Musical Language
Malaysian composers have won numerous awards abroad and at home with their rich and diverse styles of composition.
At the cutting edge of the avant garde are Chong Kee Yong and Tazul Tajuddin. They have received numerous awards and accolades in Europe, Japan, Korea and elsewhere. Yii Kah Hoe is slowly exploring a similar direction as a departure, or perhaps an enrichment, of his work with Chinese orchestral music, as his award-winning composition for Chinese Orchestra Buka Panggung displays. Pianist-composer Ng Chong Lim inhabits the ground between atonalism and aleatoric music based on the live interaction of more tonal fragments.
Preferring a more lyrical and tonal language, the music of Adeline Wong and Johan Othman are colourful and rhythmically vibrant. Othman in particular combines a quasi minimalist approach with elements of Malaysian aesthetics tempered with jazzy undercurrents to fashion a truly recognisable Malaysian sound, while Wong has a unique way of building complex structures from basic harmonic material and rich sound colours.
Ahmad Muriz Che Rose works with a more populist approach to Malay traditional instruments in a contemporary language through his work with the Petronas Performing Arts Group. Saidah Rastam experiments with jazz and atonalism in combination with ethnic Malaysian and regional elements from gamelan to ketchak, and has even worked with reinventing Chinese Opera through atonal jazz in her work Spirits. Film and jazz composer Hardesh Singh pushes the limits in the field of jazz composition with his group 50cents Jazz Club, and brings in elements of world music and sound samples into the art.
Read more about this topic: Malaysian Contemporary Music
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