The topic of the second lecture is sounds. Before we discuss about sounds, we should talk about how we should use our ears to listen. Listening is very important. We need to listen not only to our own sounds, but also the sounds of the others. We need to learn to listen to the sounds of nature, and how to distinguish the sounds of nature and the sounds created by man-made machines. When we understand all those sounds, then we could have a good foundation to express ourselves with our own sounds.

Thus, when we use our sounds to express, we could understand the structure and composition of sounds, and this helps us a great deal in making sounds. We listen, and then we make sounds, then we begin to understand making sounds is in fact the origin of music. The first sound made by humans is the most primitive music. Of course, we are now talking about what music is with a very detached definition. The origin of music is the sounds made by humans. I think the structure of sounds, as well as their quality are very important.

Let's go back to what I said previously about listening with care, and distinguishing differences with our heart, and then to assemble them. In that way, we can control our sounds, and know how to use our sounds to express. Then, we know how to develop music with our sounds, and to tell stories with sounds. Actually, we are using sounds to understand our breathing step by step when we do warm up exercise. In fact, breathing is the first step of developing our body language which is related to sound. Through breathing, we could understand the rhythm of sound, and gradually we come to know the quality of sound.

In the process of breathing, we can feel the relationship between ourselves and our surrounding environment. Thus, breathing is the beginning of sound, when we do warm-up. When we hear the sound of our own breathing, it makes us understand what the structure of sound is. We are now listening to the captured images and sounds recorded, and so we could understand how a sound is interpreted by technology. When we are speaking through a microphone in a very big classroom, this in turn reflects the relationship between sounds and technology.

Let's say for instance, there was no technology of sound recording, and neither was there the concept of electronic music. Nowadays, the music that you listen to has a lot to do with today's technologies. Let me give you an example, one musical element that we often use is the “Internationale” of the “Cultural Revolution”. As we all know, the “Internationale” is a very important revolutionary song, composed in the 19th Century. If you wanted to listen to this song in the 19th Century, you had to go to the scene where it was played live, because there was no recording technology. In the past few decades, recording technology emerged, and we could listen to the recorded “Internationale” performed by others.

As of today, you could listen to an electronic version of the “Internationale”, that is a recorded and processed version of the “Internationale”, turned into electronic music. Also, I used different versions of the “Internationale” in the performance of the “Cultural Revolution”, overlapping them to make a new song. In that song, we could hear the most primitive version of the “Internationale” to today's electronic version. What we were doing, was to use technologies to take a new look at history, to review music and history, and see how we could interact history with music and technologies. This is a very good case study.

In 1991, I invited a musician from Beijing, Qu Xiaosong to come to Hong Kong to work with us in the rehearsals of a performance. He is a very outstanding musician. After the first workshop, he said to me, “Danny Yung, the members of Zuni Icosahedron cannot carry a tune, and they have no sense of rhythm. How could we work out a performance by rehearsing together?”
Then, I said to Qu Xiaosong, “Hmmm, let us try this. I don't expect you to create an aria, or a traditional song for working together and expressing. Why don't we try to consider what is the framework or criteria for creation? Maybe, we could make use of their lack of sense in music to develop a new work.”

He took some time and pondered upon the issue, and then he told me, yes, he had thought of something. That's because he started to listen with his heart, he heard the sounds of Hong Kong, the sounds of Cantonese. Gradually, he heard some of the very special textures and structures of the Cantonese language. There are nine tones in Cantonese, and the Northerners would find it very difficult to grasp the complexity of these nine tones. But he learned to listen first, and when he could hear, he could then develop a work with the group. That's the music creation of “The Revolutionary Opera”, and that piece began with counting numbers. In “The Revolutionary Opera”, we could hear a group of Zuni members counting numbers, and there you could hear all nine tones of Cantonese.

Thus, counting numbers turned into a piece of very outstanding Hong Kong music with Hong Kong characteristics. The rhymes and tones of Cantonese are very rich, such as the word “I” (the Cantonese pronunciation is “ngo”).

If we ask a Northerner to pronounce the this word “ngo”, he would find it very difficult. So, how should we make use of our characteristics to bring our music into full play, to draw out the potentials of our local culture ? That should be the starting point of our creation. I always think that we have to learn how to discover ourselves. After finding ourselves, then we could push ourselves into a greater scope. That's the beginning of of experimenting creation. Thus, discovering and understanding oneself is a very importing aspect in creating.

Qu Xiaosong came from Beijing, but actually he is a native of Guizhou. That's why, he himself is a cross regional experiment. I feel that Beijing has to understand Hong Kong, and we have to understand Beijing as well, both are equally important. When he came to Hong Kong to understand our local culture, he used Beijing standards to discuss Hong Kong culture in the beginning. After he listened with his heart, he came to realise that the first thing he had to learn to do was to listen to the sounds of Hong Kong. I think that when we interact and exchange with other cultures, the most important thing is to learn to listen with our heart. We should not have any preconception, and use one certain standard to comment on others.

That's why, very often, when we talk about collaboration in cultural exchange, we should make both sides to understand each other's culture step by step, and only when we have enough understanding for each other, then we could achieve goal of “there is me in you, and you in me”. Then, we could know what we should do in order to make the most of our spirit of cooperation.In 2008, I created a piece titled “Tears of Barren Hill”. This is a work in honour of Cheng Yanqiu, a very distinguished Peking opera master...actually it should be Kunqu opera. In the 1930's, he went to Europe on his own, and the work is about his experience in Europe. “Tears of Barren Hill” is one of his works. It is a play he created in the year 1931.

