Feast your senses with a novel ink art and new music experience
- Asian Premiere of ‘Ink Art & New Music: New Works by Faculty and Student Composers’ on 30 September, 8pm, at Grand Hall of Lee Shau Kee Lecture Centre, Centennial Campus, HKU
- Featuring seven new works for mixed Chinese and Western instruments inspired by the Ink Art Collection of M+ Museum
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Get set for an evening of multisensory experience of the musical and visual arts on 30 September at HKU. Aspiring young talents of Ensemble Traversée will perform seven novel, cross-genre, cross-cultural, and cross-generational works composed by three faculty composers and four outstanding student composers. Hailing from The University of Hong Kong (Prof. Chan Hing-yan, Austin Leung, Jing Wang), South China Normal University (Dr. Yeung-ping Chen), The Tianjin Juilliard School (Dr. Yiwen Shen) and the Bard College Conservatory of Music (Samuel Mutter, OGA), they broke new ground by composing for mixed ensemble of Chinese and Western instruments that respond to their selected ink artworks from M+.
Breaking new ground with young talents
The genesis of the year-long multi-party collaboration ‘Ink Art and New Music’ Creative Exchange Project started back in 2018 when Prof. Chan, Dr. Chen, Dr. Robert Martin (former director of the Bard Conservatory), Dr. Jindong Cai (director of the US-China Music Institute), Dr. Lesley Ma (former curator at M+ and current associate curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Sharon Lu (programme director of HKU MUSE) met up in Hong Kong. “Ink art and Chinese musical instruments are part of Chinese culture with a long history; both need to find a contemporary voice. So we came up with the idea to create new music with a mixed ensemble featuring a very unique combination of instruments that responds explicitly to specific ink paintings. It has never been done before,” explains Prof. Chan.
Divided into three phases, the project eventually kicked off in September 2021 under the auspices of the HKU MUSE series, whose mission is to inspire a life-long passion for the arts through innovative and educational programmes. Run by the HKU Cultural Management Office, HKU MUSE has presented many innovative educational programmes. They include the Literature X Music Series with Musical Pushkin and Musical Murakami, a special project to commemorate 80 years of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, a crossover musical dialogue between the harpsichord and zheng, and a book on ‘late style’ published by Oxford University Press.
