The Life and Music of Phoon Yew Tien: A Podcast with Kenneth Tay and Pow Jun Kai
Kenneth Tay and Pow Jun Kai (November 2021)
Monumentality at the Premiere of Phoon Yew Tien’s Confucius – A Secular Cantata
Kenneth Tay (November 2021)
In this essay, I offer some perspectives on monumentality with respect to the premiere of Phoon Yew Tien’s Confucius – A Secular Cantata in 2001. Beyond the musical content, I identify these areas which contribute to the importance of this landmark composition.
First, there was a high level of direct support by the state, in particular, through the National Arts Council. At the point of the premiere, it was reported by The Straits Times, Singapore’s most circulated daily newspaper, that a five-figure sum was put aside for the commission of the work, which was then the largest ever commission by the National Arts Council for concert music (Tan, 2001a). In addition, the premiere was a part of the Singapore Arts Festival, the largest state-supported international arts event. The scope of the festival was further invigorated to present the best in local and international arts, especially with the unveiling of the Renaissance City Report, which outlined a new strategic direction for the transformation of Singapore into a “key city in the Asian renaissance of the 21st Century and a cultural centre in the globalised world” (National Arts Council, 2000). High-level audiences at the premiere, which included then Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Ambassador-at-Large Tommy Koh, and Lee Seng Gee (the lattermost being chairman of Singapore’s largest charity foundation, the Lee Foundation) underpinned the commitment of the state as the largest champion for the arts, with Confucius – A Secular Cantata at the centre of attention (Tan, 2001b).
The CD album cover of the live production of Confucius – A Secular Cantata, featuring all performers at the curtain call.
Second, the sheer number of performers required to perform the work would have dwarfed many concert music productions at the point of the premiere. In 2001, the largest venue to stage the premiere would have been the Victoria Concert Hall, which could seat 883 audiences at full capacity. In my review of the programme notes together with the live CD recording, which includes the names of all performers, I counted a total of 64 orchestra members, 103 choristers (across three choirs) and 8 soloists, who were featured alongside conductor Professor Xia Fei Yun and chorus master Nelson Kwei.
The pages of the CD programme, which includes the instrumentation and names of performers for the Singapore Chinese Orchestra at the premiere of Confucius – A Secular Cantata
Third, at ten-movements long, with a total play time of 2 hours 27 minutes on the live CD production, Confucius – A Secular Cantata is the longest work written by any Singaporean composer for the concert music medium. More fascinating to me, Phoon Yew Tien, a composer whose compositional process revolves around a piano, an audio recorder, and music notation software, had labouriously hand-engraved all 490 pages of his full orchestral score. Phoon, who regularly writes reflections on his personal blog, recounts, “Prior to writing Confucius – A Secular Cantata, I had always handwritten my music on stave paper. But after six months, working hard day and night at a desk, I hurt my poor back! I decided to switch to use a computer keyboard to engrave my music” (Phoon, 2018; my translation).
The handwritten full score of Confucius – A Secular Cantata. Featured here is the opening of the 2nd movement.
Furthermore, Phoon reflected that “[a]lthough it [Confucius – A Secular Cantata] took me barely six months to complete, I actually worked on it day and night during the later stage of its creation. It was way beyond my expectation (I had originally planned to write a 90-minute piece). One recollection: it was like going on an impossible, long and arduous journey or climbing a mountain without ever seeing the peak. Composing music is a lonely venture. Those nights that saw me struggling all alone have helped me gain a fresh understanding of what loneliness means. In terms of personal development the effort I made in the process was in itself a reward. Looking back, besides a deep sense of fulfilment I have grown more confident in meeting any future challenges” (Phoon, 2001).
To conclude, the identity of Confucius – A Secular Cantata as a monumental work exists because of its interaction with a community that provides the necessary support for its premiere. The state, particularly through the National Arts Council, provided the necessary funding and administrative support for the organisation of the premiere at the Singapore Arts Festival. The performers not only invested energy towards learning of new repertoire, but also delivered the rousing performance that is kept on record through the CD. At the heart of the composition, is the composer, who toiled for months to bring the work to its completion.
