Malaysian Contemporary Music - Background

Background

The MPO forum brought together six talented young composers, Ahmad Muriz Che Rose, Chong Kee Yong, Vivian Chua, Johan Othman, Tay Poh Gek and Adeline Wong, from around the country and abroad, to Kuala Lumpur, to compose music for the orchestra. Spread over two years, the forum introduced six new compositions for chamber orchestra and four for full orchestra. Chong Kee Yong, who had won numerous awards in Europe, emerged as the winner of the forum and won the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra International Composers Award 2004 with his symphony work The Starry Night's Ripples. The Forum was also a success from the audience standpoint, as all concerts were well attended and enthusiastically received by the music-going public as well as by the media.

The success of the Forum is a key factor in raising the profile on Malaysian contemporary music in Malaysia, although the composers who participated, as well as a number of others who were not represented, have been composing music in this medium for a number of years, the majority of their output having been premiered abroad.

That is to say, this does not mean that there was no activity in the field prior to the Forum, only that such efforts were not highly visible or organised. Information on serious composition in the 1980s through to the 1990s by composers such as Tazul Tajuddin (whose Etudes for chamber orchestra was performed in 1995 in USA), Dr Valerie Ross (who was awarded Malaysian Young Composer (1988) by the Asian Composers' League in Hong Kong), Razak Abdul Aziz (who began composing vocal works as early as 1980) is only now slowly becoming available, although a comprehensive survey of the pre-millennium period is still in need.

As cited by a Malaysian research paper in the late 1990s, the lack of such musical activities in Malaysia prior to the 21st Century is largely attributed to the absence of professional ensembles in the country who were able to support composers, although key issue has been one of a total absence of infrastructure rather than one of talent.

Fortunately for the Malaysian art music scene progress in the current period has been brisk, and the number of serious composers and compositions in this field is increasing. The 2006-2007 series of Composers Forums in Kuala Lumpur, for example, introduced new voices such as Ng Chong Lim, Teh Tze Siew, Yii Kah Hoe and Mohd Yazid Zakaria.

In 2008 Off The Edge magazine based in Kuala Lumpur collaborated with the Malaysian Composers Collective and HSBC Bank Malaysia Ltd to produce the country's first CD anthology of contemporary Malaysian music called Faith, Hope & Chaos. In 2009 the Malaysian Composers Collective collaborated with Goethe Institut to hold the country's first ever three-day contemporary music festival, the KL Contemporary Music Festival 09.

Titled Urban Soundscapes, the festival featured guest composers from around the country and the South East Asia region and Germany, with music performed by international new music groups Ensemble Mosaik and Hong Kong New Music Ensemble with a host of Malaysian musicians. The festival held concerts, workshops and a two-day conference at in Segi University College Kota Damansara, and also included a late night electroacoustic concert at the Central Market Annexe and an art exhibition on the theme of the city. KLCMF 09 also held the region's first ever Southeast Asian Young Composers Competition which received over 60 entries from Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand.

This article offers only a brief introduction to Malaysia's growing contemporary music movement, in the absence of a full study on the subject. It also places emphasis on the western-based formal tradition, and on composers largely trained in this tradition, purely as a matter of focus on an area that is particularly lacking in information, notwithstanding the very notions of art music or western-based music is itself evolving rapidly today with the blurring of lines between western and eastern instruments and the smearing of borders between various genres such as avant-garde, minimalism, world music and jazz, amongst others.