Sing-Yat Chan: “I Would Be Bolder If I Could Do It Again” | Concours de Genève
A total of 188 composers entered the composition competition at the 80th Concours de Genève. The jury, made up of leading contemporary composers including Unsuk Chin, Toshio Hosokawa and Magnus Lindberg, selected three finalists.
Not yet 25, Sing-Yat Chan became the first Chinese composer to reach the final of the Concours de Genève, where she was awarded third prize. The day after the results were announced, I returned to Victoria Hall to meet Chan backstage. She was a little subdued at not having placed higher, although she told me that, having seen the scores of the prize-winning composers, she had more or less anticipated the outcome.
As we talked, a small speaker above us was playing a recording of the orchestra rehearsing for the final round of the conducting competition the following evening, 13 November. Stravinsky’s The Firebird came on.
“I feel that I have a voice of my own, but I need to be more certain of it.” Speaking about her work Shattered Sky / Remaining Land, Chan says that, looking back, there are still things she wishes she had done more boldly. If she were to write it again, she would approach it differently. “I was holding back a little. I was being a bit mild. It could actually have been much more radical.”
Perhaps she was still concerned about tradition, the practical demands of performance and the expectations surrounding orchestral writing. She says that breaking away from these conventions takes a certain amount of courage. But after the competition, she began to realise that the jury was not asking her to write something more accessible or more in keeping with conventional orchestral practice. What they appreciated was the individual musical language she had already begun to develop, and they wanted her to take it further. Several members of the composition jury encouraged her to trust and clarify her own voice. Magnus Lindberg, meanwhile, described the work as “beautiful”. Chan also spoke with some of the conducting jury members, who offered suggestions about the treatment of breath sounds in the piece, feeling that these could be developed further.
Imagining the Orchestra as a Living, Breathing Organism
Shattered Sky / Remaining Land was originally written as part of Chan’s master’s degree. She says that, given how rare an opportunity it was to write for a full orchestra, she wanted to make the most of it and express her artistic vision through the piece. The feeling she wanted to convey was deeply personal, and she felt that it was something that could only be expressed through an orchestral work.
She also wanted to break away from the conventional orchestral sound. In her imagination, the orchestra is not simply a collection of instruments producing their familiar sounds. It is more like a gigantic synthesiser, or a living organism that breathes. She wanted the instruments to create sounds reminiscent of electronic music, but without using electronics or any pre-processing.
This was not easy. When she began writing, she was working within a number of constraints, including restrictions on instrumentation and the institutional expectations she faced at the time. Her challenge was to work out how to get the most out of the orchestra within those limits.
When she first finished the piece, she did not like it at all, so she changed everything. She went through around six versions over the course of more than a year. The overall structure remained broadly the same, but the musical language, details and techniques changed considerably. She also altered the percussion instrumentation and the tempo. She was still trying to be practical about the instrumentation and the techniques available to the players, but wanted to push the boundaries as far as she could.
She thinks of the orchestra as a canvas, with multiple possibilities of texture. Some sounds are rough, others smooth or transparent; some are bright, others dark, with different shades in between. Her initial thought was the colour blue, which later brought to mind the crackled glaze of Ru ware, the celebrated Song-dynasty ceramics. From that image, the sounds gradually began to take shape.
A Performance Shaped by the Draw
“Fragility and breath” were the two ideas Chan offered to Jacobus de Jager, the conductor who drew her work in the competition's allocation process. She says that hearing the orchestra perform it for the first time was, overall, quite close to what she had imagined, although some details still needed adjusting. In particular, the breath sounds in the brass, the very fragile sounds in the strings, and the ricochet gestures in the percussion all required careful balancing between the different sections.
“There are quite a lot of extended techniques in the piece. It is difficult to get the sound across to conductors and musicians through the score or computer playback alone.” After the first rehearsal, she recorded her own sound demonstrations, which she felt really helped everyone understand what was happening musically. She had also prepared a detailed instruction sheet, complete with QR codes and demonstration videos. As a result, there were not many questions to work through when she met the conductor.
