Kei Hong (Addison) Wong’s piece, Chamber Music for Seven Performers, will be featured on the ECCE May 19th “newmusicnow.pdx: the newest voices in classical music” concert. You can see a preview of the piece below, and read more about Kei Hong and his source of musical inspiration below.
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Introducing composer Kei Hong Wong:
My name is Kei Hong Wong and I also go by Addison. I came from Macau, China. I first found interest in music when I came to the State 8 years ago. The place I went was called Hoopeston, a tiny town with 2000 population located South of Illinois. I was 16 years old at that time and all I wanted to do was to try out everything in school. So I joined the choir, show choir, musical and band. They all had one thing in common. They are very old-school style because almost all of their repertoire came from the jazzy show tunes from the 40s. A lot of old folks loved it when we performed them including my host father, Steve, who played exceptionally well accordion since the age of 6. That was probably my first cultural shock since I came from an Asian country where my high school, as well as many others, focuses extensively on Math, Chinese, English and Science. The culture was pretty much business driven and music was looked at as an entertainment. However, it is a whole different life in Hoopeston, a tiny town but extremely musical. I was rehearsing day and night running from big sacred choral pieces to Frank Sinatra little tunes; and after I came home everyday, I would sat down to enjoy Steve’s playing accordion before dinner. I told myself one day when I am 60, I want to be like Steve, playing music all day and have fun.
The old Jazz tunes I sung in high school really came back to me when my keyboard skill teacher in my first year of college introduced a major 7th chord to me. I ran home and tried that chord out for hours and I knew I heard them a lot in the past, especially in those Jazz tunes. I have always interested in harmony, harmony that tells a beautiful story. That matches my optimistic personality. One could hear the clean and vivid quality harmony dominant my music.
My passion is to write music that encourages people and brings people to joyfulness. In order to achieve this ideal, in my Chamber Music for Seven Performers, I used solely notes that comes from the Lydian mode, the brightest mode of all, for every vertical moment in the first section. Equally important, the melodic writing gives emphasis on consonant intervals. (According to my taste, they are Perfect 5th , Perfect 4th and Major 2nd). Finally, maybe is the most important of all, rhythm is the key to bring out happiness. Without a rhythm that truly reflects joy, all of the above would not bring us to that stage. In terms of rhythm, Herbie Hancock is my model. His Jazz Fusion, Cantelope Island, has appeared to be very joyful to me, at least in terms of rhythm. It makes you want to move with its 16th note off-beat accent. One could see all kinds of different approaches I took to write gestures with four 16th notes with the last one accented. They could go in ascending or descending direction and in fact, the subject in my Fugue in the middle of the piece ends with a descending four 16th notes figure.
Some players expressed to me that they enjoyed playing the piece because they had some fun lines to play. It is not only a piece for the composer to have fun with but more importantly for others to enjoy it. I might not be able to recall every influence I had with the show tunes that I have sung, but the spirit of a16 year-old boy excited for life in a musical town is definitely there beyond the notes on the page.
Kei Hong Wong (Addison) is an active concert composer in Los Angeles and Eugene. This summer, he will be studying at the Bowdoin International Music Festival in Maine.
Blurring Genres, Finding Common Values
Take for example extreme metal and popular country music. The metal fans seek potent rhythms, tasteful use of articulations, and virtuosic instrumental work. The harsh vocals are used in a percussive sense, which to the metal fan only adds to the power of the music. Many a country music fan will dismiss metal for its lack of vocal melody, its harshness, or its ear-punishing sound world. These country fans value sing-able vocal melodies, stable/simple rhythms, and a real life story that they can identify with. These two groups are many times at odds not over the quality of music written, but over the use of their favorite musical characteristics. All of the musical features mentioned above have equal musical value depending on their contexts. The major difference is not what is being listened to, but who is doing the listening.
The classically trained musician has equally as many perceptive roadblocks to avoid. Many musical institutions turn students’ focus to a handful of important things: the value of “serious” western art music, the importance of form, of counterpoint, of doing what is traditionally “correct”, or of strict avoidance of that same “correctness”. Many a time as a music student have I found myself professing to like a piece of contemporary music because the concept behind it is interesting, or because I find the compositional skills by the composer amazing. That’s not to say that this music isn’t good (I think it’s awesome). It’s just that accepting non-musical elements as justification for music’s worth is leading you away from the value of the music itself. This is a battle I’m constantly fighting as a listener; the attempt to listen to music for itself and not for outside circumstances, to let my ears do more work and my brain do less.
I am in no way saying that every person should attempt to like and treat all music equally, because no one can connect on a personal level to that many types of music. Liking one kind of music and disliking others is a fundamental part of being a human. However, if you and I open our minds as well as our ears when we listen to music, we may discover that there is far more music out there that speaks to us than any of us could imagine.
Matt Pollock is a composer and multi-instrumentalist living in Bellingham, WA. Matt is active in Bellingham based bands Queen Anne’s Revenge and E-Clec-Ti-Ci-Ty