Tsang’s musical poetry (2018-2020) for 'Twisting Ways' (Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra, 2020)
- Submitting institution
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The University of Liverpool
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 15761
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Available from University of Liverpool
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Tsang’s musical poetry (2018-2020) for Twisting Ways (Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra, 2020)
‘Twisting Ways’ explores relationships between words and music in new ways, including how these relationships are redefined by different musicians in fluid compositional and performance processes. Tsang’s involvement throughout the album’s production enabled his poetry’s technical, musical and narrative characteristics to grow within a complex system.
Tsang produces musical poetry by improvising vowels to match melodic-harmonic sonorities, taking into account the timbral salience potential and the timbral rhythms of composer source materials, as well as physiological matters relating to vocal resonance. He then improvises images, metaphors and narratives, while continuously evaluating sonority-matching decisions and the consistencies, differences and conflicts that arise between words and music.
In Twisting Ways, Tsang collaborated with Braid to write ‘The Hand’ and ‘Lydian Sky’, and with Côté to write ‘Hope Shadow’. His contribution to ‘The Hand’ and ‘Hope Shadow’ set out ‘twisting’ paths and reflexivity concepts that aligned classical-jazz improvisation processes with ideas about direction and mutual interdependence from Christianity, Confucianism, and psychoanalysis. His concepts and compositional processes were developed further in Braid’s and Côté’s jazz orchestra settings of all three texts on the album.
Tsang’s creation of texts on the basis of resonance potential is his key compositional method in these works, but when ideas are exchanged in a crossover jazz-classical context a range of interpretations and responses are possible. Different singers produced idiosyncratic timbral patterns that required stitching into the musical fabric and collective redevelopment of surrounding material. Vocalists performing the works shifted from British classical towards North American jazz and popular, yet retained priority resonances and introduced ornamental inflections. Moreover, individual performer attributes stimulated re-evaluations of vocal line configurations in which Tsang prioritised the characteristics of timbral registration and narrative.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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