Bibliography
Lim, Lorraine. 2012. “Constructing habitus: promoting an international arts trend at the Singapore Arts Festival”, <em>International Journal of Cultural Policy</em> 18(3), 308-322.
National Arts Council. 2000. Renaissance City Reports (2000, 2004, 2008). Retrieved 12 December 2021. https://www.nac.gov.sg/resources/arts-masterplans/renaissance-city-reports-(2000-2004-2008) .
Phoon, Yew Tien. 2001. Confucius – A Secular Cantata. Audio CD.
Phoon, Yew Tien. 2018. “《化雨》风波（一）”. Retrieved 13 December 2021. https://phoonyewtien.blogspot.com/2018/12/2001-10-cd-90.html .
Tan, Shzr Ee. 2001. “Phoon the ‘Show Loser’”. The Straits Times, May 25, 2001.
Tan, Shzr Ee. 2001. “Hard labour, sweet delivery”. The Straits Times, June 10, 2001.
Interview with Phoon Yew Tien
Kenneth Tay (January 2022)
Part 1 – On compositional process and the Chinese orchestra
KT: A very good morning! Thank you for having me here. Here’s the first question for today. I’d like to ask: when you compose, do you hear chords, melodies and harmonies in your head, and then you write them down? Or do you try different things and improvise at the piano? How does your compositional process work, and does it involve a combination of some of these methods?
PYT: That’s quite a lot of a question! You see, I don’t have perfect pitch, so I can only imagine the sound. I love paper, and I used to play a lot on the piano. My time is different from now. During my time, we are talking about the 1970s and 1980s. I only started using computers after 2002. And before that, if there were things I wasn’t sure of, I would have to go to the piano. And traditionally, for composers, part of the training required learning how to play the piano. There are very few exceptions, like Berlioz, who didn’t play the piano, but we can imagine composers like Schumann, Chopin and so on, everybody plays the piano. They are not only instrumentalists, but also composers and conductors. So it is a combination.
KT: Based on a copy of Confucius: A Secular Cantata that I borrowed from the library, you handwrote everything, over 400 pages?
PYT: This was before 2002! Before I started using computers for notation. There was a lot for me to do, to come up with the full orchestra score, as well as the piano short score for the choir and vocalists. So that took up a lot of time. I only knew I needed to do all that towards the end, as I was finishing the orchestral score. So it was a huge blow to me, it was kind of a shock because I was just trying to finish and meet the deadline. It wasn’t in the contract, I’m not really sure, because I was trying to concentrate on the orchestra, the choir and the solo parts.
The reason I eventually turned to the computer was because of this piece! Because writing Confucius: A Secular Cantata really hurt my back. Imagine, you compose such a long work, I think in less than half a year, and along the way there were many problems. So it was quite a challenge.
KT: Of all the music that you have written so far, have they all received performances? Or are there some that haven’t yet been performed?
PYT: Good question. As a professional composer, there are different stages I suppose. I am lucky in a way because in my early years, in the 1970s, I worked with the PA Chinese Orchestra. And at that time there weren’t many scores because of the political landscape. They were very sensitive about communist ideologies and a lot of Chinese music had associations with Mainland China. And they would have been published as records, but most of them were banned, including those without political issues. So there was a shortage of music for the Chinese Orchestras here in Singapore. So what I did was a lot of dictation. I’d listen to records and write as much as possible. The music then wasn’t as complicated as now, so it was quite doable. I could get about 70-80%, and it was quite enough for the orchestra, because the orchestra was really short of compositions and repertoire. Nowadays, there are so many composers! It’s also easier for ensembles to buy music now, with the internet.
The good thing was, I got a lot of opportunities to practice. It wasn’t stressful at all. That time I hadn’t received much formal training, but had some advice from a few people. I had only learned from Mr Leong Yoon Pin (梁荣平) from 1974, and those arrangements that I did, some of it was before that, some of it was after. I think Western music theory and harmonies doesn’t fit wholly into the Chinese orchestral music in those days, and you have to think of a way to go around it. It made you think, how to make use of what you learned in Western music theory.
