Welcome Message

 

On behalf of the Conservatory, I am pleased to welcome you to this PAMS festival focusing on the new in music with a particular emphasis on contemporary trends around the Pacific Rim. We are grateful to our Pacific Alliance of Music School partners for their contributions to the event and for being with us for these few days.

 

I particularly want to acknowledge here Associate Professor Peter Edwards for accepting my request to lead this project and managing it so effectively and with such imagination. His artistic direction of the project has been invaluable. We are grateful also to the National Gallery and Esplanade Spectrum for their support in hosting some of the final performances.  Thank you also to all staff, faculty and students who are contributing - I am sure it will be a most memorable and engaging event. 

 

 

Professor Bernard Lanskey

Director

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music

 

 

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Festival Director's Welcome Message

 

YouTube, Google, Wikipedia.  WeChat, WhatsApp, and Skype.  Only 30 years ago, science fiction films showed people video chatting with their relatives in distant lands.  Today, this is commonplace.  In terms of communication, our world has shrunk, and our access to information has grown.  In addition to influencing our daily lives or business lives, these communication and information shifts transform our cultural lives. For avid arts patrons, this must be exciting.  For artists, this can often be overwhelming.  Digesting and incorporating these new influences can be a challenge.  Philosophically, is the artist's origin, her national or ethnic background, in jeopardy of dilution, even extinction, due to these foreign influences?

 

These issues are explored in our weekend-long festival dedicated to contemporary music from PAMS institutions, a collection of music schools located in different parts of the Pacific Rim.  Two panel discussions explore the relationship between tradition and innovation as well as art and machines.  Two concerts of works by professors and students from participating PAMS institutions offer a sampling of the artistic ideas from throughout the region.  We also hold a concert of short performances situated throughout the National Gallery of Singapore with a selection of choral works from Pacific Rim composers, including our very own Leong Yoon Pin.  The festival ends with a concert performed by the conservatory New Music Ensemble under the baton of Dr. Chen Zhangyi.  The works on this concert touch on a relevant theme for those of us living in Asia, a region rich in traditions but also deeply engaged with Western musical practices: the influence, and often deep inspiration, of foreign cultural ideas within more familiar musical approaches.  Hear Jonathan Harvey's deeply personal expression of Vajrayana Buddhist practice and Liza Lim's exploration of a Sufi melody within her contemporary, experimental sound world.  There is Evan Ziporyn's Eel Bone, based on Balinese Wayang Kulit, with the original work demonstrated by I Wayan Rachman on Balinese gender.

 

We also host music that requires 220 volts.  Running for two days in the conservatory's Steven Baxter Recital Studio are works for audio playback and video from participating PAMS students and staff.  The students from the PAMS institutions have also spent much of the week collaborating on audio-visual installations that you can discover at various locations in the conservatory.

 

I would like to take this chance to express my deepest thanks to the participating institutions, the instructors who have shared their expertise and the students who have made great efforts to make this week a success.  I thank the musicians - our local professionals, alumni, and students from YSTCM and other PAMS institutions - for their dedication to excellent performances of the many new works on offer this weekend.  Finally, I thank those providing behind-the-scenes support that makes these events possible; without Jenny Ang, Tang I Shyan, Poo Lai Fong, Yap Pei Ying, and Wynne Fung plans would remain perpetually on the drawing board and guests would be stranded at the airport.

 

I do hope that the weekend's events leave you in some way transformed, that the music and discussions offer you new ideas and a memorable set of experiences that, at least as of this weekend, are yet be found on the internet.

 

 

 

Assoc Prof Peter Edwards

Festival Director