“About 180 guests, including 18 Cultural Medallion recipients, were present at the ceremony, which also honoured five arts practitioners under the age of 35 with the Young Artist Award. They were visual artists Weixin Quek Chong, 31; lighting designer Gabriel Chan, 35; film director He Shuming, 34; composer Emily Koh, 33; and animation artist Tan Wei Keong, 35. They were each presented with a trophy by Ms Grace Fu, the Minister for Culture, Community and Youth. They will also receive a $20, 000 grant and a certificate.”
作曲家许佩珊观察生活寻找闪光点
“Currently based in Georgia, the United States, where she is assistant professor of composition at the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, University of Georgia, Koh graduated from the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music and did her postgraduate studies at the Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University and Brandeis. Her works have been performed by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, the New York Music Ensemble and the Malaysia Philharmonic. She was shocked when she heard about the award as she “always feels nobody knows or understands” what she does. “The award is a very humbling experience… it makes me feel like maybe I’m not as alone in my endeavour as I felt. It’s very encouraging to be supported. I hope to use the award in a couple of years’ time to record an opera in Boston which I’m writing. And I hope L’Arietta in Singapore will perform this opera.”
“The choir’s performance for the second half of the concert was noticeably more settled and less tentative compared to the first half, opening with the world premiere of Emily Koh’s Homemade Recipe: Char Kuay. I found the performance reminiscent of my attempts in following recipes from the internet. Most of the time, I’m sure I’ve missed out a couple of steps somewhere during the cooking and prepping segment. The food doesn’t really look like what it’s supposed to, yet it still manages to be delicious (Taste over plating anytime!). Culinary adventures aside, the audience was treated to percussive and somewhat aleatoric vocalisations as the recipe was articulated in a sing-speech manner. The text was in Chinese, and as someone who doesn’t speak the language, I only manage to recognise a few (delicious) ingredients like chai poh (preserved turnip).
The next work, also written by Emily, was a visceral piece entitled Nakuniku. The text was drawn from admonishments commonly used by elderly Chinese women on their young female children and grandchildren, to police and reproduce gendered behaviours valued by the patriarchy. The choir did very well to set up the sombre mood of the piece; two soloists, Angela Lee and Look Ru-shin, embodied the matriarch and intoned her words in an antiphonal echo amidst a tapestry of textured chords. The text and the performance struck home for many in the audience, and the unease it engendered mirrored the composer’s own troubled ruminations.”
Emily's piece After Igor was selected for the Aguascalientes Symphony Orchestra Earshot New Music Readings, which takes place August 12-14, 2019 in Aguascalientes, Mexico.
“For cello and prepared piano, Emily Koh’s piquant and colourful smidgen(s) explores five different spices, each in a separate movement. Yummy!”
“Thus, during the first half of the program, Koh’s “am burning, have burned, will burn” served as a “response” to Caccini’s “Ch’amor sia nudo” (that love is naked). The result was a pair of complementary takes on Cupid with sharply contrasting rhetorical stances.”
“Emily Koh’s trans-[migra].nation (2011) honors the late Steven Baxter, onetime dean and director of Peabody Conservatory and its Singaporean sister school Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, both of which Koh attended. The 11-minute octet offered the evening’s most expansive instrumentation but sounded even greater than the sum of its parts in its eruptive moments. Conducted coolly and unobtrusively by Maurice Cohn, Zafa’s tight ensemble was most impressive in this large-scale work, the musician’s unison lines and motivic echoes interlocking fluently.”
“Next was Emily Koh’s Bridging Isolation (2013) for clarinet, violin and piano. The clarinet introduced with a bright opening. At times listeners could hear random vocal calls from the clarinet that echoed Olivier Messiaen’s birdsong quotations. The work is slightly more demanding, with sufficient compositional space given to each instrument’s striking voices, though the composer occasionally established connections between the instruments. The piano was at times ominous, before increasing tension near the end, which created a cliffhanger as its climax and as the end of the work.”
