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 November-December 2024 is Chan Hao Li.
Hao Li regularly performs with Novo Winds and the Singapore Wind Symphony. He is one of the featured Young Composers in the Singapore Composers Festival, with his piece You By The Merlion performed by local ensemble WeirdAftertaste.
Watch the interview on YouTube here, or read the transcript below!
1. Share with us how your compositional journey began, as well as your dreams and aspirations!
I began writing music when I was 15, with my first piece being a dedication to my secondary school concert band. Looking back, it was pretty ambitious of me to even think about writing music for such a large ensemble as a wind band, let alone without any proper professional training.
However, it was because of this first “big dream” that I was opened to the world of music composition. I took a leap of faith and decided to study H2 Music in A-Levels despite dropping Music as a subject when I was in Secondary 2, and I would say that gave me a solid foundation in music education and clarinet playing, where I learnt clarinet for 2 years under Ralph Emmanuel Lim.
I was also fortunate enough to participate in YST’s Young Composers Academy in 2020 when I was 16, where I worked with flautist Carolin Ralser and premiered my first piece ever, which was Me Growing Up (featuring my parents), in 2 Movements. That was a significant life-changing moment that really made me believe that I could make music my professional career.
As for my dreams and aspirations, I would say that I would really want to contribute back to the local music scene here in Singapore. I’ve seen so many mentor figures in my musical upbringing having been there for just such a brief moment in time, and yet the connections and impact that they have had on me truly made me who I am today. And that’s something I really want to do in the future; to carry the torch of inspiration for the next generation and keep the passion for learning music going.
And related to my upbringing, I feel that it’s inevitable that I return to my roots of being in a wind band and just finding ways of fully exploring and developing that medium in SIngapore. It’s such a humbling place to begin as a young musician, and yet it’s led me to so many festivals, experiences, mentors and friendships that define who I am. The Singapore wind band scene has basically nurtured me, and I feel it only makes sense to pay it back sometime in the future in my professional career.
2. What was the inspiration behind your piece ‘You by the Merlion’ that was recently showcased at the Singapore Composers Festival? Could you share more about the compositional process behind it?
So when I began the writing for You by the Merlion, I was looking around for inspiration to see what material I could work with outside of music, and I just stumbled upon this poem by Singaporean poet Edwin Thumboo called Ulysses by the Merlion, which tells a story of the Greek hero visiting Singapore in the 70s and marvelling at our culture and also specifically about how the Merlion was a symbol that represented that Singapore and its people.
What I found more interesting was that this poem was this foundational poem that really set off decades worth of Merlion poetry in Singapore, and many of which were in response to Thumboo’s initial poem. And all of these poems were chronicled in this anthology of poems called Reflecting On The Merlion: An Anthology of Poems, which I had to go to the library to find because there just isn’t an online copy for me to just peruse.
This anthology features around 40 or so poems about or surrounding the subject matter of the Merlion, and the poets really showcased a huge variety of emotions and viewpoints about the Merlion and how it played into one’s identity as a Singaporean. And when I was reading this anthology, I was also analysing myself and my relationship to Singapore and what it means to be a Singaporean, and how the Merlion serves as a canvas for myself and many others to express their emotions towards SIngapore and being Singaporean.
Really, the compositional process for me was honestly beginning to understand the various emotions that were portrayed in the anthology, and these would each serve as an individual section of music. These emotions primarily were:
critique
ambivalence and uncertainty
self-reflection and reinvention
acceptance
From there, I filtered out some of the lines of poetry that I felt really inspired by and could do word-painting based on the lines. Honestly, there were so many lines that were just so amazing, or as my generation would call it, “fire” or “bangers”, that it was so difficult to shortlist which ones that ended up in the piece. I must have gone from like something to 40 really long excerpts of text, to probably just 20 snippets that ended in the actual piece.
The music really just came to life as I composed around and with the text and the surrounding emotions, as many of the motifs in the music are all directly related to some bits of the text. One more thing that I should add is that before I started writing a single note, I asked weird aftertaste if they had any Singaporean-inspired objects they wanted to include, and Michellina Chan on saxophone suggested NTUC plastic bags and red water buckets, which I incorporated into the piece as percussive elements and effects. Felt like it really couldn’t be a real “Singaporean” piece without Singaporean objects haha.
3. What are some interesting aspects of the keyboard electronics that you've discovered while composing your piece ‘You by the Merlion’?
So this piece was the first time I worked with electronics and I primarily used the electronics as triggers for narration of lines of the poetry, as well as looping certain lines over each other. Being the first time I used Ableton, it was admittedly really scary as I was not always sure if what I was doing was correct. Thankfully, Bertram Wee from weird aftertaste was there to guide me every step of the way and he helped me immensely with advice and how to work with the loops and narrative bits.
I think a reason I wanted to work with electronics, aside from triggering the narration and the loops, was that I wanted to create a sense of artificiality or something not natural in the sounds that the keyboard would make. And Ableton really gave me a lot of avenues to explore these interesting sounds and parameters, with all the pads and synths and whatnot. Honestly it’s a little terrifying to think about it all because there’s just so much; it’s like handing a dictionary to a baby.
I think what was fun about it all was that because it was my first time, I was learning all these new ideas and effects and playing around with them in real time without having to notate them down first. So things like loops and randomization and tweaking with the parameters, sometimes there would be a huge change in how it sounds, sometimes the change would be so subtle. One of those things that did end up in my composition was this “shaking” effect in the synth that was controlled by an expression pedal, and it was like a very subtle pulsating effect.
And honestly, if I got the chance to do it again, I feel I would have really doubled down on the electronics and leaned into all these effects, because WOW they were just that fun to play and experiment with. I remember playing around with my Akai MIDI Keyboard and just tweaking around with the knobs to adjust various parameters in Ableton and I was just such a huge fan of that. It really made me realise that I had been missing out on so many nuanced things in electronic music, and honestly I’m just amazed and a little terrified of the potential that I can explore in the future.
4. Do you have any upcoming projects/works that we can look forward to?
Currently, I’m enjoying the rest of my holiday break before I begin the second semester of my first year at YST. While I don’t really have anything concrete that’s lined up for 2025 yet, I am looking forward to many opportunities to attend composing and band festivals, writing and premiering new pieces, and playing and attending a bunch of concerts, and just overall learning as much as I can from my mentors and my friends. I’m sure it’ll be a great year ahead!
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