Events

Goethe-Institut Hongkong is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Samson Young: On the Musically Beautiful by media artist Samson Young at the Goethe-Gallery on April 25, 2013 (Thursday) and the opening of the Institut’s new Black Box Studio, in which one of the works from the exhibition, entitled Memorizing the Tristan Chord (Institute of Fictional Ethnomusicology), will be featured. The exhibition is one of the programmes to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Goethe-Institut Hongkong in 2013.

Project Background – My Personal Wagner

You might remember that in last December, Goethe-Institut Hongkong and Samson Young have conducted an open call for participants for the “My Personal Wagner” project to celebrate German composer Richard Wagner’s 200th birthday in 2013. Memorizing the Tristan Chord (Institute of Fictional Ethnomusicology) is part of the result of the project. This newly-commissioned work by the Goethe-Institut will be shown in the new Black Box Studio concurrent to Young’s four other works at the Goethe-Gallery on the same floor. The works are: Brahms String Quartet No. 1 Mv. 1, Pulse Radio (Debussy, Arabesque No. 1), Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 1 - 14 (Senza Misura) and Eight Partitas. The other outcome of the project is a web blog, which is available on Goethe-Institut's website "My Personal Wagner" http://blog.goethe.de/wagner/ .

Richard Wagner (22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) is a German composer who has written famous operas such as Lohengrin, Der Ring des Nibelungen and Der fliegender Holländer. 2013 marks the 200th birthday of Richard Wagner. To celebrate this special occasion, a web blog project was initiated by the Goethe-Institut in which artists from around the world were invited to create a piece of art, a text-based article or a composition to express their attitude towards Wagner and his work. Goethe-Institut Hongkong has chosen the renowned sound and media artist Samson Young to take part in this project by producing an installation on the web followed by an exhibition in Hong Kong.

Artist’s Statement

That of which we become aware in nature either is or is not music. The decisive factor can only be the commensurability of tones… According to this principle, bird songs must be called music and the mechanical music box must not. But precisely the opposite is the case. - Eduard Hanslik, 1854

On the Musically Beautiful features a series of sound works and installations by Samson Young. Originally trained in classical composition, Young now works with installations, multimedia performances, and sound-based works. The works shown in this exhibition comment on “Music-with-a-capital M” and the act of composition as sites where fantasies and ideologies are produced, ascribed and contested. At the center of this exhibition is a web database and video installation project entitled Memorizing the Tristan Chord (Institute of Fictional Ethnomusicology), which was commissioned by Goethe-Institut Hongkong to commemorate the 200th birthday of Richard Wagner in 2013. Through an open call, the artist recruited Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong to invent Cantonese phrases that would map perfectly onto the pitch contour that leads up to and immediately follows the famous “Tristan chord” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Participants were asked to internalize the phrase by singing it several times in front of the camera. The process is likened to the infliction of “earworms” onto the participants – a forceful marriage of music and nonsensical words, and an unimaginable act of localization and corruption. An online preview of the project is available at http://fictionalethnomusicology.squarespace.com.

The Artist

Samson Young is a composer, sound artist and media artist. He received training in composition at Princeton University under the supervision of computer music pioneer Paul Lansky. In 2007 Young became the recipient of the inaugural Bloomberg Emerging Artist Award. Other honors include the New York Society for New Music Brian M. Israel Prize, a Jury Selection award at the 15th Japan Media Art Festival, and an honorary mention at the digital music and sound art category of Prix Ars Electronica. He was Hong Kong Sinfonietta’s Artist Associate in the 2008/09 season. He is currently an assistant professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, and the artistic director of experimental sound advocacy organization Contemporary Musiking.

Audio equipment courtesy of: