Music Unlimited V

In a new century, where is the voice of the East heading?
Taipei Chamber Singers: Asian Chinese Choral Commissions · World Premiere Night
Setting out from Taiwan, reflecting from afar: new works that challenge how we think about choral music.

To raise both the quality and the quantity of contemporary Chinese choral composition, the Taipei Chamber Singers has for several years pursued the Music Unlimited commissioning project, aiming to build an unprecedented, forward-looking platform for contemporary choral music by Asian Chinese composers. To date it has worked with many outstanding composers and premiered more than thirty contemporary choral works rooted in Eastern thought. Beyond their premieres in Taipei, these works have toured to Italy, Hong Kong, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and elsewhere, extending the international reach of contemporary choral art with a distinctly Eastern character.

In 2010, Music Unlimited V reaches across the Taiwan Strait for the first time: alongside outstanding Taiwanese composers, it collaborates for the first time with a composer from Beijing to present new horizons in contemporary Chinese choral composition. Composer Xiang Jin, currently teaching at the China Conservatory of Music in Beijing, reinterprets “Apricot Blossoms, Sky and Shadow” (杏花天影) by the Southern Song musician and lyricist Jiang Kui for three-part women’s chorus, and has written a new work based on the modern poem “The Camels Carrying Willows” (運楊柳的駱駝) by contemporary Chinese poet Gong Liu. Renowned Taiwanese composer Hwang Long Pan brings Taiwanese proverbs and Tang poetry together in the a cappella mixed-voice work “Proverbs versus Tang Poems” (諺語對唐詩), a fresh experiment joining two literary arts far apart in era and style. Shu Xi Chen, a composer known for deconstructing and reassembling ethnic musical elements, draws this year on Mongolian long-song to write “Altai” (阿爾泰), evoking the vast open wilderness of the northern deserts. Professor Xing-Kui Zeng, who has devoted decades to computer music research, takes inspiration from poems by the Tang poet Du Fu and contemporary poet 辛金順 to create the avant-garde “Thoughts on a Night Journey I, II” (旅夜書懷I、II), combining calligraphy performance with computer technology, a work sure to offer audiences an entirely new sensory experience. Music Unlimited V also looks back at past commissions, including “Prelude to Water Melody” (水調歌頭, 2006) by Taiwanese composer Fuk Wing Yim, “The Path I” (軌跡I, 2006) by Chiung Yu Chen, and “An Ancient, Leisurely Journey” (古悠悠行, 2009) by Hong Kong composer Victor Chen, set to a poem by the Tang poet Li He.