I think also in Singapore, we are one of the pioneers of using Western concepts of music and merging them into Chinese orchestra music. My generation… I don’t know about other people, but perhaps because I was more serious about it, so I did quite a bit of it. Perhaps that is something similar to what the Chinese composers from Mainland China are doing too, at that time.
I would say 90% of my music have been performed. There are those pieces I have written that were for my own interest, to try out something. The orchestra might not be available all the time, but most of the time they were okay because they needed new music to play.
After having lessons with Mr Leong, we had a group of pupils that had interest in composing songs, and there were some competitions. There were at least 3 that I participated in. So those were the ones where I wrote something, and had performance opportunities of my work. I joined the PA Chinese Orchestra in 1974 as a musician as well as arranger, under conductor Mr Ng Tai Kong (吴大江), who became the first director of the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, which I consider the best Chinese Orchestra in the world. So the music I wrote, the musicians will practice it.
End of 1970s, I went to Australia under a Singapore Symphony Orchestra scholarship, initially to study the flute, and later on having two degree programmes going on at the same time! I did compose a lot, and most of it have been performed. Apart from those you know, assignments? Haha! But being in school as a composer was wonderful – they would be performed in some masterclass by leading musicians, or in concerts by student musicians.
So after I came back to Singapore, I was probably the only person working professionally as a composer. Even though I had to pay back my bond by serving the PA Chinese Orchestra from 1984-1992, and that period I was the assistant and associate conductor, I still wrote quite a bit of music performed at the Singapore Arts Festival as well as overseas. I also taught in NAFA from 1984, and was the head of the music department between 1993 and 1996.
That time, I was doing two things – I was administrator for the music department, and I was also taking on commissions from local organisations as well as overseas. Although before that I won some compositional prizes, like the Yoshiro Irino Memorial Prize, which I received before Tan Dun (谭盾) did! Haha! But I was getting to around 40 years old, I thought I should do something better than I had already done before, and I got a bit worried. For the serious compositions, if I didn’t try to do something good, then if I got older I wouldn’t have the energy and the motivation. So I tried to challenge myself, without a commission, to come up with something good, even without a performance.
On my arrangements… part of my education was from my early childhood in the 1960s. There wasn’t much entertainment in Singapore at that time, the main source of it was the radio. The Rediffusion channel. Your family members would listen to those old records and the radio. There were English oldies, Chinese oldies, and some Western classical music even, but then you didn’t know the name of those works. Later on we find out its some masterpiece and at that time we just go, wow, it is very nice. So I listened to a lot of popular music at that time, now considered oldies. I was Chinese educated, so of course I listened to a lot of the Chinese oldies.
But if you know about the Chinese oldies, in the 1930s to 1940s in Shanghai, a lot of the music were arranged and played by Russian musicians. But of course the melodies would have come from the Chinese songwriters, like Yao Min (姚明), Li Jinguang (黎景光), Chen Ge Xin (陈歌辛). When I listened to the arrangements, I liked the way they arranged them, the colour, the harmonisations, so unconsciously, over time, I remember a lot of details. I didn’t know much about 4-part harmony then, but when listening to the same song arranged by different people, I just had a feeling that made me uncomfortable, like something was wrong. And so we come back to the 1990s, when I have more time to write music after I left the PA Chinese Orchestra. There’s a lot of memory in this music I grew up with. Some of the recordings, I couldn’t get access to again, so I based it of my memory, and rearranged tunes according to what I can remember. So I did two CDs in Shanghai of these kinds of arrangements, about 30 pieces in total. But I think to date, I did more than 100 of such arrangements for symphony orchestra and Chinese orchestra.
