When the Global Meets the Local in Cantonese Choral Works: Toward a Model of Text-Tone-Music Relationships​

Hedy Law
University of British Columbia

Since the Cantonese linguistic tones are critical components of the Cantonese language, how do composers write a composition that consists of multiple vocal parts while making sure that all the melodic parts sufficiently correlate to linguistic tones? In this paper, I answer this question by analyzing a Cantonese choral song, “No Woundless World” (2018). With lyrics by Chris Shum and music by composer Alex Tam, this song demonstrates meticulously constructed three-part vocal writing, featuring various degrees of correspondence between linguistic tones and melody that result in an ever-shifting musical texture. Instead of the text-and-music relationships that are usually used in musical analysis, I develop a new model—of text-tone-music relationships—that explain unusual musical features that could not be adequately explained without taking linguistic tones as an analytical parameter. Importantly, a new wave of established composers—Yin Ng, Leon Ko, Jason Liu, Cynthia Wong—meet the same musical-linguistic challenge by composing Cantonese multivocal compositions. Their works—performed at international music festivals by prominent ensembles such as the Hong Kong Children’s Chorus—illustrate Cantonese choral music as a genre suitable for the global music stage. But the significance of these songs goes beyond tokenism. Their musical-linguistic properties raise epistemological questions about research on vocal music, which takes non-tonal languages exclusively as its analytical premise. The text-tone-melody properties present a compositional challenge for Hong Kong composers who use a “local” language to expand their “global” compositional training. Their Cantonese choral compositions provide examples for reconceptualizing language, the sound of language, and music.

About me!

Hedy Law

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Hedy Law is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She received her B.A. in Piano Performance with first-class honors and a Postgraduate Diploma in Education with distinction at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, followed by a Master’s of Studies degree in musicology at Oxford University, and a PhD in Music History and Theory at the University of Chicago. She has published on dance, pantomime, sign, language, disability studies, gender, freedom, and various aspects of eighteenth-century culture, French opera, and the French Enlightenment. She is now interested in the global Enlightenment, gender and sexuality, intersectionality, the body, memory, materiality, decolonization, and Sinophone studies. Her book, Music, Pantomime, and Freedom in Enlightenment France, was published by Boydell in 2020.

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