Award-winning composer of music, and stalwart of the Singaporean new-music scene Joyce Beetuan Koh, wraps WAparty up with an adventurous new evening-length work, written for the musicians of weird aftertaste.

Koh’s creative impulses, driven by a personal fascination with everything from the pedantry of architecture and scientific theories to the fantasy of Beowulf, have led to the creation of an oeuvre of music that spans a multitude of artistic disciplines. Recent works include collaborations with film-makers and dancers to instrument makers, reflecting her wildly multivalent approach to the medium of sound. Her music, while described as being in a language that is “abstract, self-contained, and never sentimental”, possesses an air of levity and spirit of playfulness that betrays its more severe intellectual foundations: for example, her On the String, a musicalization of string theory with a veritable playground of string instruments and tactile playable structures, and What’ll We Do?, a spirited speech-less setting of sections of Beckett’s tragicomic Godot.

The new work, Flight, operates in a variety of different modalities: it is a music composition, but also a participatory performance piece, impermanent visual installation, and codified sonic language. Taking Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes as a point of departure, the audience collectively assembles a poem from fragments of text in the performance space. The resultant artefact is decoded by the musicians in an act of sounding that transverses mediums of language, written representation, aural expression and live performance.

Flight is a ‘theatre of music’: this being a term coined by Koh in describing substantial, self-sufficient works of a singular vision that exist as sensorial ‘music-mind space[s]’ in which audiences are invited to commune.