Leong Yoon Pin and the Aesthetics of Appraisal
Leia Devadason (October 2021)
I am watching an interview with the late composer Leong Yoon Pin. There is no trace of the interviewer but for a screen, appearing between clips, with questions posed to the composer. Near the end of the video, “who is Leong Yoon Pin?” is the silent question that flashes on the screen.
Cut to Leong in his eighties, sitting by the piano.“I don’t know him…” he laughs. “I feel that I’m always behind the scene. Leong Yoon Pin is only an ordinary man.” (ArtsObserved)
What Leong Yoon Pin’s humorous and soft-spoken nature did not give away is how, as a music composer, educator and conductor in pre to post-independent Singapore, he had marked many “firsts” for the nation. In 1977, Leong was made first resident conductor of the Singapore National Orchestra (which was formed by National Theatre Trust); in 1980, his concert overture “Dayong Sampan” was the first piece by a local composer to be performed by the brand-new Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO), and in 2000, he was appointed the SSO’s first composer-in-residence. Leong was at the forefront of monumental developments in art and culture as much as his life had been shaped by national history.
Leong Yoon Pin was born on 5 August 1931 and lived his childhood to teenage years in British colonial and Japanese-occupied Singapore, receiving a mix of English and Chinese-medium education in school. While always loving music, he only formally took music lessons at the age of 22, under the South African pianist Noreen Stokes (Kong). In 1951, he began studying at Teachers Training College (TTC) and, upon graduation, taught music and other subjects at primary school. In 1955, Leong received a scholarship to study music at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where he majored in composition, piano, and voice. Upon his return to Singapore, he was appointed music lecturer at TTC. About a decade later in 1967, Leong moved to Paris to study composition under the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger. Back in Singapore, he was promoted to head of music department at the then-Institute of Education (renamed from TTC). Winning a British Council Commonwealth Fellowship allowed Leong to complete his postgraduate studies in Music Education at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1975.
Having composed music from 1953 till the last few years of his life, Leong’s most prolific period occurred between 1980-2000s, when he wrote over 40 original pieces and arrangements. A cursory look at the titles of Leong’s pieces reveals his wide-ranging influences, which include: literature, epic narratives (e.g., “Mulan”, “Journey to the West”, “Metamorphosis”), vernacular folk music (“Lenggang”, “Dayong Sampan”) and local soundscapes (“Street Calls”, “Dragon Dance”). The ensembles most represented in Leong’s output are choirs and orchestras – a result of both personal interest and current demand. In addition to being passionate about texts and the human voice, Leong had a community-based and even patriotic motivation for writing choral music – the fact that, according to his observation, local choirs usually sang music by European or Chinese composers but not Singaporean composers (ArtsObserved).
The “monumental” seems to follow Leong throughout his life, in which many personal achievements were simultaneously national milestones. There is a trace of this theme in his musical aesthetics, though it is not only to be found in musical “monuments” as they have traditionally been conceived (the grand symphony, the opera, the magnum opus). Although Leong has certainly written pieces for large forces, and ones explicitly inspired by epic themes and processes, to me what stands out in the oeuvre are his moving attempts to represent, preserve and monumentalise quotidian aspects of life such as day-to-day social interactions, shared activities, and distinct local soundscapes.
Monumentality as a concept may at first glance be opposed to the quotidian, denoting the state of being objectified, grand, authoritative and by extension revered; monuments transcend historical amnesia while daily life is exactly that which gets washed away with the passing of time. Monuments, according to Theodor Adorno (1982: 175), also have a “museal” quality. In this light, an object’s placement in a museum (or its monumentalisation) is a symptom of the fact that it “no longer has a vital relationship” to contemporary life, just as the act of exhibition itself actively (re)produces an object’s alienated condition. From current debates in music about the need for a canon constituted by “great” works by “great” men, and in a wider context, whether statues of once-celebrated colonialists marking public space in the West and postcolonial countries should fall, it is evident that we live in an age of widespread cynicism about monuments and the self-evident moral authority they claim wherever they are planted.
