Performances

• 2024 (Premiere)

  Soundbites: Les Eclats du Son

  Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music

  Les Eclats du Son Ensemble

for piano and vibraphone was written in collaboration with Les Eclats du Son, who offered to utilise a wide range of percussion instruments. However, I eventually conceptualised this piece in a very economical way by restricting myself to using just the vibraphone and the piano. The two sound qualities of both instruments share many similarities, which reminded me of the qualities of the Javanese Gamelan instruments in the ensemble I was playing in. As such, I found myself borrowing various concepts from there. For instance, irama form the main crux of the piece. Irama is defined as the ratio of the melodic tempo in relation to other elaborating instrumental lines and the gong structure. This creates a “paradoxical” phenomenon whereby as the skeletal melody slows down, the music starts to feel faster (temporal density), even though the tempo remains approximately the same.

Javanese Gamelan is often viewed as one of the more assessable forms of music, where newcomers can pick up an instrument and join the ensemble very quickly. Culturally, it does not impose perfection and virtuosity upon its musicians unlike Western or Thai musical cultures. As such, imperfections of amateur musicians emerge in various forms, and I used the imperfections of meter to highlight how ensembles may not always play exactly together yet produces something that is still coherent. Combining with Steve Reich’s phasing concept, for piano and vibraphone portrays complex tuplets to convey the written acceleration and deceleration within a fixed metric tempo.