Morse Percussion is a professional contemporary classical percussion group that aims to cultivate the interest of percussive music through modern practices and compelling productions. Formed in 2020 by a group of likeminded percussionists with an adventurous and eclectic taste for percussive music, Morse Percussion hopes to inspire through exquisite contemporary percussion music making, educate and cultivate interest of classical percussion through interesting productions, and to be Singapore's first professional percussion group characterized by musical diversity and excellence.
About Morse Percussion
An ardent supporter of commissioning Singaporean works, Morse Percussion have worked with local composer Phang Kokjun to create five multi-discliplinary videos which include percussion and dance, creating a visual and audio story based on Morse code and the global pandemic, and serial award winning composer Cheng Jin Koh on a piece that was influenced by the art paintings of Georgette Chen. Earlier this year, Morse commissioned 5 local composers namely Dr Tony Makarome, Jon Lin Chua, Jonathan Shin, August Lum and Avik Chari to create percussion works of contrasting styles.
Morse Percussion most recently played to a sold-out audience at the Esplanade concert hall at the Singapore Festival of Arts 2021. Their concert, titled Ghosts of Yesteryear, locally premiered music by American legend Philip Glass and awardwinning composing sensation David T. Little. They have also been featured as a contemporary music group at the Soundislands: Re: Sound festival at the Art Science Museum.
"There’s just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history and Steve Reich is one of them," states The Guardian. than affect the dour seriousness of his contemporaries. His music was as unique as his character and his influence – on everyone from contemporaries like Stockhausen and Lutoslawski, to the artists of the Fluxus school (several of whom had been his students), and rock bands like Frank Zappa and Sonic Youth – was incalculable. As diverse as his oeuvre and wide-ranging as his interests undoubtedly were, Cage was consistent in his steadfast determination to “let sounds be themselves”.
(1936-)Reich
John Cage (1912-1992)
Steve
Born in 1912, the son of an inventor who dabbled in everything form submarines to space travel, Cage was himself famously dubbed by his early composition teacher Arnold Schoenberg, “not a composer, but an inventor – of genius”. From youthful work as an accompanist to dance classes at UCLA and the Cornish School in Seattle to his long association with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, many of Cage’s innovations came about through his work with choreographers. When the percussion ensemble he had been writing for became too unwieldy to take on tour with Bonnie Bird’s dancers, he inserted bolts, screws and rubber erasers between the strings of an upright piano to make a percussion ensemble in a box. The ‘prepared piano’ was born. Cage remained a singular presence in music throughout his life, always more inclined to laugh joyously
Steve Reich has been called "America’s greatest living composer" (Village Voice), "the most original musical thinker of our time" (The New Yorker), and "among the great composers of the century" (The New York Times). His music has influenced composers and mainstream musicians all over the world. Music for 18 Musicians and Different Trains have earned him two Grammy Awards, and in 2009, his Double Sextet won the Pulitzer Prize. Reich’s documentary video opera works—The Cave and Three Tales, done in collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot—have been performed on four continents. His recent work Quartet, for percussionist Colin Currie, sold out two consecutive concerts at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London shortly after tens of thousands at the Glastonbury Festival heard Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead) perform Electric Counterpoint followed by the London Sinfonietta performing his Music for 18 Musicians. In 2012, Reich was awarded the Gold Medal in Music by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has additionally received the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, the Polar Music Prize in Stockholm, the BBVA Award in Madrid, and recently the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. He has been named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Royal College of Music in London, the Juilliard School, the Liszt Academy in Budapest, and the New England Conservatory of Music, among others.
Music for Pieces of Wood (1973) Steve Reich Amores: Mov 2 and 3 (1943) John Cage Nagoya Marimbas (1994) Steve Reich Child of Tree (1975) John Cage Third Construction (1975) John Cage Mallet Quartet (2009) Steve Reich
Morse Percussion will be presenting only the 2nd and 3rd movements of the piece tonight.
In an amazing bit of cross-cultural respect, a letter exists from Woody Guthrie to the producers of a recording of the Amores piano movements. Guthrie’s 1947 note spoke of hearing Cage “overhauling the family piano in his own way.” He described the experience as a “keen fresh breeze” and found it a “healthy change from the old ways you hear the average piano played.” Cage’s response, if there ever was one, is unknown but we can imagine that he would have been secretly gratified by Guthrie’s praise for “the inventive things that a piano can do to the touch of the proper hand.”