When I rehearsed the play with the performers, I told them that we were exploring the vocal skills and rhyme scheme of Peking and Kunqu operas, and we should start with the voice. One of the performers working with me was Lan Tian. He sang an excerpt of “Tears of Barren Hill” to me. I asked him why he sang such a sad song so fast. He said he didn't know why, but that's how his teacher taught him. Then, I asked him again, “Why don't you think over it, and try to tell me again?” Then he told me, “Perhaps, it's because when we perform on stage, we have to show the audience our ‘skills’, in order to display singing skills, we need to sing fast, that's how we try to show our singing skills.” I told him, “Why don't we try to do an experiment with our voice? Try to sing this song very slowly and see if we could feel something new.” And so he tried.

After trying that, he found it very interesting, and a lot of fun. We turned the singing of that traditional Peking opera song from 57 seconds to more than 3 minutes, and it became much slower. This inspired us that, when we listen, and when we create, we have to think of the values behind that. After we did that experiment of slowing down, we tried to slow down the speed of Bach's music, slowing it down to about 3 times of the original as another experiment. We also put that in the performance of “Tears of Barren Hill”. Since we were slowing down the singing speed of traditional Chinese opera, so we tried to do that to western music too. Then, there was that other thing that had to be slowed down too. I talked to them about the most adept skill of Cheng Yanqiu's, water sleeve. I proposed that we should take away the water sleeve, and let the audience see what the sequence of water sleeve and its posture really were in very slow motion.

This was how “Tears of Barren Hill” developed, from an experiment with the voice to a complete experimental theatre. That was in the year 2008. Actually, playing with speed is something we could do because we have the technology of recording. We can try to see what slow speed is like. We developed the technology of recording, and then technology inspired us to use new methods to deal with our way to express. That was the beginning of how technologies enabled our music to have new developments, and how we rediscovered music. The words “slow motion”...When we go to the movies, we come to know what slow motion is.

But was there slow motion before the cinema? This is something very worth thinking about. All these slow motion, slow speed recording, they are all dialectics of theatre performance after we have technologies. Of course, another very important aspect when we did “Tears of Barren Hill” was how to link traditional performing arts and contemporary expressions together. In fact, there is no absolute performing arts. When we talk about traditional performing arts, are we talking about performing arts tradition of 50 years ago or that of 500 years ago? We can further discuss about this. But when we look at “traditional” today, we are using modern technologies, modern culture to read arts in the past. What we get is contemporary traditional arts.

...When we all try to understand our own sounds by listening carefully, and try to understand our own culture, such as, when I go back to where I hear sounds of Hong Kong, where the culture of the Cantonese language is, or where Cantonese culture is, maybe we could start from there to understand Hong Kong or many elements behind the development of Cantonese performing arts up till now. For example, Naamyam (Cantonese South Sound) and Yue Ou (Cantonese folk songs or love songs), they are all closely related to the Cantonese language and Cantonese music.

Should we start from there, in order to understand the theatre of Hong Kong, and how Hong Kong traditional theatre has evolved up till now to develop a Hong Kong contemporary theatre? We always ask what Hong Kong theatre is, or what Hong Kong culture is. Since Hong Kong is a harbour, and so very often cultural diversity is a special characteristic of ours. The interaction between Hong Kong and other foreign cultures makes Hong Kong culture particularly dynamic, and relatively speaking very open, absorbing nutrients from the outside. This is the same case with Hong Kong theatre. When we go to watch a Cantonese opera, we could see that Cantonese opera can absorb a lot of foreign cultural elements any time and any place.

When I mentioned just now that we should listen carefully before we speak, that's absorbing what we hear, which is a characteristic of Cantonese. For example, should we start with South Sound or Cantonese folk and love songs when we want to talk about Cantonese opera ? Or, should we start with the flexibility and diversity of Hong Kong ? Then, we won't get stuck inside and be limited by the inherent framework. I think Hong Kong has a very unique culture. We can start with the sounds of Hong Kong to explore its culture, as well as its notably pluralistic and open culture.Let's go back to “The Revolutionary Opera” (literally, Hong Kong Model Opera). In fact, we are all looking for what Hong Kong is, what model is, and what opera is. We are all looking for what actually Hong Kong revolutionary opera is.

Of course, we hope that Hong Kong revolutionary opera is a revolutionary opera of the world. We want to start with the word “I” (“ngo”), and then that “I” would turn into a “we”. Then, we shall make the whole world hear the pronunciation of the word “I” (“ngo”). So, the convergence of Hong Kong and the whole world is composed to many I's coming together, and this becomes a piece of contemporary music, a contemporary theatre. In “The Revolutionary Opera”, Qu Xiaosong and I finally developed a piece of music using the combination of counting numbers. Qu Xiaosong is most sensitive to the pronunciation of the number “5”, in the counting of Cantonese numbers. It's because the Cantonese pronunciation of “5” is very special.

So, he suggested that composed a whole section of music with the combination of “1, 2, 3, 4, 5...” and “6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15...”. From that, we could see that he listened carefully to the pronunciation of those Cantonese words and found it very special. Of course, the counting of numbers and the rhythm...and a small sense of oppression, are all related to “The Revolutionary Opera” that we're about. This case is a very good example. When we rediscover our own culture and our own sounds, and then we find the language of theatre. Slowly, slowly. Sometimes, when things are slowed down, then we'd get to understand our creation more. There are things we cannot rush.

Being slow doesn't mean you are lazy. We use different means to look at what we are doing. We can do things slowly and there's no need for instant success. We learn about our theatre slowly, learn our language slowly, come to know of our body slowly and understand our own sounds slowly.