After the completion of the recordings in Shanghai, we had two concerts performed by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, of these oldies – in 2015 and in 2016. Those are performed by the Kids’ Philharmonic Orchestra here in Singapore. There are still a number that haven’t been performed. You see, when I have time, I just write arrangements, for my own satisfaction! Of course there is the hope that they will eventually get performed.
As a professional composer, sometimes you don’t just compose for fun, especially those that need a lot of creative ideas. I feel like I do arrangements for my own enjoyment, because there are so many arrangements available in the market, and I don’t like some of them. The recording I did in Shanghai, I didn’t get much in payments, but that’s something I do for myself. Comparing with professional arrangers in Hong Kong or Taiwan, I think they are not like me, because they don’t have the same kind of background as me. During my childhood, those music I can remember… I make some adjustments. Because the original music might be for a smaller ensemble, while I write it for a full symphony orchestra or Chinese orchestra. And also, in the 1930s and 1940s, there was very little editing for records, they just go straight in one-take. Sometimes there might be wrong notes, but they just go with it because of the expensive studio time, or whatever else was in the cost. So for me, I will try to patch up those things that weren’t right. I tried to perfect it. So that’s what I did.
KT: Before you wrote Confucius: A Secular Cantata, you wrote this work, called Variations for Chinese Orchestra, also known as the Young Person’s Guide to the Chinese Orchestra. Of course, there are comparisons between this work and Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Could you tell me about the genesis of this interesting composition?
PYT: When I first came back from Australia, I composed this piece for the Hwa Chong Junior College Chinese Orchestra, because that was one of the best student orchestras, and the conductor, Mr Tham Chaik Kong (谭泽江), was very serious. Very good musician, although he wasn’t formally trained, I think at least in spirit he is better than a lot of professional conductors. I repeated the performance of this work when I was with the PA Chinese Orchestra as the assistant and associate conductor. I think I made some changes when it was eventually performed by the Singapore Chinese Orchestra in the 2000s under Tsung Yeh. We did a CD… it’s like a package for people that wanted to learn more about writing for instruments of the Chinese Orchestra. Because in the CD, not only did I want something close to what Benjamin Britten did with the voiceovers, but also a work that depicted the history of Chinese orchestral music from the very beginning.
There are three works in this series. There was a demonstration piece to showcase some of the possibilities of each of the Chinese instruments in a solo manner. It’s very educational.
KT: Was it because the Chinese Orchestra as a concept, was somewhat young then, that there wasn’t a lot of repertoire, that made you write this work?
PYT: That time there was definitely a lack in Chinese instrumental books and guides. I think there were books that attempted to gather facts about each of the Chinese instruments, but my work had sound and also narration, and to explain about the historical development of the Chinese orchestra. I think it is important to help young people learn about the Chinese orchestra. I feel the need, the urgency. There are a lot of budding composers who write in a Western style, but as a person of Chinese descent, there is value in knowing about Chinese music. Of course, some composers like Eric Watson have written for Chinese orchestra too. And composers like Tan Dun (谭盾), and those in his generation from Mainland China, they were all bilingual in some sense.
So for me, my background is different because I was Chinese educated, and was self-taught in Chinese instruments. Even though when I first joined the PA Chinese Orchestra, which was supposed to be professional, all of us musicians were self-taught. We listen to Chinese music, of course, but learned a lot about Western music after a tour to Switzerland. There was an international youth orchestra festival, and we represented Singapore as a Chinese orchestra. That was an important tour for us because we get to listen to so many Western symphonic orchestral performances every night. When we came back, we wanted to learn more, so we took Western instrumental lessons, theory lessons all that. We are different from the Mainland Chinese composers because they were professionally trained early on, they have a better background in a way. So therefore, Chinese music written by a Singaporean composer and a Mainland Chinese one is very different, especially when we try to talk about a Nanyang style, all that.
