Since 2020, the Composers Society of Singapore (CSS) has been releasing a monthly series for our Musings section, Composer of the Month! The Composer of the Month for Aug 2023 is Jia Yi LEE. Jia Yi is currently pursuing her Doctor of Musical Arts at Peabody Institute, studying with Felipe Lara. She writes music that explores the colors and textures of sound through movement and gesture. She creates imaginative sound worlds inspired by natural phenomena and processes, and is interested in the perception of temporality and timbre in music.

For this interview, we have returned to our unique video-format first initiated during the CSS 15th Anniversary Interviews.

The video can be viewed HERE

Interviewer/editor/producer: Dr Pow Jun Kai

A Statement from Dr Pow:

It gives me great pleasure to share with you my third video work for CSS’s Composer of the Month. These were conceived as creative audio-visual collaborations with CSS composers whose works were selected for the Asian Composer League Festival in 2022. Many local composers often hesitate to make appearances and prefer to let their music speak for themselves. Therefore, instead of the usual talking-head interview or musical texts and notation, I decided on using moving images to accompany the composers’ chamber works. For the co-creation with Lee Jia Yi, we decided to pair her string quartet with photos of her visits to France and the USA. These photos were taken during her creative residencies and reflect certain aspects of her worldview and creative muse. One of the challenges of transforming the photos, which were taken in portrait form, was for me to render the images into the 16:9 frame. Technological innovations have now enabled our intimate aural experience to be accentuated by distant visual material. I hope this creative experiment of ours will enrich your enjoyment of the work via a multi-sensorial approach.