Morse Percussion will be presenting this piece with four players tonight. Amores, Movements II and III (John Cage - 1943) Cage wrote and premiered his four-part Amores in 1943. World War II was underway and Cage wrote that he “thought anything that is small and intimate, and has some love in it, is beautiful.” He further stated that Amores was “about my conviction that love is something that we can consider beautiful.” The outer movements call for prepared piano, in which specific notes are altered by attaching screws, bolts, nuts and strips of rubber to the strings of the instrument.
(MusicnotesProgrammeforPiecesofWoodSteveReich-1973)
“Music for Pieces of Wood” was written in 1973 and is designed for five players. It is written for claves, which are percussion instruments with particular pitches. There are two types used in this piece, the so-called standard and the “African” claves. The clave, which comes from Cuba (the word in Spanish means “key”), is made of two pieces of hardwood that the player beats. Audiences may be most familiar with the instrument in its use in the rhumba and other LatinAmerican dances. They have been used in orchestral works by Varese, Copland (in Connotations, among other works), and Berio. The Claves in this piece are designed to create a particular pitch differentiation. The composer specifies the physical arrangement of the players. While the notation is precise, the composer asks the players to repeat each bar “approximately” the number of times indicated, perhaps giving the performers a chance to vary not only the character but the duration of each performance.
To refer to John Cage as a composer would be an understatement; his ideas and influences on music and art are so far-reaching that he is often also deemed a poet, a philosopher, or, perhaps most fitting and all-encompassing, an artist. A revolutionary thinker who studied composition under Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, Cage produced work that centered primarily on the belief that there is no distinction between “sound” and “music.” This belief led Cage to experiment with the timbral possibilities of percussion instruments and everyday objects. In doing so, Cage freed himself from traditional, harmonic-centered modes of music theory and foregrounded new possibilities for contemporary percussion music. His early works are some of the first pieces written for percussion ensemble, and they remain staples of the repertoire more than 70 years after they were first Thirdimagined.Construction utilizes a wide array of instruments, including tin cans, split pieces of bamboo, a conch shell and the “lion’s roar,” a modified drum that uses friction to create an animal-like groaning sound. Despite very complex rhythms that often displace the listener’s perception of the beat, the piece is entirely in cut time, and follows its own numerical form, a more complex version of the ‘square’ form used in his First and Second Constructions. In this case, there are 24 sections of 24 measures each. In Third Construction, Cage created a great sense of fluidity and unpredictability with an extra twist in his numerical structure: the players’ phrases constantly seem to overlap and interrupt each other, because each musician’s phrases are grouped according to a different scheme within the 24 measure sections (for instance, the first player’s phrases are always 2-8-2-4-5-3, while the fourth player’s are 8-2-4-5-3-2).
Steve Reich’s Nagoya Marimbas was written in 1994, in honour of the opening of the Shirakawa Hall in Nagoya. Having established the harmonic intentions of the work and its rhythmic language, the two marimba players embark on a ‘close canon’ to the end of the piece; the second player plays precisely the same music as the first player half a beat behind him. The result is a bewildering collage of sound that immediately intrigues the ear.
Notes from Steve Reich: Nagoya Marimbas is somewhat similar to my pieces from the 1960s and ‘70s in that there are repeating patterns played on both marimbas, one or more beats out of phase, creating a series of two-part unison canons. However, these patterns are more melodically developed and change frequently, and each is usually repeated no more than three times, similar to my more recent work. The piece is also considerably more difficult to play than my earlier ones and requires two virtuosic performers.”
Third Construction (John Cage - 1975)
Nagoya Marimbas (Steve Reich - 1994)
Child of Tree (John Cage - 1975) Child of Tree is a composed improvisation for plant materials. Cage specifies amplified cactus and pea pod shakers as two of ten “instruments” that are to be chosen by the performer. The aleatory is realized on three levels. First by the interpretation of the “score”: the instructions provided are written out in roughdraft-form in Cage’s chicken scratch, with words, sentences and paragraphs crossed out and scribbled over. The difficulty of reading the words and the ambiguity of what is and what is not crossed out adds an element of chance to the construction. Second, by the means of composing the structure: prior to the performance, the performer throws coins and interprets the results (heads or tails) by the oracle of the I Ching (the Chinese Book of Changes). These chance operations determine how many sections the prescribed 8 minutes is to be divided, the lengths of those sections and which instruments are to be used in which sections. And thirdly, aleatory is realized in the performance, which is simply an improvisation. The performer is instructed to “clarify the time structure by means of the instruments,” but even though the performance is completely designed by the performer, an element of chance still exists “because the improvisation can’t be based on taste and memory since one doesn’t know the instruments” (John Cage in an interview, 1982).
