With such a commission, an important question to ask is: How do I bring the 4 alphorns and 8 modern instruments together?
But perhaps the more important question is: Why? The instruments are completely different and belong to different worlds. Why should they meet in my piece?
I started off with two questions for myself:
1) Why do humans make sounds?
2) What have we gained and what have we lost through the modernisation of our instruments?
I think that we humans make sounds in order to communicate. We come into the world alone in our experience, and alone we die. We cry out, we call out, and like the alphorn, these cries and calls travel over space to connect with others. We cry and call out with our voices, but also with our instruments.
Some cries and calls:
I don't think that humans created instruments to make music. I think that they did it for communication. With these instruments already existing, we made music, which became more complex, more organised, more structured, alongside the modernisation of the instruments.
As I researched on the alphorn, I looked into other similarly old/traditional instruments, and searched how they sound on YouTube. These include:
Frankly, I was shocked to hear how "horrible" some of these instruments sounded. Shocking, raw, ugly, similar to how an infant cries. Quickly though, I realised that many of them have the same guttural cry as the alphorn. This raised the question for me: What have we gained and lost through the modernisation of our instruments? They have become louder, stronger, and faster. The music of the time saw these attributes as desirable, and amplified them. Composed music responded by also becoming louder, stronger, and faster. Its tones, tones that were once cries, have been reduced to a blip in a melody or in a figuration.
But as with everything, when something is gained, something is also lost. I don't sense these guttural timbres in our modern instruments anymore. Were they deemed unwanted and polished away through the years? Why?
Upon completing the piece, 08.01.2026
This piece was born of a deep loneliness and the existential need to connect.
I struggled to make sense of the world around me – society and the music scene – and the seeming indifference of those in my vicinity to the horror and tragedy of man-made human suffering in the world.
In this time, in light of the violence and injustice in the world, I found it difficult to believe in beauty and its ability to touch and move us. How does one reconcile man-made beauty (in the concert hall or in museums) with man-made death and destruction? When we concurrently watch mothers carry the blown-up remains of their children in shopping bags, when we watch young children hugging the corpses of their fathers, begging them to come back to life?
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How does a sound come into being, and how does it cease to exist? And how is it, in its lifetime? How does it breathe and move, what does it want?
My piece is about being together with one another
About being free
About self-determination
About being strong, being unrelentingly oneself
(“Strength is not measured by how many people you can blow up or how
many children you can leave hungry.” - Tony Burke, Minister for Home
Affairs, Australia)
I cannot believe in a beauty which controls, which demands, which
excludes, which oppresses, which dictates.
John Cage would say about playing a piece or sound this way or that way –
both ways are beautiful. Things are beautiful, for they are themselves. That is
the beauty of self-determination!
And beautiful is also hope, natality; new life – existence – resistance
Human beings are born good “人之初，性本善，性相近，习相远” (All
men are born intrinsically with a good and similar nature. However, their
natures will change due to what they learn.)
And human beings are born free.
There are glimpses of heaven in everyday life.
There is kindness, there is togetherness, which is really all that we
have in our short lives.
“Now, more than ever, I
understand what struggle is about. Today we are together, sharing with each
other, laughing and crying together; tomorrow, one of us is just taken away
from the rest of us forever. Yet we go on, we continue, that is the only way we
can honour those who have so generously laid down their lives.”
- Ang Swee Chai, From Beirut to Jerusalem
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Humans did not create instruments for music. They created instruments for communication.
Have we forgotten this, as we modernised our instruments and made them louder, faster and cleaner? Tones have been reduced to just a blip in a phrase, a cog in a large machine.
These cries in my piece are a bid for connection, not just over space, but also over time: our shared humanity.
How do we make music, when only single tones are available to us? Without melodies, without phrases, without rhythms, without harmonies?
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“So the paintings aren’t pictures, but evidences - maybe documents, along the road you have not chosen, but are on nevertheless.” - Philip Guston
"I have not painted the war, because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer looking for something to depict. But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done.” – Picasso
18.03.2026
I too, am a child, who is not afraid.