MODART

Modart

MODART is a professional development project that provides opportunities for emerging composers to develop works for vocal ensemble, and which then receive public performance by The Song Company.

Biography: Karfai Samson Young

Kar Fai Samson Young (b.1979) holds degrees in composition from the University of Sydney and the University of Hong Kong. In addition, Kar Fai had also been a visiting student of some of the most influential composers of our time, including Samuel Adler, William Bolcom, George Crumb and Steve Reich. Currently, Kar Fai is pursuing a PhD in composition at Princeton University, with the support of a Naumberg Prize and Graduate Fellowship.

As an active young composer, Kar Fai’s creative output ranges from the traditional concert hall music, to music theatre, to multi-media and sound installations. Kar Fai’s recent festival participations include the C21 New Music Festival (1999, 2000); the 11th Sydney Spring International Music Festival, Young Composers’ Salon (2000); Cattle Depot Arts Festival, Hong Kong (2003); Le French May Arts Festival of Hong Kong (2004); Bowdoin International Music Festival, Maine USA (2004); Microwave International New Media Festival (2004); Bang on a Can Music Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, USA (2005).

Program Notes: Ritual Machine

1. Invocation
2. A Flood That Does Not Flow
3. Vertical Opera
4. A Time That Is Not My Time

Countless composers, including those of ethnically Chinese origins, have found sources of inspiration in rituals: much of Tan Dun's recent output, most notably his chamber operas Tea and Nine Songs; Liza Lim's epic Yuè Lìng Jié and Machine for Contacting the Dead, to list a few. Scholars have also written extensively on the ritualistic quality of concert hall experiences; and in reverse, the idea of ritual as performance is not unfamiliar either.
In fact, a large proportion of Cantonese operatic productions in Hong Kong are 'ritual performances' – performances staged for the deities as charitable and pious deeds. In this sense, contemporary compositions that seek to re-present/ re-enact rituals in a concert hall setting bear interesting double meanings.

My Ritual Machine also takes as its point of departure a rather comical ritual that involves the beating and cursing of a small cut-out paper person with a shoe. The Beating the Small Person Ritual, though having its origins in mainland China, no longer survives the post-cultural revolution era, but remains active in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia. Various scholars, most notably Qiao Jian and Liang Chu’an, have published on the ritual: this peculiar ritual is of interest to cultural theorists for it differs in fundamental conception to comparable shamanistic practices (for instance, voodoo) in that the relationship between the practitioner/the cursed, the good/the evil, the human/the super-natural is volatile; ones position in relation to the positive/negative dichotomy shifts constantly throughout the course of the ritual, and it is precisely this contingent top-down/left-right relationship that I set out to explore in Ritual Machine II.

Having taken the ritual out of its original context, I dare not claim that my work bears any spiritual or religious significance, nor am I attempting to stage the ritual in any authentic, functional sense. That said, I have nonetheless borrowed from its structural framework and various formal proceedings, and by juxtaposing its chants with nonsense vocalisations and various other texts (including excerpts from a Requiem, and Kenneth Slessor's Five Bells), I hope to conjure up a tapestry of paradoxes and contingencies: between the physical world's burden of living memories and the liberty of after-life; between the practitioner/the cursed, the positive/the negative, the human/the super-natural, the deity/the evil spirit; and between the concert hall experience and the subject matter's original cultural context – and hence the title: the Ritual and the Machine.