In a similar way, Emily Koh (who lives in Georgia) stretches Caccini’s original phrases, the music of am burning, have burned, will burn becoming mockingly ceremonial in its slowness. Skittering notes, at the ends of long tones in the cello, sound like a French overture failing to get off the ground. But most striking in this theatrical work are the exclamations — “Cupid is naked!” — and the cackling laughter that ensues.
If only the Baroque performances had been as adventurous. The group’s playing wasn’t half as assertive as the speaker of Caccini’s “Chi desia di saper” (Who wants to know) and the same composer’s “Ch’amor sio nudo” (That love that is naked) sounded strangely square, for a song about Cupid
“Her musical inspirations are wide and varied. She is especially attracted to uniquely human things: language, philosophy, sensory details (food, visual art, experiences etc.) Her music definitely reflects this variety of influences. I was initially drawn to Synpunkt because of the range of sounds and structures she uses. This also led to the greatest challenge in learning the piece: making a whole out of all the different sections and ideas. But as rehearsals went on, strong connections and relationships emerged, and the piece revealed itself to be unified as much as it was disparate.”
“Emily Koh’s brilliant \very/ specifically vague (2017) promises a depiction of roundabout conversation — and trading snippets of material, the duo maintained a dialogue that grew heated at moments but remained productive.”
In the former category were Emily Koh’s synpunkt (2013) for flute/piccolo (Hershman-Tcherepnin), clarinet/bass clarinet (Matasy) and percussion (Robert Schulz), Ho’s Injection Refraction No. 3 (2013) for piano (Donald Berman) and Yu-Hui Chang’s In Thin Air (2012) for violin (Omar Chen Guey), piano (Berman) and percussion (Schulz). Koh’s interest lies in pointillist statements and sonorities that grow ever so slightly into perceptible motifs, and synpunkt generally follows that pattern. The title is an actual Swedish word for point of view, but it carries to Anglophone ears a suggestion of coming together, taking “syn” as a common prefix.
Emily Koh’s nakuniku, a “patchwork of Chinese sayings and phrases” remembered by Singapore-born Koh from her childhood, was a particularly wonderful work. Though entirely Western in sensibility and musical vocabulary, the music began in tone fragments and conversation snatches that functioned as sound-paintings; traditional choral singing emerged gradually, inviting the listener into a musical world that was at once intimate and wise, simultaneously witty and unintelligible.
Brandeis' 66th commencement ceremony will take place on May 21, 2017. Each year, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) selects one graduating student to serve as Commencement Marshal for the school. This year, that student is Emily Koh, a PhD graduate in Music Composition and Theory.
Could you tell us a bit about where you're from?
I was born in and grew up in Singapore, where my family still lives. Singapore is a small tropical island in Southeast Asia with amazing food! I studied music composition at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music at the National University of Singapore before leaving the country to pursue my masters degrees in music composition and music theory pedagogy at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in 2009. I graduated from Peabody and moved from Baltimore, Maryland to Waltham, Massachusetts in 2011.
How did you end up at Brandeis?
I studied at music conservatories within larger universities for both my bachelors and masters programs, and wanted to pursue a doctoral education that is of the complete opposite end of the spectrum. One of my mentors at Peabody, David Smooke, suggested that Brandeis would be a great fit for the type of doctoral education and challenges I was interested in. I listened to the music of all the composers on faculty, was impressed and intrigued, and decided to apply!
What did you study at Brandeis?
I study music composition and theory, and work with my amazing professors David Rakowski, Eric Chasalow and Yu-Hui Chang. My dissertation explored Claude Vivier's Prologue pour un Marco Polo's innovative re-imagining of elements of Balinese gamelan gong kebyar and how it affected the structure and development in the work.
What are you doing now?
I am the co-Artistic Director of a local new music ensemble, Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble and teach theory and composition at Brandeis, Harvard and Walnut Hill School for the Arts, an arts high school in Natick, Massachusetts. I also perform with the New England Philharmonic as a double bassist, and play other gigs when they come up. Unfortunately, my New England adventures end soon; this fall, my husband and I are moving to Athens, Georgia where I will start a new position as Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Georgia!
