Three young composers have featured these oft-overlooked instruments in pieces commissioned by the Singapore Chinese Orchestra.

Mostly used to produce loud resonant crashes in orchestral pieces, the tam-tam, a huge metal gong, is rarely the star of the show. But it is central to Chua Jon Lin’s Chinese orchestra piece, Lingering Resonances of the Street Opera Gongs, which reflects on the decline of Chinese street opera in Singapore.

Instead of simply being struck against the surface, the tam-tam’s friction mallets – with heads made of rubber – make a rubbing motion across the entire instrument, bringing out its rich acoustic overtones. 

“(The mallets) produce a variety of gong resonances and sound colours depending on factors such as the size of the mallet head, speed of the musician’s movements, and pressure placed upon the tam-tam,” said Chua of the piece, which was commissioned by the Singapore Chinese Orchestra (SCO) and performed by the Singapore National Youth Chinese Orchestra (SNYCO) in 2022.

The composer, who spent her teenage years playing the erhu with street opera troupes, strove in this piece to illustrate the fading tradition using the tam-tam’s range of tonal colours.

What emerges is a musical collage. “Traditional operatic fragments faded in and out amidst stray ‘resonances’ created through a mix of non-pitched sounds and ‘echoes’ of the operatic material played by the orchestra,” added the Eastman School of Music graduate, whose piece also features the drum, string instruments, and the nanxiao (a type of flute). 

The performance ends in silence, with musicians making hand gestures central to opera percussion performance: a poignant homage to a vanishing art.

A composer’s secret ingredient: The guanzi

Creamy, like corn starch. Smooth as butter on the eardrums.

Listen to New York-based composer Sulwyn Lok wax lyrical about the Chinese orchestra’s “secret ingredient” and you might forget he isn’t a chef. His secret sauce? None other than the guanzi, a double reed wind instrument that can serve as an aural “thickening agent” when doubled with the suona, another wind instrument.

“It eases the timbre into something a little more creamy, creating something more lush and smooth,” gushed Lok, who has featured the guanzi prominently in his music.

The guanzi, primarily found in professional orchestras due to how difficult it is to play, has a timbre which changes across different registers. For example, when the soprano guanzi is played softly in its lower register, it has a fragile quality – a “tender yearning” – which Lok displayed in With a Little Bit of Love and Imagination at the 2024 SCO Young Children’s Concert.

“On the flip side, in its higher registers and at stronger dynamics, the guanzi can turn into quite a visceral colour. It can sound really poignant…It has a strong emotional quality to it, making it one of the most expressive woodwind instruments,” the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music graduate added.

His large-scale symphonic poem Waves, Towards the Lands We Call Home, commissioned by SCO and performed by SNYCO and SCO at the 2024 Legacy II concert, harnessed this quality to stirring effect.

In one part of the piece, Lok uses guanzi trills below a dizi melody.

“It gives a very raw, primal effect that cuts through the orchestration unlike any other woodwind instrument,” he said.

Celestial colours: The yangqin

In the world of Chinese orchestra, the yangqin has long been overshadowed by the erhu and guzheng. A type of hammered dulcimer thought to have originated in Central Asia, it often plays the part of the accompaniment – much like the viola in symphony orchestras.

To composer Koh Cheng Jin, it is a hidden gem. The yangqin has a versatile sound and blends well with other string instruments, bridging the higher frequency of the pipa and lower frequency of the ruan, the Juilliard graduate argued.

Then there is its wide, mostly chromatic pitch range – spanning more than four octaves – which allows for colourful harmonic explorations.

These can be found in Koh’s Song of the Night Wind, which premiered at the Singapore International Festival of Arts 2022. Written for the SCO and Sarawak-based creative agency Tuyang Initiative’s MEPAAN programme, the orchestral work was inspired by songs of the Kenyah people in Borneo. The yangqin solos in the piece depict starlight.

Koh, a yangqin player herself, hopes to one day compose a piece of music that puts the instrument front and centre. “It’s my most familiar instrument and my comfort zone,” she said. “I feel extremely at home writing for it in any setting.”