What does it mean, then, for Leong to inscribe the calls of streetside hawkers selling their “geui-chuk” and “kon-lou-min” as melodies of a choral work, and an Indian labourers’ work chant within a symphony? Or, crucially, for me to suggest that these are acts of musical monumentalisation? After our discussion of the “museal”, the problem of asserting monumentalisation here is to admit that these sonic phenomena, now detached from function and stylised, come to bear a non-vital relationship to contemporary life by conversely becoming objects for aesthetic appreciation. Furthermore, claiming that these are monumentalised via the integration into, or expression by, western classical genres/ idioms reinforces a hierarchy between western classical music and vernacular folk music, sounds of Singaporean existence.
However, while “non-vital” cannot but sound like a demotion from relevance to life, all it means is that we do not heckle the hawker-singer-personas in “Street Calls”, even if we crave those very dishes they are singing about, and that the chorus singing the work chant in Leong’s Symphony are not doing so to relieve their daily toil. Set in a musical composition, these expressions now exist to be listened to, appreciated, and made-time-for. The residue of their original contexts pricks listeners with a sense that while we may have been trained to hear “things in music”, we haven’t been listening attentively enough to the “music in/ of things” and life around them – and perhaps we should.
Furthermore, Leong’s idiomatic musical language, which in “Street Calls” is determined heavily by the intonation and rhythm of Cantonese, for example, complicate the typical vertical-horizontal (melody: vernacular/ harmony: western) divide which commentators tend to focus on when characterising fusions between vernacular and Western Classical music. Thus, elevation and monumentalisation does not consist of Leong simply “Westernising” local subject matter or folk melodies through harmonisation or inserting them into high art genres at all.
Instead, the monumental in Leong Yoon Pin’s pieces appears as a humanist impulse to frame humble human labour as creative and aesthetically fruitful, to assert the small as large (in terms of importance!), make the vanishing recallable, and re-frame the “sonic” as “musical”. Whether or not his gestures of appraisal amount to musical monuments (nouns) is less crucial than the result that they can now be made real again in performances and enjoyed by many beyond their natural existence.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. , “Foreword,” in <em>Prisms</em> (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 175-185.
ArtsObserved. “Interview with Leong Yoon Pin.” YouTube. YouTube, July 17, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzR8SB42q84&t=20s&ab_channel=ArtsObserved .
Kong, Kam Yoke. “SCM Leong Yoon Pin final27oct – National Library Board.” Accessed October 23, 2021. https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/music/Media/PDFs/Article/99d9dbb2-a733-4a79-b98c-7164cffe0c6e.pdf .
N.N. “Leong Yoon Pin.” Accessed September 21, 2021. https://www.esplanade.com/offstage/arts/leong-yoon-pin .
N.N. “Leong Yoon Pin Music, Videos, Stats, and Photos.” Accessed October 23, 2021. https://www.last.fm/music/Leong+Yoon+Pin/ .
National Library Board Singapore. “Liang Rong Pin.” NLB Music SG. Accessed September 26, 2021. https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/music/music/artist/1033 .
Winzenburg, John. Half Moon Rising : Choral Music from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. London: Peters, 2015.
Singing Singaporean Soundscapes
Leia Devadason (November 2021)
{ APPETISER. }
When, in 2007, the late composer Leong Yoon Pin was asked “What is Singaporean Music?” — the inevitable question posed to Singaporean composers — he replied: “if you ask me, music that is related or connected to the songs we’ve been singing, the music that we’ve been hearing in Singapore.
Leong’s love of “the songs we’ve been singing” and the love of singing them shows up time and time again in his musical oeuvre and life’s milestones. According to his observation as a music director, local choirs usually sang music by European or Chinese composers but not Singaporean composers. To encourage the writing and singing of local choral pieces, Leong founded the Rediffusion Youth Choir (1953) and Metro Philharmonic Society (1959) — choirs which learnt and performed many of his own works.
The composer’s diverse choral writing includes arrangements and recompositions of multicultural folk-songs (“Lenggang”) to pieces which envoice unique soundscapes (“Dragon Dance”, “Street Calls”) and those which mix the worlds of lyrical singing and onomatopoeic, speech-like representations of reality (“Pedlars and the Soprano”).While Leong ties the idea of local music to “song” and “music”, the last two categories speak to a mode of perception and evaluation that is open to much more than what one would traditionally call music, or even understand to be musical.