So coming back to the need of these materials… Over the years I see a lot of young composers try to write for Chinese orchestra, and the Singapore Chinese Orchestra tries to encourage that. And actually they commissioned composers to write for them. I used to be working quite closely with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, because I was once their composer-in-residence, for at least 2 years, and I’ve been working very closely with them. And when I saw the scores submitted by young composers, I was quite shocked, I felt they didn’t know Chinese music at all. I mean, the orchestra does provide some resources, like the possible ranges of each instrument. One of the biggest mistake is, that composers treat the Chinese flute like the Western flute, and then they write all the chromatic scales. But the Chinese flute cannot play it; you have to be sensible to the instrument. If you don’t know enough about an instrument, it is important to ask questions. Like, it’s not possible to treat the erhu like a violin.
So during my term with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, one of the things I did was to conduct some workshops and some training. The participants have to come up with a piece that would be read by the musicians. I was then the second composer-in-residence. The first composer-in-residence had already conducted some masterclasses with the young composers, but I thought what happened was that they assumed that the young composers already knew about the basics of Chinese orchestra writing. So for the composition masterclass, the one who conducted the class just went straight into the composition. I don’t really agree with that because a lot of these young composers weren’t really sure about what they were doing. So during my term as composer-in-residence, I suggested to the music director that I wanted to teach young composers the right way of writing for Chinese instruments. So we aimed for each participant to complete one piece, then I go through the details during each weekly lesson during a 3 month workshop series. I think that’s the better way.
I heard from some of my musician friends in Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, which I think is one of the best Chinese Orchestras in the world, when the organization commissions a work, they have no right to object to some writing styles that weren’t idiomatic, or suitable. I mentioned to the music director of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, Tsung Yeh, to not accept these kinds of commissions that didn’t respect the capabilities of Chinese instruments. I mean when I write or the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, I spend a lot of time, to check every detail. So I think a composer should have that kind of responsibility, otherwise I think they are not honest, nor sincere.
Part 2 – On Confucius: A Secular Cantata
KT: You used a very established genre to describe the Confucius composition – a cantata. Would you say it was a conscious decision to adhere to some kind of musical tradition, by calling it a cantata?
PYT: In the first place, this was not my idea! Before the lyricist, Chong Wing Hong (莊永康), approached me, he approached a Mainland Chinese composer, Liu Yuan (刘湲). It didn’t work out, I don’t know why. But before he went to that composer, he did come to me for advice. After that, he came back to me for advice, and suggested we work on it. Initially, I was thinking of an opera, but then he said, considering the cost of production and things like that, a cantata is an easy way to work out the project. For me, it was okay, either an opera or cantata was fine, since the text was about the life of Confucius, from his childhood to adult life.
KT: How would you describe the relationship between the commission for Confucius: A Secular Cantata, and the overall structure of the eventual composition? Was there for example, any guideline on time limit for each movement, or was it just born out of the discussion with the lyricist?
PYT: When I discussed with Chong Wing Hong, we did have a very clear idea of how long the piece was going to be. I thought it shouldn’t be too long, because the script was just a few pages. But when you start composing, somehow, it just ended up like that, that there was a kind of force that said, you have to do this, this passage needed a certain duration to describe what you want. So it ended up that long. When I compose, I wasn’t concerned about the overall duration, but when I finished, then I realised the scale – there were 10 movements. Two of the movements were close to 30 mins. In total, the work was about 2.5 hours.
KT: To your knowledge, has any other Singaporean composer written such a huge and systematic work in scale, over two hours long?
PYT: I think I may have been the only one. My teacher, Mr Leong Yoon Pin, composed an opera before, but I don’t think it was that long. The other Singaporean composers, I don’t remember. Before Confucius: A Secular Cantata, I wrote one long work for the Singapore Arts Festival with Mdm Goh Lay Kuan (吴丽娟), Nu Wa (女娲). I think that one was at least 1.5 hours long.
KT: Normally your compositions are shorter in length?
