Constructs from Living Cultures: Creating and (Re)sourcing Composition on the Cloud

Abstract

          Composing entails sourcing and resourcing the endless stream of creative ideas that provide us with a base. The modern day techno-icon for this process is the so-called “Cloud”—a place where we can now conveniently archive and retrieve sounds and ideas without limit. In Asia, while much of the discipline of composition is rooted in western music theory, local structures, specifically those arising out of local rural and urban living cultures, form a foundation for composers’ conceptual and structural creations. Although composers benefit from hi-tech innovations like the Cloud, constructing from living cultures continues to involve the direct experience of belonging to and being rooted in living culture, as work arising out of living culture imbues us with a sense of creative fulfillment in having achieved something original and distinct. Connecting to one’s living culture should thus be encouraged as a component of today’s composition pedagogy. Revisiting this process of local sourcing and compositional application is key to motivating emerging composers to keenly observe their environments and think of ways to encode living culture into structural and aesthetic musical relationships. When composers strengthen their relationships to local culture in both thought and action, a cyclical flow occurs in which the act of collecting and composing in turn expands the composer’s creative consciousness and results in expanded original contributions to living culture.