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Leia Devadason (October 2021)<\/em><\/p>\n 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, \u201cwho is Leong Yoon Pin?\u201d is the silent question that flashes on the screen.<\/em><\/p>\n Cut to Leong in his eighties, sitting by the piano.\u201cI don\u2019t know him\u2026\u201d he laughs. \u201cI feel that I\u2019m always behind the scene. Leong Yoon Pin is only an ordinary man.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0(ArtsObserved)<\/p>\n What Leong Yoon Pin\u2019s 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 \u201cfirsts\u201d 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 \u201cDayong Sampan\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Having composed music from 1953 till the last few years of his life, Leong\u2019s most prolific period occurred between 1980-2000s, when he wrote over 40 original pieces and arrangements. A cursory look at the titles of Leong\u2019s pieces reveals his wide-ranging influences, which include: literature, epic narratives (e.g., \u201cMulan\u201d, \u201cJourney to the West\u201d, \u201cMetamorphosis\u201d), vernacular folk music (\u201cLenggang\u201d, \u201cDayong Sampan\u201d) and local soundscapes (\u201cStreet Calls\u201d, \u201cDragon Dance\u201d). The ensembles most represented in Leong\u2019s output are choirs and orchestras \u2013 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 \u2013 the fact that, according to his observation, local choirs usually sang music by European or Chinese composers but not Singaporean composers (ArtsObserved).<\/p>\n The \u201cmonumental\u201d seems to follow Leong throughout his life, in which many personal achievements were simultaneously<\/em> national milestones. There is a trace of this theme in his musical aesthetics, though it is not only to be found in musical \u201cmonuments\u201d as they have traditionally been conceived (the grand symphony, the opera, the\u00a0magnum opus<\/em>). 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<\/em>\u00a0quotidian aspects of life such as day-to-day social interactions, shared activities, and distinct local soundscapes.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Monuments, according to Theodor Adorno (1982: 175), also have a \u201cmuseal\u201d quality. In this light, an object\u2019s placement in a museum (or its monumentalisation) is a symptom of the fact that it \u201cno longer has a vital relationship\u201d to contemporary life, just as the act of exhibition itself actively (re)produces an object\u2019s alienated condition. From current debates in music about the need for a canon constituted by \u201cgreat\u201d works by \u201cgreat\u201d 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.<\/p>\n What does it mean, then, for Leong to inscribe the calls of streetside hawkers selling their \u201cgeui-chuk\u201d<\/em> and\u00a0\u201ckon-lou-min\u201d<\/em>\u00a0as melodies of a choral work, and an Indian labourers\u2019 work chant within a symphony? Or, crucially, for me to suggest that these are acts of musical monumentalisation? After our discussion of the \u201cmuseal\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n