Since 2007 the Singaporean Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) and the YST conservatoire have cooperated to organize a regular series of lunch concerts. Usually these concerts take place inside the museum and they draw quite large audiences. The concerts consist mostly of presentations of solo and chamber music repertoire by YST students of all years.
In 2020 however things were a bit different. Because of the COVID situation it was decided to live-stream all concerts from the conservatory to the facebook channel of the museum. Furthermore the museum had expressed a wish to make a connection between the music and their collections. YST has responded by introducing two concerts that were a bit different in this respect. The first project was a class project guided by Dr. Chen, where students composed and performed pieces inspired by stories connected to the Tang Dynasty Shipwreck (an important part of the ACM collection). For the second project I was asked to develop a set of
pieces inspired by the hugely varied ACM collection. To reflect the great diversity of the artifacts in this collection I decided to choose collaborators with diverse musical backgrounds amongst my colleagues: Dr. Tony Makerome and the artist fellow Syafiqah 'Adha Sallehin. Tony is a double bass player with a combined jazz and classical background and he is also an excellent mridangam player, highly skilled in the musical language of the South Indian
Carnatic tradition. Syafiqah is an expert of Malaysian traditional music and plays Accordeon as well as Malay drums. I myself complemented them with Piano and Synth. Both have previous experiences with improvisation. The program was called 'Improvised Inspirations' and made connections in various ways to elements of the museum collection. The creative process will be presented further and analyzed in the BACKSTAGE section.
From ACM's announcement on the Facebook page:
"Drawing inspiration from stories and objects in ACM's collection, the trio consisting of Karst de Jong, Tony Makarome and Syafiqah "Adha Sallehin present original compositions and improvisations, virtually"
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Karst de Jong (YST visiting faculty). keyboards
Tony Makarome (YST artist faculty), double bass and mridangam
Syafiqah 'Adha Sallehin (YST artist fellow), accordion & rebana
>> BACKSTAGE