Kai-Young Chan
Constraints/Creativity
Duration: 65'
Constraints/Creativity
Sample pages
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Work introduction
This score collection comprises 12 Cantonese choral works composed by Kai-Young Chan between 2014 and 2024. These works have gained increasing recognition and have been performed by choirs, both Cantonese and non-Cantonese speaking, across various countries and regions in Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific. The compositions in this collection draw from ancient Chinese poetry, contemporary writings, and biblical texts.
The scarcity of Cantonese choral music and educational resources has long hindered Cantonese musicians from performing and composing in their native language, resulting in a lack of representation of Cantonese choral music on the global stage. The choral works in this collection directly address this issue by tackling the limited creative output in Cantonese, primarily due to the challenge of effectively aligning lyrics with the music. Cantonese is a tonal language that relies on pitch changes to convey word meanings. Unless Cantonese texts are skillfully set to melodies that follow the tone contours, they risk being incomprehensible or significantly misinterpreted. Instances of mismatched melodies are still prevalent in Cantonese music, where numerous Cantonese hymns have inadvertently turned “my lord” into “pig,” “God” into “kidney,” and “singing” into “the window.” While the relationship between speech and melody has been explored in studies on Cantonese opera and popular music, the constraints and creativity involved in intelligible text-setting for Cantonese choral music have not been thoroughly examined.
Chan has addressed this gap by demonstrating how the constraints of Cantonese text-setting can be transformed into creative resources in various musical aspects, including melodic writing, harmony, and textures. Through a combination of corpus-based methodologies, empirical tests, and practice-led research, Chan’s efforts have provided theoretical and musical models for setting text to sung Cantonese. His works highlight innovative composition and performance approaches that go beyond Western methodologies and challenge stereotypes associated with Asian music.