STRING BY STRING

for min. 8 string players is composed and directed by Joyce Beetuan Koh.

Inspired by the glissandi passages of Greek-French composer and architect Iannis Xenakis’ 1954 orchestral work ‘Metastasis’, the musical material has been conceived with the site-specific, resonant attributes of the gallery space in the ArtScience Museum Singapore n mind to create musical and spatial depth.

Composed for SOUNDISLANDS : Resound Festival 2021, presented by ArtScience Museum, Singapore.
Duration: c. 28 minutes

MOUTHFUL • MASKED DUET

How to breathe deeply and sing expressively in this moment when the mouth and nose embody danger? How to have pleasure in music when in its essences it is airborne and moist?

Let us return power and agency to the mouth and voice while still protecting ourselves and others. Let us express our emotions freely into the air that we all share.
The Mouthful mask is both conceptual and practical. It exposes the breath and gives us an earful and eyeful of air. Mouthful projects a new sound which follows the guidelines of our time while it overcomes and embraces the obstacles we face with poetry and humor.

Mouthful is conceived by Ana Prvački, activated by Reginald Jalleh and Zerlina Tan with original music by Joyce Bee Tuan Koh, produced and manifested by Galina Mihaleva . A transdisciplinary, collaborative work, Mouthful is realized with two performative activations and as an installation and sound work in The Vitrine at NTU CCA Singapore, Block 43 Malan Road.

SOUNDING BODY

Dance and Music

The guqin has a wide range of sonorities. Each finger technique produces a unique sonic character. Imagine the dancer's body becoming expressive fingers that pluck and strum the strings: bright sounds, prolonged, scratchy, etc. What new aural and visual synergies might happen?

Conceived by Joyce Beetuan Koh, Sounding Body is an original choreographic score where the dancers' movements shape the quality and intensity of the music. The body sounds! Through an interactive system, the dancers learn to control the sounds. They have to find ways to express the sound character, eliciting a new vocabulary of movements. Dancers no longer move to the music but move the music through their movements.

Together with Ricky Sim, RAW Moves' artistic director, Felix Leuschner, instrument-system designer, and the dancers of RAW Moves dance company, we pose several questions about the intersection between movement and sound. For example, how should and could the body move to control the sound artfully? How measurable is artfulness? Does artfulness emerge when it is no longer possible to know if the movement is shaping the sound or the sound is driving the movement?

I have relied on John Thompson's comprehensive site http://www.silkqin.com for knowledge about the qin and qin music. Five classic pieces of the guqin repertoire inspire me, 'Autumn River Night Anchorage,' 'Clouds over the Xiao and Xiang Rivers,' 'Dialogue between Fisherman and Woodcutter,' 'Wine Mad' and 'Water Immortal.' The images of water, mountain, and epic journeys run through these pieces. Resisting the descriptive connotation of these pieces, I have sought to extrapolate a single thread that could flow through the entire work. It is the poetic idea of enjoying life.

Commissioned by RAW Moves, 2016.
Duration: c. 35 minutes

AWAY WE GO

https://ntu.ccasingapore.org/exhibition/tomas-saraceno-arachnid-orchestra-jam-sessions/#top

Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions at NTU CCA Singapore is a new production by Tomás Saraceno commissioned by the centre that brings his long-term research on spider webs into the realm of sound. The artist uses spider webs as musical instruments embodying the incredible structural properties of the spider’s silk, but also the spider’s sophisticated mode of communication through vibrations.

Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions is a pioneering investigation by Saraceno and his studio in Berlin that involves a range of collaborators from various universities and disciplines. The exhibition space is turned into an interactive sound and visual installation, a process-driven laboratory for experimentation that pushes the boundaries of interspecies communication.

As an extension of the exhibition, a dedicated website (www.arachnidorchestra.org) will operate as a research platform and playful hypertext of musical tuning.

'Away We Go' is the third track.

Joyce Beetuan Koh, concept, composer, director, aeolic instrument player
Étienne Turpin, wordsmith and reciter
Cheryl Ho and Nadine Ng, violinists