Risk Resonances: Communicating Risk through Music

What does risk sound like? Join us for a concert which transforms risk into resonance, dedicatedly prepared by five students who present their musical interpretations of issues such as mental health, ageing, heat and plastic pollution.

More information about the musicians and their pieces below.

• NEO JIE NING: Tides of Change for piano and flute

What if the sea could speak? This piece for piano and flute invites listeners to imagine the ocean finding its voice through the dialogue between piano and flute, framed by the sound of real waves. The music traces the sea's shifting moods: its tranquil shimmer, growing unease, and quiet plea for change. As climate change and pollution transform the waters that protect and sustain us, the piece becomes both a reflection and reminder that the sea's story is inseparable from our own, and that within its voice lies not only risk, but also resilience and hope.

• LUKE NG: Heat for Electronics and Bass Melodica

Drawing inspiration from the repetitive phrases and shifting layers often associated with Philip Glass, this piece explores how subtle, gradual processes can accumulate unnoticed—mirroring the insidious nature of heat risk. Divided into three sections, the work represents a gradual increase in temperature, which can be interpreted on both an individual level, reflecting the body’s response to heat, and a broader environmental level, highlighting the impacts of climate change. While Glass’s approach informs the use of repetition and layering, the composition integrates the student’s own expressive and structural choices, resulting in a distinctive musical interpretation of the theme.

• CHAN XIN TONG: 3uph3n15m for guzheng and erhu

The piece 3uph3n15m for guzheng and erhu is inspired by the linguistic phenomenon of euphemisms heavily perpetuated by social media, where taboo or sensitive words suppressed by algorithms are creatively altered as an act of resistance, giving voice to otherwise silenced content. Examples include phrases such as “suicide” replaced by “unalive,” “kill” written as “k1ll,” and “G@z@” used to speak about the Israel–Gaza war. These substitutions reveal how people adapt language to survive within systems of control, transforming suppression into expression.

The title 3uph3n15m itself mirrors this transformation, encoding the word “euphemism” through numbers, much like how social media users disguise forbidden words to preserve meaning and voice. The piece is about how hope manifests in the unwavering human desire to be heard. Even when words are censored and voices silenced, people continue to find ways to speak, to connect, and to be understood. Musically, the main theme is derived from the title 3uph3n15m, with each number corresponding to a pitch arranged in a synthetic pentatonic scale. The theme goes through transformation, much like how words evolve on social media, and gives voice to those previously unheard.

• FRANKLIN LEE: Reconcilable for piano four hands

Written for piano four hands, Reconcilable is a programmatic work that translates the thematic challenges people encounter as they age into sonic representations, allowing listeners to experience them viscerally. These challenges—overstimulation, mourning, and altercations—are structurally embodied within each variation, ranging from fragmented themes to polytonal strettos. Composed in a theme-and-variations form, each variation applies bold distortions to the original theme, creating a dynamic exploration of tension and resolution.

• XAVIER HUI: Portraits for oboe, violin, double bass, piano/MIDI keyboard

This piece embraces improvisation as a form of creation, moving beyond the traditional notion of composition as reading a fixed score. By engaging in spontaneous, collaborative interactions, the work embodies the inherent uncertainties and risks associated with mental health.

The improvisation explores risk in three ways: through issues of trust between performers, through detachment and altered perception using real-world and electronic sounds, and through the unpredictable flow of intense emotions. Rather than focusing on a specific disorder or conveying a message, the work serves as a portrait of risk, allowing the audience to draw their own reflections while demonstrating how improvisation can be a deliberate tool for exploring complex human experiences.