PROGRAM NOTES BY JOCELYN HO​

It is my pleasure to bring to you a vision that has been in the making for many years, borne out of my interdisciplinary research in music and embodiment. Any lover of music can tell you that music affects them not only on a cerebral level; great music can chill bones and raise hairs. And so, Synaesthesia Playground is about experiencing music on this kind of physical plane. The theme of this concert is the body, and I am going to take you for a ride through my own and ultimately, through yours.

The first half of the program is a journey inwards from the skin to the depths of the core: we start with the superficial touch in Celeste Oram’s toccata & bruise, then enter into the vocal apparatus with Anne Sophie Andersen’s Iyalāmai, and finally plunging into the core where we experience spiritual ecstasy in Sidney Boquiren’s Missa di Glossa.  

In the second half of the program, we start interiorly with my live heartbeat and breath: both of these physiologies will be hooked up to the music and the visuals in Andrew Batt-Rawden’s Love Spiral and Daniel Weymouth’s Lux Venit. Finally, the trajectory of the bodily journey catapults outwards: we finish off with my composition Sheng, a collective improvisation where your gestures (via your mobile phones) will be part of the music-making.

The music and the visual installations — Celeste Oram and Takafumi Ide’s Piano Epidermis and Nobuho Nagasawa and HUL ARNOLD’s Bio Lux— meld together as one to highlight the inter-sensoriality of this physical journey. The two halves of the recital juxtapose the piano’s exteriority with the pianist’s interiority: while Piano Epidermis is a dynamic installation on the body of the piano, Bio Lux is a luminescent garment pulsating to my internal viscera. One may ask, where is the boundary between the pianist’s and the piano’s bodies?

The vision of Synaesthesia Playground exists within my general outlook of bringing Classical music to the masses. In this 21^st century of dwindling classical music audiences, the classical concert needs to shed its elitist image and bloom in directions that are exciting and contemporary.  I hope that this experience of Synaesthesia Playground inspires you to explore what the world of new music has to offer.