My route to contemporary Singaporean new music (written by composers who have been trained in doctoral programs in the West; hereafter, "Singaporean music") began after I completed my
Masters at Oxford and returned to enlist in National Service at the Singapore Armed Forces' Music and Drama Company as a clerk, during which time
my brain had to grasp hold onto something. New music, which I had rarely
encountered through my entire college education, seemed like fertile new
ground. My interest in new music was subsequently narrowed into contemporary
Singaporean composers while I was a teacher-in-training at the National Institute of Education, in large part
because of the existence there of the Singaporean music archive set up by Eddy
Chong. This research was given extra impetus with a research grant from the National Arts Council in
2007, which culminated in the release of the research report Scions of the Musical West: Singapore at Cultural Crossroads in 2009, just
weeks before I left for the US to pursue my doctorate in musicology at Duke
University. (Incidentally, the National Library Board initially listed my report as "...Singapore at Cultural Crosswords"--a fitting title for a volume about cultural puzzles!)
In my dissertation, I focused on three works, one each by
Robert Casteels (L’autre fille aux
cheveux de Bali, 2002), Joyce Koh (TAI,
1998/2002), and John Sharpley (Kong,
2002). (The selection of these works—the fact that I selected these works—
present a whole new set of issues, to be addressed elsewhere.) Such is the
nature of academia that I have found myself staring at a narrower and narrower
point where detailed discussion of specific works intersected with engagement
with postcolonial, feminist, and affect theory. My success in this accelerating
zooming-in has made me equal to the academic milieu of journal publication (forthcoming
in Journal of the Royal Musical
Association) and conference presentation (American Musicological Society,
Society for Music Theory, Society for Ethnomusicology).
Now comes the exciting prospect of bringing Singaporean
music to an international audience in the US and UK, but also the conundrum of
accessibility. Conference audiences and journal readers expect to have access
to the music which I discuss; this is entirely reasonable—why would anyone slog
through a 30-min conference session or an entire 15,000-20,000 word article if the
music in question is not even easily available commercially through major music
labels and publishers? Now, I have to insert the caveat that the dissemination of Singaporean music is growing (though not at a pace I would like). Nevertheless, I think it is reasonable to argue, from a purely pragmatic point of view, that the problematic of relative inaccessibility takes
the form of a vicious cycle: since the music is relatively inaccessible (you often can’t access it at the click of a button), my conference attendees and would-be
journal readers are relatively reluctant to pay attention to it, which
reinforces the relative inaccessibility of this music (record labels and music
publishers are less likely to pick it up because the audience is small and not
growing much). Compounding the pragmatic aspect of accessibility is the more
complicated issue of aesthetic validation by new music networks globally,
comprising composers in and outside of university music faculties, music
historians and theorists, graduate programs, publishers, record labels, music
critics, and audiences.
My research output at conferences and especially in journals
brings Singaporean music to a wider audience, but if this music is not easily
accessible, it is going to be stuck in the vicious cycle of relative
invisibility from the admittedly limited point of view of the academic music
audience (music historians and theorists). Yet the power of appealing to this
group should not be ignored; professors, after all, are the ones who write
music history, both in the more general form of music history textbooks, and in
the more specialized form of monographs about narrower music topics. Consider a
thought experiment where a new textbook on Western music actually mentions Singaporean
composers—this textbook would be written by a music historian. (I realize that the definition of Singaporean music as "Western" presents a whole new set of issues, also to be explored elsewhere.)
Music professors are also the people who review journal
articles about music to determine whether an article should be published, and
the fact that a work discussed in a potential journal article is not readily available is most
definitely a negative point in the review process. If the music is not already
in the average journal reader's music library, and if the music is written by a brilliant composer whom the reader has nevertheless not heard of because of cultural geopolitics, and if the reader already has a huge Western canon at hand, including contemporary Asian
composers such as Chinary Ung and Bright Sheng, what are the overall odds that this reader would consider going online to buy other music off a commercial website,
or to listen to the music on the composer's website? And if further, the reader actually
has to search for the composer online, and write to the composer personally to
request for the music, what are the lesser odds that he would do this? Pondering these questions are key in the process of exploring ways to envoice Singaporean music, an issue of particular salience as research in a broader definition of "Singaporean music" than I have been pursuing intensifies (see Jun Zubillaga-Pow and Chee-Kong Ho eds., Singapore Soundscape: Musical Renaissance of a Global City).
