daniel Bonaventure Lim's Hold It Still was a scherzo-like piece scored for wind quintet and  percussionist Iskandar Rashid, with Roberto Alvarez's flute and piccolo being the protagonist.

Here slumber gets interrupted by vivid and sometimes disturbing dreams, which was the case with Malaysian composer Chow Jun Yan's Ning III for piano, violin and flute. With Shane Thio stroking the insides of the piano, it was left for violinist Christina Zhou and Alvarez to conjure up harmonics and the most tinnitus-inducing sounds from their instruments, all guaranteed to result in insomnia.

In between were Quartre Pieces pour Hautbois et Piano by veteran Vietnamese composer Ton-That Thiet (born 1933), short and varied essays in the style of the French modernist school. Composers like Messiaen, Dutilleux and Jolivet came to mind. Dutch oboist Joost Flach negotiated its bed of brambles with aplomb, accompanied by Thio who also performed Chua Jon Lin's Seven Miniatures, interesting character pieces that displayed influences by Satie, Bartok and Ligeti among others.

Teenaged Bruneian composer Shilah Husaimee Ahmad's 6 Cities In March for wind quintet was the most traditional work on show, but one displaying much maturity. Its theme was an Arabic lullaby prayer song heard as a child, subjected to six variations, each representing a city of spiritual significance including Brunei, Jeddah, Mecca, Medinah, Dubai and Singapore. Its performers were Alvarez, Flach, Wichert, Colin Tan (clarinet) and Alan Kartik (French horn).    

The Indonesian Septian Dwi Cahyo's String Quartet No.1 comprised very short movements, much in the astringent manner of Viennese serialist Anton Webern. Its thorny pages brought out the virtuosity of violinists Zhou, Nanako Tanaka, violist Marietta Ku and cellist Lin Juan. This concert of three world premieres and three Singapore premieres was brought full circle with a reprise of Hoh's Parts / Yuan, this time with the added element of audience interaction.

Photo credit: Prof Bernard Tan

Hoh requested the audience to mingle with the musicians and among themselves, to react, to imitate and to oppose whatever actions and sounds as they see fit. This was essentially a licence to a free-for-all, so cue the mayhem of the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring and whatever occurs when concert etiquette flies out of the window. It is hoped that SETTS#2 proves to be another riot. 

All photographs by the kind permission of SETTS.