Instead, the pieces “Dragon Dance”, “Street Calls” and “Pedlars and the Soprano” show that, as someone living in Singapore, one’s attention — and affection — are equally captured by popular songs as they are by the familiar sounds of intersecting cultural communities, styles of life and events from the mundane to festive that take place in shared public spaces. We can even say that one’s sense of self and of being-at-home in a certain place or community rests upon the aesthetics of the everyday: the dong-qiang of cymbals that herald Chinese New Year and the call of otak-otak that heralds a very specific savoury satisfaction for the stomach. Leong’s pieces recognise these quotidian sonic expressions as forms of cultural inheritance — and he in turn gives them a new lease of life in musical composition such that they can be resounded as art and heritage for generations to come. Aside from preserving the ephemeral for posterity, we can, taking a Schaferian approach, speculate that Leong’s soundscape-inspired compositions intended to cultivate in listeners a deeper awareness and musical attentiveness to their surroundings.
{ MAIN COURSE. }
Street Calls (1997, LYP) x Delicious Music (2021, RLD)
It is easy to get hungry while listening to Leong Yoon Pin’s music. But it is only easy if you know what he’s “talking” about; otherwise, “xiu mai” “ha gao” arrive in the listener’s ear just as expressive words, distinct and interesting but ultimately non-referential musical phrases.
Visual, gustatory, tactile and affective knowledge of the food constantly being sung about in Leong’s music cannot always be taken for granted. That’s why I attempt to help the unseasoned listener along with an alternative (and complementary) score to the original “Street Calls”. This is intended as a playful reinterpretation of Leong’s piece — an experiment in literal translation — and not a faithful or thorough re-mapping of the score in pictorial terms. It can even be taken as a derivative artwork by itself.
Despite not being able to convey nuances of Leong’s melodic variations of musical themes or any of his harmony, this food score brings attention to groupings of musical phrases, texture, and rates of durational compression or elongation with surprising clarity. Thus, it can in many ways function as an aid to analysis. In the thick of hearing, it is difficult to parse intricate textures and know how different parts are interacting with one another: this is especially true of the fugal section at the first Piu Mosso, in which our appreciation of the sequential layering of parts and their counterpoint likely comes at the expense of clarity of the food being passed around, as it were. But while following the food score, one can immediately see the interaction of parts; how the dishes (meaning: the musical themes which each dish/picture corresponds to) tend to be grouped by the composer; and how different sections are organised by the dominance, or presence/absence of certain dishes/themes.
After creating and reviewing this score, I realised the irony of something I created to increase appetite working in the opposite direction — the manipulated pictures of food on some pages verge on grotesque! (see page 9). Even so, I take this reaction from myself as a sign of the score having achieved my goals of increasing the sensory content in one’s listening experience of “Street Calls” to better suit the multi-sensory nature of the original culinary scene it represents, and of riffing off this piece’s richness in another artistic dimension.
Ethnolinguistic Politics in Leong Yoon Pin’s <em>Love Quatrains
Leia Devadason (January 2021)
While Leong Yoon Pin’s varied interests in history, myth, poetry across cultures is unmistakable, one who has spent time with his body of work as a whole will find that the composer is quite selective in the types of socio-historical subjects he chooses to represent. Leong has written many pieces that appraise the beauty of timeless nature and ancient poetry as well as elevate contemporary urban scenes into “art”, but close to none of them touch on or divisive political events or the hard times he himself had lived through, such as the Japanese Occupation of Singapore (Zubillaga-Pow 2011); instead, the portraits Leong paints of the country are filtered through the relatively depoliticised themes of food and “the folk” — an idealised concept of the unified common people, represented by vernacular folksong.
