Asia Première
An edgy soundscape of urban life blending contemporary music and cross-cultural ideas

A spectacular collection of new works by five renowned composers with surround sound effects and video projections

"Vividly and engagingly performed... the compositions mirrored the cultural diversity of the industrialised conglomerate including Hong Kong and Macao" – The Daily Mirror, Berlin

In the project into..., organised by Ensemble Modern and Siemens Arts Program in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, 17 outstanding composers set out to conduct compositional research on the state of cultural convergence in megacities Istanbul, Dubai, Johannesburg, and the Pearl River Delta region, spending a month in one of these locations to compose a work reflecting on it.

To create into Pearl River Delta, five celebrated composers stepped into Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Macao and Hong Kong in 2008-09 with the goal of transforming encounters with the region into music. The compositions that resulted mirror the cultural diversity of the Pearl River Delta cities, transferring drivers' radio conversations and street theatre into poetic, geographically specific music.

Grammy Award winner Heiner Goebbels' electronic composition out of translates the intense acoustics of Hong Kong into music. While in Hong Kong, Benedict Mason made a film to synchronise with live music as a thought-provoking multi-layered commentary. Unsuk Chin, winner of a prestigious Grawemeyer Award and the Arnold Schönberg Prize, takes a special angle in Gougalōn by using percussion to evoke sounds reminiscent of an old marketplace. Johannes Schöllhorn, twice awarded the Premio V. Bucchi, toys with a variety of orchestral colours in Niemandsland while David Fennessy, a top prize-winner in the New Music for Sligo Composers' Competition, discovers the individual in sites of mass production in 13 Factories. Together, the five pieces try to get a glimpse of the new century in one of its most vibrant places: the Pearl River Delta, producing a contemporary music event not to be missed.

Ensemble Modern
Founded in 1980 in Germany, Ensemble Modern (EM) is one of the world's leading contemporary music ensembles. EM currently comprises 19 soloists from eight countries in Europe, Asia and South America, all of whom add to the group's rich multicultural background. The ensemble regularly performs at leading festivals and top international venues around the world, including Salzburger Festspiele, Wiener Festwochen, Musikfest Berlin, Lincoln Center Festival, Festival d'Automne à Paris, Holland Festival and Oper Frankfurt.

Composers' notes

Johannes Schöllhorn (Germany)
Niemandsland (No Man's Land)
Hong Kong fascinated me from the very first minute. For this city is not a place, but is situated between places, as it were: it is neither Chinese nor Western, neither a village nor a mega-city, neither land nor water, but, with its many islands, a zone of transition, a gateway to the world with its own "placeless" identity… Hong Kong is self-consciously ephemeral, fascinatingly ahistorical; its inhabitants live in the "here and now", as a rule very publicly – for the dwellings in the tower blocks are much too small to permit a private life.

Unsuk Chin (Korea)
Gougalōn – Scenes from a Street Theatre
The flair of the old and impoverished neighbourhoods, the narrow streets with houses and courtyards full of nooks and crannies, the markets selling nearly everything – this atmosphere became like a Proustian experience to me, a key to my own childhood experiences. This is because the atmosphere reminds me a lot of Seoul in the 60s, i.e. the period after the Korean War, the period of radical modernisation and industrialisation. They were a troupe of amateur musicians and actors traveling from village to village to palm off homemade – at best ineffectual – medicine on people. This is then the background to my new piece where I will try to create imaginary street (theatre) music that is ironically stylised and "shabby".

Heiner Goebbels (Germany)
out of
As much as the urban development of the region is explosive, the acoustic environment is dense, never-ending and impenetrable… Only during the subsequent sifting and filtering of the acoustic material did it become clear what took place inside the small taxi and what kind of sounds was contained. Perhaps it is only their artificial separation, the foregoing of the visual and the distance we have in the concert hall that make sound landscapes, which one can hardly hear in the Pearl River Delta, become possible. For me, the composition is not about the reconstruction of an experience or the illustration of a journey. Rather, it is about the construction of images that I did not find but are inspired by the pulse of this journey.

David Fennessy (UK)
13 Factories
As I wandered around and wondered about individual people's lives I began to think about the concentric circles we draw around ourselves: ourselves, the home, family, the community, the city – like a stone dropped into still water… when do these circles reach the shore and start to reflect? The theme of "recognition" was constantly recurring: Even in medium sized European cities such as the one on which I live it is possible on certain days to get the feeling that you recognize everybody. Every person you pass in the street is familiar in some way either literally, or as a generic type. Is it possible to feel like this in a city the size of Hong Kong? After recognition comes "familiarity".

Benedict Mason (UK)

For the title, I painted an ideograph I invented

Programme

Johannes Schöllhorn (Germany) Niemandsland (No Man's Land)

Unsuk Chin (Korea) Gougalōn - Scenes from a Street Theatre

Heiner Goebbels (Germany) out of

David Fennessy (UK) 13 Factories

Benedict Mason (UK)

Jointly presented by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department and Goethe-Institut Hongkong

Photos: MAP Office and Johannes List