The collaboration was necessarily intense. The conductors found out at midnight which piece they would be performing, following the draw, and Chan met de Jager the next morning to discuss the work. She found the process very efficient. Their conversation focused mainly on the central idea of the piece and what she wanted the conductor to bring out.
After hearing the performance on the competition evening, Chan was very pleased. She could hear the different layers and details she had imagined. Before the competition, she had found writing for orchestra so difficult that she thought she might never want to take part in another competition. Having heard the work performed, however, she now feels that she can see herself writing more orchestral music.
The Difficult Path of a Composer
Born in Shenzhen and raised in Hong Kong, Chan grew up in a musical household. Her mother, who is from Xi'an, plays the pipa, while her father is from Zhanjiang in Guangdong. Chan began learning the piano as a child and moved to Michigan for secondary school. She later studied both piano and composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.
During her undergraduate years, she found herself playing more and more contemporary music. She gradually realised that she wanted to be involved in the contemporary music scene. When applying for her master's degree, she applied to both piano and composition programmes. She received a full scholarship for composition and decided to focus on it.
After completing her master's degree, she spent a year working in Houston, teaching piano privately and at different schools, as well as taking on after-school and church engagements. She describes that period as a difficult one. She had bills to pay and was struggling to find recognition and support for her work. Her parents did not fully understand contemporary music, nor were they entirely supportive of the direction she had chosen. Chan says that one of her reasons for entering the competition was to strengthen her career prospects, and to find a way out of those difficulties.
She already has several projects in the pipeline. One involves writing for a group of clarinettists who are friends of hers and are currently based in Cincinnati, one of whom is originally from Hong Kong. Another is a project in Hong Kong for an interactive concert for children, for which she will write a piece based on the story of The Tortoise and the Hare. The music will accompany the storytelling, and she will also take part as the pianist.
Chan hopes to continue working with different performers and ensembles. Asked which ensemble she would most like to collaborate with, she names Ensemble Intercontemporain in France. She has also previously taken part in a workshop with Ensemble Modern in Houston, for which she wrote a small ensemble piece.
The Riff Questionnaire with Sing-Yat Chen
Are you a morning person or a night owl?
A night owl. I work at night and function well at night.
What is the first thing you do when you wake up?
Drink coffee. Well, obviously I brush my teeth and all that first, and then...
Which city could you imagine living in for a year?
Berlin. I think it is very artistic.
What do you eat when you want to cheer yourself up?
Chocolate.
What is one thing you cannot live without, apart from music?
Literature.
Is there a literary work you have loved since childhood?
The Farewell of the Shadow, from Lu Xun’s Wild Grass. I have loved it since I was a child. It is deep and dark, with lots of different layers.
If you were not a composer, what do you think you would be?
Practically speaking, perhaps a barista. Ideally, I would be a poet or a visual artist.
What is something about you that people might find surprising?
People think I am a very happy person. But when they hear my music or see my artwork, they find it quite dark. I look cheerful, but there are different layers to my work.
What is your favourite sound in everyday life?
I like bells, especially church bells.
What is something you have always wanted to learn but never found the time for?
Electric guitar.
What is your most recent little obsession?
Sudoku.
What makes you laugh most easily?
I laugh easily. I find lots of little things funny. I think I am very sensitive emotionally. Even a small thing can make me laugh a lot if it is funny, or make me feel very sad if it is sad.
Which piece would you play for someone who knows nothing about contemporary classical music?
Ligeti’s Étude No. 9, Vertige, from the second book of piano études.
If you could take only one piece of music to a desert island, what would it be?
Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto This piece means a great deal to me. It was written for a friend of Prokofiev’s who died by suicide. The response to its premiere was terrible. The critics said things like, “My cats could play better.” Later, the original orchestral score was destroyed in a fire, and Prokofiev had to reconstruct and substantially revise the work.
I particularly love the first movement. It begins very simply, before the piano launches into an extraordinary cadenza. I think it lasts about sixteen minutes, taking up most of the movement, while the orchestra is basically just sitting there. That is quite unusual for a concerto. The cadenza itself has so many layers and is full of emotion. At its climax, the orchestra comes back in, returning to the opening motif first heard in the clarinet. For me, it is an incredibly moving piece.
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