From the outside, it all looks very healthy indeed. Singapore is positively bristling with choirs. Schools have them, community centres have them, churches have them and ad hoc groups pop up all over the place. There is also a very active group of choral directors who have large-scale conferences and gatherings to discuss the finer points of their activity.
But from the inside it is all pretty dreadful.
Read any biography of any Singapore choir and you come across multitudinous references to "Choral Olympics", "Competitions" , "Eisteddfodau" and hardly a mention of repertory. They dance, they stand around in cleverly contrived patterns, they go to town on the dressing and the colouring, and they commit to memory the most bland, featureless, meaningless drivel and present it as some kind of live musical wallpaper. In short, Singapore choirs compete but they do not sing.
In Singapore, promoted largely by the schools and that phalanx of choral directors, choral singing is a competitive sport, not a musical activity. Like soccer, only without the physical exercise, the corruption, the loose women or the bags of money, good choral singing is defined by league placings and international triumph is lauded above internal satisfaction. And, as a result, the connection between music, artistry and choral singing is lost. There is hardly a choir in Singapore who could successfully cope with a hundredth part of the repertory any self-respecting British, French or German choir - or Australian or New Zealand, for that matter - and because of this, despite my absolute passion for choral singing, I avoid the activity in Singapore like I avoid swimming in crocodile-infested waters.
There are exceptions. Sit in Mass at the Cathedral of The Good Shepherd any Sunday and Peter Low's choir will entrance with their singing of plainchant, even if some of the other music they sing is so vulgar that I cringe with embarrassment. Today, at St Andrew's Cathedral, a choir of students gave a lovely unaccompanied performance of the Schulz St John Passion marred only by an amplification system which rendered much of it virtually indecipherable. And if you wander in to the Esplanade on the evenings of the 21st and 22nd and the afternoon of the 23rd April, you will hear three ladies calling themselves La Voix Médiévale performing music from the 10th to the 14th centuries - and I instinctively know this will be good.
And very best of all is The Philharmonic Chamber Choir. I heard them do a programme of unaccompanied Asian works last Sunday and I have to say it was about the best piece of choral singing by a local choir I have ever heard in Singapore. Here's my review from yesterday's Straits Times.

The other composer
present was Chen Shu-xi. He was sitting
in the balcony rather than singing in the choir, but his four Musical Impressions
of Taiwan was given an equally committed and perceptive performance.
Indian composer
Vanraj Bhatia probably stretched the choir the furthest in this respect and, in
the rapid-fire passagework of his Monsoon, they very nearly came unstuck. The pitch slides which featured so much in his
Autumn were far more within the choir’s technical comfort zone.
But from the inside it is all pretty dreadful.
Read any biography of any Singapore choir and you come across multitudinous references to "Choral Olympics", "Competitions" , "Eisteddfodau" and hardly a mention of repertory. They dance, they stand around in cleverly contrived patterns, they go to town on the dressing and the colouring, and they commit to memory the most bland, featureless, meaningless drivel and present it as some kind of live musical wallpaper. In short, Singapore choirs compete but they do not sing.
In Singapore, promoted largely by the schools and that phalanx of choral directors, choral singing is a competitive sport, not a musical activity. Like soccer, only without the physical exercise, the corruption, the loose women or the bags of money, good choral singing is defined by league placings and international triumph is lauded above internal satisfaction. And, as a result, the connection between music, artistry and choral singing is lost. There is hardly a choir in Singapore who could successfully cope with a hundredth part of the repertory any self-respecting British, French or German choir - or Australian or New Zealand, for that matter - and because of this, despite my absolute passion for choral singing, I avoid the activity in Singapore like I avoid swimming in crocodile-infested waters.
There are exceptions. Sit in Mass at the Cathedral of The Good Shepherd any Sunday and Peter Low's choir will entrance with their singing of plainchant, even if some of the other music they sing is so vulgar that I cringe with embarrassment. Today, at St Andrew's Cathedral, a choir of students gave a lovely unaccompanied performance of the Schulz St John Passion marred only by an amplification system which rendered much of it virtually indecipherable. And if you wander in to the Esplanade on the evenings of the 21st and 22nd and the afternoon of the 23rd April, you will hear three ladies calling themselves La Voix Médiévale performing music from the 10th to the 14th centuries - and I instinctively know this will be good.
And very best of all is The Philharmonic Chamber Choir. I heard them do a programme of unaccompanied Asian works last Sunday and I have to say it was about the best piece of choral singing by a local choir I have ever heard in Singapore. Here's my review from yesterday's Straits Times.

Never let it be
said that the Singapore audience for classical music shies away from a
challenge. Here was over 60 minutes of
unaccompanied choral singing in which almost every work was written in the 21st
century and few of the composers were widely known, yet an impressively large
audience sat enthralled through it all.
Even an interval
which lasted longer than the entire first half of the concert was not enough to
dampen their ardour and, unusually, the audience was as large for the second
half as it had been for the first.
The one composer
whose name should have been familiar to the audience was Singapore’s own Zechariah
Goh. His Three Refrains at Yang Guan was
receiving its world premiere at this concert.
Its roots in a piece for Guqin were clear, but Goh skilfully weaved an
intriguing choral work around it.
Perhaps because he had written it especially for The Philharmonic
Chamber Choir and was not just present at the concert but actively
participating as a member of the choir, it received here a particularly
persuasive performance.
These were musically
intriguing pieces, but the big challenge for the choir was that the texts were in
the Amis language. In fact, the
programme involved texts in six different Asian languages and dialects, of
which only Mandarin would have been generally familiar to the 26 singers on
stage. The challenges in the music were, fortunately, not so much of the
tongue-twisting variety, but were pretty daunting none-the-less.
Six settings of
verses from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in Japanese by Takatomi Nobunaga
wandered dangerously close to the atmospheric mood music and contrived athletic
obstacles which those groups for whom choral singing is simply a static
competitive sport enjoy so much. But Lim
Yau was never going to let his singers degenerate into competitive exhibitionism.
It was the very musicality
of all these performances, coupled with a sumptuous choral tone and a control
over the various technical footballs which would have been the envy of any
Premier League Striker, which vividly demonstrated that under Lim Yau, The Philharmonic
Chamber Choir is not just the finest chamber choir in Singapore but can easily
hold its own with any in the world.
Brutally honest but your comments must be taken seriously. Music must be inspirational and it has to come from the heart. It is not just about winning accolades and competitions, rather the joy of it. Your review is so true and must be read slowly and hopefully, those really willing to learn can find it fruitful as I do.
ReplyDeleteHi Dr Rochester,
ReplyDeleteI hope this message finds you well. I'm hoping to get in touch with you with regard to my own doctoral dissertation regarding the cultural production of Singapore. Is it possible for me to buy you coffee and have a chat with you?