Having been universalised as the shared heritage of all Singaporeans by education and the media, subjects like food and folksong easily stand in for the ideal of multicultural harmony. It must be said that, firstly, this comes about through the generalisation of specific food/folk heritages into a nationalised culture — which entails a symbolic erasure of their specific ethnic origins; secondly, that symbols like Singaporean food are fraught with tension when they are made to perform racial, and even post-racial, harmony, while simultaneously being divided along racial-ethnic lines in government discourses about health. This tension is encapsulated by the following excerpts, one of which cites PM Lee Hsien Loong’s racialised health warning (emphases mine):
“The food reflects the multicultural make-up of Singapore, comprising mainly Chinese, Malay and Indian as well as various other cultures. Hawkers in Singapore take inspiration from the confluence of cultures, experimenting and adapting dishes to local tastes and context, reflecting a living food heritage through generations….” (National Heritage Board)
“…traditional methods of cooking or serving Indian and Malay favourite dishes…have made it difficult for many hawkers and home cooks to change the way they prepare these dishes. For them, unlike Chinese dishes, one cannot produce a healthier, yet still tasty ayam penyet or roti prata by simply using less oil, salt or sauce. But change they must if the two communities are to win the war against diabetes, which Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong described as a “health crisis” for Malays and Indians…” (Wong and Toh 2017)
Leong Yoon Pin glosses over the tensions these symbols contain and uses them in universalised form, as on the Roots website, to perform patriotism. Unsurprisingly, much of his music emphasises social collectivity (e.g. festive rituals, food-based gatherings), what R Murray Schafer calls “soundmarks”, and the artistic integration of multi-ethnic elements. In line with the Singapore government, Leong evokes multiracial harmony in his work and subtly encourages patriotic feeling around this idea. In this essay, I will explore Leong’s construction of the national multiracial ideal and the politics of language use in the choral piece Love Quatrains.
Love Quatrains was commissioned for the Singapore Youth Festival in 1993. At its core is a Malay Pantun (an oral, rhyming poetic form), which has been translated into English and then elaborated upon by additional Chinese lyrics. As such, singers of the piece weave in and out of three languages before singing them all in tandem. In addition to being expressed in culturally significant languages of Singapore, Love Quatrain’s sense of place is also veiled in the Pantun’s setting: lovesick people sing to one another under the starlit sky and the bright-shining moon, which can be interpreted as a reference to the Singapore flag. The song describes young love, and more specifically, young heterosexual love; this is indicated by the call-and-response between verses that name the love object as “tuan” (Verse 1) and “sweet young maid” (Verse 2) respectively, as well as the composer’s allotment of Soprano solos to the “tuan”-directed verses, which cements the assumed alignment of voice type with gender and (hetero)sexuality.
Through the trilingual lyrics, however, the song can be heard as subtly encouraging the expansion of traditional ideas of love in another direction: across race and ethnicity. The personas in Love Quatrains repeat the original Malay Pantun in English and then once again in Malay. At this point, the choir breaks into an “animated” Mandarin verse, achieved by a change in metre, forte dynamics and iambic rhythmic motion, that follows the repeated sentiments of yearning with a decisive proclamation to pursue love to the fullest without fear of external judgement. The song ends on this note, so to speak, with Sopranos singing in Malay, Altos in English, and Tenors and Basses in Mandarin simultaneously. The harmonic and harmonious fusion of languages, lyrics, and melodic themes in the final line is a sign that the personas’ wishes have been fulfilled as the piece rhetorically performs the very love it preaches: one that reconciles differences and overcomes prejudice. Along these lines, Love Quatrains has been interpreted as “a social commentary on the increasing number of inter-racial relationships and marriages in the nation-state (Zubillaga-Pow 2011).” From here, it is easy to read romantic love between races as a metonymy of multicultural harmony at a societal level.
I wish to complicate this reading by discussing the choice of the three languages from two angles. Leong’s choice of writing Love Quatrains in English, Malay and Mandarin is unsurprising given that they hold multiple types of significance for Singaporeans, both individually and as a package of languages. When presented together, they suggest the category of National Languages that includes Tamil, which were chosen to functionally correspond to and represent the four main races in Singapore. As a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office, authored by the late Lee Kuan Yew, reads: “In Singapore four languages — Malay, Chinese, Tamil, and English — are official and equal languages (Lee 1965).”