PYT: It varies, because I believe as a composer, you should be able to do almost anything. Haha! But of course, it depends on your own liking, there are some things you might not like to do. But for professional composers, you cannot just write serious music, you will not be able to survive. It doesn’t really show your abilities, in a way. As a professional composer, for me, there are periods of time where my livelihood requires me to take on work that I cannot choose. Most of the time, I will accept, even things that are not my cup of tea, but I take it as a kind of challenge, and I try my best to like it. I did quite a bit of pop song arrangement for the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra – normally I don’t listen to it, but when I receive a commission, I have to try and transform in my mind, and write for Chinese orchestra. The original of course, isn’t for Chinese orchestra, like the pop songs by Faye Wong (王菲). I did an arrangement of her “I’m Willing” (我愿意) before. Cantopop is okay, Cantonese opera is okay, it is more in line with my compositional language. But after you do it, you kind of understand it more, I might not like it much but I can accept it.
KT: And for Confucius: A Secular Cantata, did you feel a sense of achievement when you completed it?
PYT: Of course!
KT: Were there any particular challenges writing such a long work? How long did that process take?
PYT: The challenge is determination. Sometimes you really don’t feel like writing. Not to mention, pain in the body and what not, because you bend down all the time. That time I was much younger, but I realised you really can hurt yourself. It was so much music then. Now with a computer, it is much easier to cut and paste, but that time when you want to repeat a section, you have to rewrite it. But the good thing is, when you rewrite, the process is slow, then you have more time to rethink about certain things. Not like computer, where it’s fast and you sometimes don’t reflect on it. You see when you write on score, you see everything, but on a computer, you have to zoom in and out, click here and there… your focus just becomes more narrow. With paper, you can see the whole picture. Sometimes, with computer, it is too easy for young composers to cut and paste. When they want to experiment with certain sounds, they let the computer do it. But with composers of my time, if we couldn’t imagine the sounds, the harmony, we just had to go to the piano.
Because like the cantata, I didn’t use traditional modulations. On recordings it sounds smooth, but when one of the top singer from Shanghai opera sang it at first, he got lost! I think Nelson Kwei did it very well for the chorus. I was of course inspired by composers like Prokofiev, some similar kind of treatment in his melody. His modulations, like in Peter and the Wolf? That kind of melodic modulation. I didn’t use pivot chord, I used pivot notes. And you have to do it very carefully. Prokofiev is Western, mine, I combined with the pentatonic scale for more Chineseness.
Luckily, we have a modern Chinese orchestra, and I would say they are as good as the Western orchestra, in terms of the playing technique.
KT: Do you think you approached the vocal and instrumental writing differently in Confucius: A Secular Cantata? How did it play out when you merged these forces together?
PYT: I think I just did it very naturally. I don’t have any problems with that.
KT: How would you describe the colours used in your composition?
PYT: I want everything! Colourful, loud, soft and energetic, sometimes a bit plaintive. At the same time I have to go with Chong Wing Hong’s text, but when it comes to the music I have my own freedom, my own interpretation. He did a lot of research and made the text very good, but honestly, if not for the commission, I would not have written it. The interest and love for the work kept growing as I worked on it, it’s like being around people. When you spend time with people, the more you interact, the more you understand, the more you like them or hate them! Haha! But you have to like the process, otherwise it will be very miserable. I always tell my students, you have to like what you do. If you don’t like it, then don’t do it. But of course, I wouldn’t have given up. This wasn’t my first priority, in a way, but it took so much energy. My child was still in kindergarten then: we had a TV in the living room, so I had my son sit on a stool to entertain himself while I kept watch from the other room to work.
KT: How do you feel about being Singapore’s most eminent composer? After all, the national anthem, with the most recent arrangement by you, is sung and played daily.
PYT: Haha! Never thought about it. You may call it luck or opportunity, but I think you still need to fall back on hard work, because things don’t just come without working hard. Great composers have a large number of works, some works might never get heard or performed, but I think you need to have a large volume that some good ones can emerge. If I have the time and energy, I would sit down and arrange some music. I like what I do, and I think it’s important to give others something you’ve done with love.
Exploring Monumentality in 天下滔滔 from Phoon Yew Tien’s Confucius: A Secular Cantata (2001)
Kenneth Tay (February 2022)