SYC lite: Nona Sensilia

Welcome to our first lite concert, with a skewed offering of 60% 'lighter' music (for SYC!) to 40% 'heavy' repertoire. Tonight's lite fare includes music of hte Caribbean and Latin America, and Filipino folk and contemporary song. We close the concert with our trademark, African-American spirituals.

Within this evening's lighter programme, we still make time to explore what it means to be a chorister living in the 'now'. Musicians and others who have found us 'refreshingly adventurous' in the past may rest assured that the 'pathfinder mission' continues to shape who we are. And as part of our ongoing commitment to give voice to Asian composers and arrangers, we premiere a Filipino love song arranged for us by Babes, Hindi Kita Malimot, in addition to Joyce's Nona Sensilia.

We stretch ourselves (and our audience) once again by challenging notions of what the choral art should or should not be (boring, stand in 3 rows and sing out/blast). The luxury of a larger space with built-iin technical equipment allows us to broaden our musicianship, transforming the experience of the choral art.

In Schafer's Seventeen Haiku, the singers move in the space accompanied, for the first time, by lighting design intended as visual aid to the word-painting effects of each haiku. The changing light takes us, as do the haiku, from dawn to darkness; and we explore the impact of sight on sound and the imagery conjured up by this marriage.

Lighting design also features in Nona Sensilia, a work that invites us to relish sound for its own sake. The singers alternate between singing the text of Lear and speaking it in a sing-song manner, in earnest dramatic conversation with morphing speech-like electronic sounds. All these sounds are passed through a mixing board, and diffused through the various Hall speakers, our small-scale version of cinematic surround sound. The shifting backdrop of light, the choir's senseless repetitive utterances, the unfamiliar sounds surrounding the audience, the incongruity of such odd sounds issuing from the hands of a pianist - these combine to affect a sensory overload more associateed with some foreign art film.

Welcome to the world of choral theatre.