Thus, because language has been iconised as a symbol of ethnicity, the National Languages together represent the country’s linguistic and racial variety — albeit in a reduced and officially curated capacity. Love Quatrains seems to align with this governmental stance on language, deeply entangled with the CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others) race classification model, that casts multilingualism as a symbol of multiracialism. Some indications of this are Leong’s use of musical elements particular to the ethnic group implied by the language in use: the opening Malay verse contains Pantun dialogue between parts characteristic of dondang sayang form; the Mandarin verse uses notes from the pentatonic scale and verbal melisma. Furthermore, the fact that Leong uses Mandarin, the officially endorsed Chinese language, instead of his own mother tongue — the “dialect” Cantonese — suggests that the verse is meant to evoke, and originate from, an ethnic community rather than a personal subjectivity.
Once we view the choice of these languages in Love Quatrains as a way of casting ethnic diversity, the absence of Tamil or any other Indian language becomes conspicuous, though today it is already normalised by the degree to which, in comparison to the three other National Languages, Tamil translations from things like road signage to election rally speeches are often neglected in Singapore. Because of this, the presence of English, Malay and Chinese in media representations is usually enough to signal diversity and multiracialism, even though it falls short of actually performing the four official languages chosen to represent these ideals. It is possible that Love Quatrains falls into this pattern of complacent signalling, or that it even intends to exclude Indians from this love (/song).
But the absence of Tamil and other Indian languages also causes me to wonder if we can read this another way: perhaps Malay, English, and Chinese were chosen not primarily for their racial significations, but for their perceived national significance? Malay was the first National Language and lingua franca of Singapore; after colonialism and independence, English became the language of politics, business and education. The appearance of Mandarin, neither “de jure” nor “de facto” language of Singapore, can possibly be explained by the PAP government’s linking of Mandarin to national interests in the 1980s. Second deputy Prime Minister Ong Teng Cheong stated in 1985 that “the economic value of Mandarin [was] increasing, particularly after [China’s]… economic transformation… (Ong 1985).” This messaging was so strong that on 16 March 1994, a year after Love Quatrains was written, the Straits Times reported a growing number of non-Chinese parents requesting their child study Mandarin in school.
This change in rhetoric about Mandarin contradicted the government’s earlier stance, in formulating the Bilingual Policy, that the Mother Tongues were meant to be a “repositories of cultural values” vis-a-vis English, a tool for economic competitiveness (Wee 2006). When Mandarin was projected to cross from the domain of culture to commerce, the language became intertwined with Singapore-as-a-nation’s success in the global world in the PAP government’s eyes. This certainly introduced a tension in the status of the Mother Tongues in Singapore, one that lives on today. Whether we view the languages in Love Quatrains from a perspective through which their primary significance is their participation in nation-building or in preserving ethnic ties and heritage, we see that Leong’s piece largely aligns with the governmental agenda to cement “Singapore” as a unified imagined community from which racial difference has been (precariously) sublimated, and whose national borders supersede all other boundaries.
Bibliography
Lee, Kuan Yew. “Statement from the Prime Minister’s Office on Singapore’s Official Languages.” National Archives Singapore. Accessed January 2, 2022. https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/lky19651001.pdf .
National Heritage Board, https://www.roots.gov.sg/ich-landing/ich/hawker-culture .
Ong, Teng Cheong. “1985 Speak Mandarin Launch Message .” Language Councils Sg. Accessed January 2, 2022. https://www.languagecouncils.sg/mandarin/en/-/media/smc/documents/goh-dpm-ong-teng-cheong_smc-launch-speech_280985.pdf .
Peters, Joseph, Dondang Sayang in “Singapore” in Santos. Ramon P. ed. The Musics of ASEAN. Philippines: ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information, 1995, pp. 93-131
Wee, Lionel. “The Semiotics of Language Ideologies in Singapore.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 10, no. 3 (2006): 344–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1360-6441.2006.00331.x .
Wong, Pei Ting and Toh Ee Ming, August 25, 2017. Accessed January 2, 2022. https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/war-on-diabetes-changing-eating-habits-of-malay-indian-communities-an-uphill-task .
Zubillaga-Pow, Jun. “The Patriotic Politics of Leong Yoon Pin.” Lugubrious Book Reviews, August 3, 2011. Accessed January 2, 2022. https://lugubriousnecrographies.wordpress.com/2011/08/03/leong-yoon-pin/ .