Swan Song R&D 1 – initial research and plots

It is time to start working on the project. I started off by mapping out the plot of the opera: how many tracks are there, where do they take place in Hong Kong, and how do I imagine they sound.

I wanted the sonic world of the opera to be a clash of the imperialist English classical music and the metropolitan world Hong Kong was establishing at the time. The problem with that is there is no clear image of how Hong Kong sounded in that era. The problem is very multi-layered, let me try to illustrate it: If I were to do a very “indigenous” sounding Hong Kong that would be inaccurate, because it wasn’t like that, we have always been very cosmopolitan. If I go very “modern 80s”, that wouldn’t be a very good representation either, because it isn’t distinct to that era. Hong Kong is a rootless culture, which is why it is so hard to create a sonic palette that could represent that without sounding too obvious and “vintage”.

What I want is to situate myself in 1986, then imagine what would happen if I were writing songs in that time for a riot to represent my people and our values. This brings in the two books mentioned in the last blog post “About Space’ and ‘Sonic Fiction’. I think of this project as very realistic yet fictional, kind of like imaginative news/history. As I recall the famous journalist/writer that died two days ago, Lee Yi, once said: fictions always carry truth, except for names, while history carries fictions, except for names. In my case, this story is very true about my heritage (at least I am trying my hardest to stick to it), except for how things actually happened.

Getting some references to back up what I will propose for the sound world>>>

War Symphony (Chen Li, 1995, poem taken from《島嶼邊緣》)

This is a piece of contemporary poetry from a Taiwanese poet Chen Li. He used Chinese characters as blocks of graphics to compose a picture, in a way he made of a megalithic word out of the poem. There are four words that were used, “兵“(soldier), “乒”(ping), “乒”(pong)”, “丘”(hill). You can see how similar these characters look and make out what kind of an image is he producing with these four words, kind of like modular atoms arranged to form an object.

This is a great way of thinking about sound and language in my piece, can I utilise sounds the same way he uses words? Can I almost collage pieces of fragments into a narrative?

This is a song from the electronic pop duo Tat Ming Pair, it was the theme song to a film “戀愛季節“ (Season for Love) in 1986. This song shows the 909 drum sequencer sound that was so popular in Hong Kong and Japan at the time, and the melody-heavy signature of Cantopop in the 80s.

Electronic music was a very powerful tool for people to reimagine the future, whether it is now or thirty years back. It has always been the escape of reality through its synthetic nature. Recently got my Lyra-8. I think I can use it as a jumping point to start imagining the future from the point of view of a Hong Konger 30 years ago.

This soundtrack has been inspiring me for years, so crucial to my creative journey. To revisit it again, this soundtrack adapted a lot of classical music and written Cantonese lyrics over it to reflect our colonised, newly invented culture and identity.

This animated film represented post-colonial Hong Kong, in a undoubtable way which everyone from Hong Kong would agree. It reminds all of us our core value as a Hong Konger, that our success in late- 20th century was a product to our hard work. As colonised people we were never looked up to by the British government, yet we proved ourselves by our remarkable performance again and again. That is still so true, I felt in the UK as an East-Asian person, I am always being judged by my performance but not my potential. And we never asked for appreciations, we do what we do for ourselves and our family, and we are so good at that. I take pride in my heritage and I want to show that.

Yet while we are very good at playing the game white neo-liberal imperialists, we are rootless. We don’t have proper culture that developed over time. We took over what we like in the west and made our own. It is time we start creating things that belongs to us. This I think works especially well in the riots scenes I written in the opera.

I started experimenting with the Lyra-8 and layed some vocals on top very quickly to test out this sonic palette. It turned out to be way darker than I imagined. Which I think is interesting and could take on its form to become a bigger motif in the piece. This quick demo also made it clear that I need to think about the use of vocal style and language, because the use of Cantonese and indigenous folk singing was too on the nose and I don’t want that. There is a balance I need to find between abstraction and the narrative that functions and not obvious. But what I have now is good, it is a clear structure, I just have to refine the composition to complete it now.

The next blogpost I will try to further contextualise experimental theatre with influences of theatre pieces from the 80s of Hong Kong.