Mallet Quartet (Steve Reich - 2009) While his early works are often categorized as “minimalist,” Mallet Quartet presents a more melodic style. The work is scored for two marimbas and two vibraphones and divided into three movements. In the fast outer movements the marimbas weave an interlocking motor rhythm over which the vibraphones play melodies, solo and in canon, while the slower middle movement utilizes the resonance of these instruments to create a more homogenous, lyrical texture less typical of Reich’s style.
Mallet Quartet is about 15 minutes in duration. It was co-commissioned by the Amadinda Quartet in Budapest, on the occasion of its 25th Anniversary, Nexus in Toronto, So Percussion in New York, Synergy Percussion in Australia, and Soundstreams in Canada. The world Premiere was given by the Amadinda Quartet in Bela Bartók National Concert Hall on December 6, 2009. The American Premiere was given by So Percussion at Stanford University Lively Arts in California on January 9, 2010.
Notes from Steve Reich: Mallet Quartet is scored for two vibraphones and two five octave marimbas. I had never written for five octave marimbas extending down to cello C. On the one hand I was delighted to have the possibility of a low bass and on the other hand apprehensive since just slightly too hard a mallet that low can produce noise instead of pitch. Eventually, after a bit of experimentation, this was well worked out. The piece is in three movements, fast, slow, fast. In the two outer fast movements the marimbas set the harmonic background which remains rather static compared to recent pieces of mine like Double Sextet (2007). The marimbas interlock in canon, also a procedure I have used in many other works. The vibes present the melodic material first solo and then in canon. However, in the central slow movement the texture changes into a thinner more transparent one with very spare use of notes, particularly in the marimbas. I was originally concerned this movement might just be ‘too thin’, but I think it ends up being the most striking, and certainly the least expected, of the piece.
Joachim Lim is as comfortable playing timpani in Mahler as he is drumming in a rock band. Armed with wide musical knowledge and versatility, he “performs with a razor-sharp edge” (The Straits Times) and is quick to adapt to fellow musicians and any situation he is put into. Joachim has experience in various orchestras and ensembles, including the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and the Metropolitan Festival Orchestra, He has performed in several countries including the United States of America, Italy, Korea, China, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia. music, Derek is dedicated to creating new works for percussion. He has premiered almost fifty solo and chamber works from composers such as Zhou Long, Chen Yi, Joyce Koh, Emily Koh, Eric Watson, Dr Zechariah Goh, Bertram Wee, and Dr Hoh Chung Shih. Derek most recently released an EP “APOLLO” with leading contemporary violist Christoven Tan in October 2021, and a sold-out 35 show music theatre production “The Noisy Forest” in collaboration with Esplanade where Derek is co-creator and Dedicatedpercussionist.topromoting and upkeeping musical traditions with the community, Derek is currently President at the Singapore Chinese Music Federation Youth Chapter, Secretary-General at the Percussion Association of Singapore and Adjunct Faculty at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore Armed Forces Band, and Tanglin Trust School. Derek received his Master’s degree at Mannes School of Music under the support of the prestigious Mannes Dean’s Scholarship, studying under Maya Gunji, Joseph Tompkins, and Michael Werner. He is also a Freer Percussion artist and plays exclusively on Freer Percussion sticks.