What is the biggest takeaway from your Brandeis experience?
My biggest takeaway at Brandeis is to take initiative! In the music department, graduate students have the freedom and opportunity to curate our own colloquium and concert series. This allows us to pursue individual interests, curate our own learning and experiment with ideas, all with support from the department. It is a truly unique and wonderful feature of the Brandeis program!
Are you excited about Commencement? If so, why?
Of course I am! I heard that I get to hold a baton. Maybe this will be the start of my conducting career!
My work is generally introspective. It contemplates difficult questions on what it means to be a human being.
Composers never know how and when they will find inspiration for a new work. For Emily Koh it was during a visit to a museum. “I was walking around the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and a painting by Esphyr Slobodkina caught my attention,” Koh said during a recent telephone conversation. “Her pieces are abstract, colorful, and angular — all the things I find interesting, not only in music, but in art and sculpture as well.”
On Saturday, February 4 at 8:00 at SPACES Gallery, No Exit will present the world premiere of Emily Koh’s esphyr, performed by violinist Cara Tweed, pianist Nicholas Underhill, and percussionist Luke Rinderknecht. The concert will also include Lou Harrison’s Suite for Solo Piano (tribute to Arnold Schoenberg), Christopher Deane’s Mourning Dove Sonnet for vibraphone, Nicholas Underhill’s Habanera for violin, and George Antheil’s Violin Sonata No. 2. The program will be repeated on Monday, February 6 at Cleveland State University’s Drinko Auditorium, and on Saturday, February 11 at Heights Arts. Both concerts begin at 8:00 pm.
Koh began working on esphyr by sketching some of her musical ideas using brightly colored writing utensils. “The piece is not written in graphic notation, but the map was full of straight lines and angular movements,” she said.
Born in 1986, Koh is the recipient of awards from ASCAP, Prix D’Été, and PARMA. She has received commissions from the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, Composers Conference at Wellesley College, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and has been awarded grants from New Music USA, Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, and Artistic Excellence (Paul Abisheganaden Grant). A graduate of the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, NUS, and the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Koh is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Music Composition and Theory at Brandeis University.
Koh has found her success as a composer surprising. “I always thought of myself as going to conservatory to become an orchestral bass player. In high school, I had one composition class which made me think that maybe I should consider writing music. When I applied to college I also sent in a composition application, so I guess you could say the rest was history.”
Even with her busy schedule in North America, Emily Koh finds the time to stay in touch with her family in Singapore. “I visit my parents and grandparents as often as possible,” she said. “I’ve also had a lot of performances of my pieces there, which I am very thankful for. The fact that people are interested in hearing my music is very humbling.”
“Emily Koh’s Implodex! (Singapore premiere) for six musicians opened the proceedings. Conducted by Setts co-founder Christoph Wichert, its configuration had strings (violin, viola and cello) placed onstage, complemented by offstage woodwinds (flute, oboe and clarinet).
With its title alluding to the origin of matter and anti-matter, fragments of sound passed around the hall, the concordant alternating with the discordant. Its climax was a solo cadenza from oboist Joost Flach, who went on to tear up pieces of paper, symbolic of a point of no return, before all the musical parts coalesced in a serene C major chord.”
"In Emily Koh's implodex!!, the musicians surrounded the audience members on all sides of the performance space. Unorthodox spatial designs often come off as gimmicky, but Koh's setup was effective: By necessity, the players conducted each other, mirroring the system of the sculpture, in which each piece is equally important to the whole. Oboist Thomas Nugent, in particular, played with beautiful tone on his virtuoso flourishes and multiphonics."
"Koh responded to the fragmented structure of Parker's piece with "implodex!!," which she called a study in implosion and explosion. This involved putting the three strings (Phyllis Kamrin on violin, Kurt Rohde on viola, and Fong) on stage while spreading the winds (Stacey Pelinka on flute, Tom Nugent on oboe, and Roman Fukshansky on clarinet) across the arms and rear of the balcony."