Derek CreativeKohDirector Touted as one of the most promising musicians of his generation, (The Straits Time Singapore), percussionist Derek Koh’s sensitive musical voice and varied musical ventures have afforded him the opportunity to perform extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia. His burgeoning rise as a dynamic and flexible musician has led him to work with art forms of all genres and mediums, from western and Chinese classical music to theatre and dance. Derek most recently appeared with the Berlin Philharmonic new music ensemble ZeMU! Ensemble at the Singapore International Festival of Arts 2022. He also regularly subs with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and the Singapore Chinese Orchestra. He has also been invited as guest percussionist for the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, guest timpanist for the Szechuan Symphony Orchestra, and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Derek has won fellowship positions in the Grammyaward winning Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (New York), Aspen Music Festival (Aspen, Colorado), Miami Music Festival (Miami, Florida), and PRISMA Festival, (British Columbia). A proponent for contemporary
In 2016, Joachim held his first independent solo percussion concert - described The Straits Times as having an “aura of informal intensity”, Joachim’s concert featured three Singapore premieres, “turning the potentially ridiculous into the searingly serious”. Joachim studied at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music and was awarded the National University of Singapore Society (NUSS) Outstanding Achievement Award during his graduation in 2014. He then proceeded with his graduate studies at the the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University with a full Apartscholarship.fromhis Classical achievements, Joachim is co-founder and Technical Director of contemporary percussion collective Morse Percussion, part of classical-pop fusion group, Lorong Boys and also plays with the TENG Ensemble, a collective that bridges Eastern and Western traditions, culminating in music that marries both traditional and contemporary.
Joachim is currently Artist Faculty with the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, Adjunct Faculty with the School of the Arts, Singapore, and a Freer Percussion Artist.
Joachim TechnicalLimDirector
musicians Left Derek Koh Right Joachim Lim
Cheong Kah Yiong One of the most highly soughtafter percussionists in Singapore due to his flexibility in Western and Chinese music literature, Cheong Kah Yiong has performed with many of Singapore’s most important ensembles including the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, Metropolitan Festival Orchestra, Ding Yi Music Company and The Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2017, he was chosen from over 1000 musicians across Asia to take part in the Asian Youth Orchestra 2017 World Tour, touring across America, Europ e and Asia, performing in festivals like the Lucerne Music Festival and the Ravello Music Festival. Through the years, Kah Yiong has had the wonderful opportunity to work with Yuru Lee Singaporean percussionist Yuru Lee has had quite a musical adventure. From starting as a pianist, to going into Chinese percussion in SOTA and eventually western percussion in Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music (YSTCM), he is often found freelancing across diverse orchestras and musical groups like the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Metropolitan Festival orchestra and Dingyi Music Company. An avid fan of video games and animation, he often transcribes original soundtracks for percussion or piano. Yuru is currently pursuing amazing artists such as Mathiass Bamert, James Judd, Kah Chun Wong, Sarah Chang and Vadim Repin. in 2020, Kah Yiong won a position in the Pacific Region International Summer Academy (PRISMA). Kah Yiong frequently collaborates with theatre and dance companies such as Intercultural Theatre and The Arts Fission Company as solo percussion, most recently touring with the latter to Melbourne, Australia, presenting music and dance in an eclectic programme curated by Dr Joyce Koh and Victoria Chou. Cheong currently serves as a military musician in Singapore Armed Forces Central Band and has performed with the band both locally and internationally. Notable performances include In Harmony 34th and 35th (acting principal timpanist) and Chamber Repertory XVI (soloist) performing Triptych Boom by Chad Floyd, accompanied by the Band’s Percussion Ensemble. Most recently, he recorded percussion for Disney’s live-action adaptation of Mulan. Kah Yiong is graduate of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts where he studied with Mark Suter and Christian Schioler. He will be heading to New York this Fall for his undergraduate studies at the Manhattan School of Music with New York Philharmonic Principal Percussion Chris Lamb. his Masters in Music Performance at YSTCM, under the tutelage of Jonathan Fox. Yuru can be found on YouTube, under the Conservatory’s Orchestra and Contemporary Music Ensemble OpusNovus as both soloist and percussionist. He can be found on Spotify too, as a session musician for Singapore Math Rock band Hauste for their albums Leavings (2018) and Patterns (2020), alongside Bennett Bay in his albums Compass (2017) and In Memory Of (2018).
CreditsProductionDerekKohJoachimLimCheongKahYiongYuruLeeAlviLindborg-KohThaddeusChungReiLim Creative Director, Producer Techincal Director CrewCrewPresenterMusicianMusician Special Thanks P.Works Singapore Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts Eight Tones Music Reich & cage 29 AUG 2022
