Project Objective

Supported by Hong Kong Baptist University's Digital Scholarship Grant, this project features a collection of parts and full scores of 51 pieces of Chinese instrumental ensemble music preserved in the Music Office (MO) of the Hong Kong Government's Leisure and Cultural Services Department. It showcases the music of erhu maestro Tong Leung-Tak alongside the compositions and arrangements of a few other musicians that served MO's education and performance needs in the past four decades. On top of archiving, preserving, and sharing this collection for research and performance purposes, this project sets out to promote Chinese music by providing a short biography of Tong, a short description of each piece in this collection, an introduction to Chinese instrumental ensemble music, and a guide to the classification of Chinese instruments. This project also advocates the 'resounding' of this collection by offering the live recording of three of Tong's most popular pieces performed by the Hong Kong Youth Chinese Orchestra (HKYCO) in January 2022 with MO's coordination. This project's digitization of the entire run of program notes of HKYCO concerts from 1978 to 2019 further illuminates both the context of this collection and the development of Chinese instrumental music in Hong Kong.

Research Team – Project Investigators (PIs) and Researchers

This project was initiated and overseen by musicologist Helan Yang, ethnomusicologist Ho Chak Law, and librarian Katie Lai. Their respective expertise played an important role in the completion of this project—Yang was the project coordinator, Law oversaw the research into this repertoire of works, and Lai in charge of the catalogue's data structure, etc. This project was also supported by three other researchers and a team of student helpers.

  • Helan Yang is professor of music at Hong Kong Baptist University. She is the co-editor of China and the West: Music, Representation, and Reception (University of Michigan Press, 2017) and the lead author of Networking the Russian Diaspora: Russian Musicians and Musical Activities in Interwar Shanghai (University of Hawai'i Press, 2020). Her 40 some articles appeared in edited volumes by leading presses such as Oxford University Press (2018), Cambridge University Press (2013), Duke University Press (2021), Routledge (2016, 2007) and Bloomsbury (2021, 2019) and international top-tier journals such as Twentieth-Century Music (2021, 2018), Asian Music (2010), and Journal of Musicological Research (2019), etc.
  • Ho Chak Law is an ethnomusicologist who received his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Michigan. His publications appear in academic journals and edited volumes such as At the Crossroad of Music and Social Justice (Indiana University Press), Music and the Moving Image, and TDR: The Drama Review. His main research interests include film music, global music history, and the music ecology of the Sinophone world.
  • Katie Lai is a librarian specializing in music librarianship, acquisitions, cataloguing, e-resources management and technical services. An active contributor to scholarly literature, she has published in top-tier journals such as Journal of Academic Librarianship and is currently chair of the RILM Committee of Hong Kong and editorial board member of Music Reference Services Quarterly.An avid pianist and chamber musician, Lai has performed in Canada, Hong Kong, Russia and the USA, including Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall and Gnesin Russian Academy of Music. Her musical training also included Western and Chinese percussion.
  • Yuen Hei Chan, Casper is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Michigan and holds a B.A. in music from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His doctoral dissertation research focuses on how Cantopop's contrafactum practice has afforded a distinctive musical-emotional expressivity for Hongkongers.
  • Samuel S. Chan is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology and Henry MacCracken Fellow at New York University. He graduated with an M.A. in Music/Integrative Studies from University of California, San Diego as a Hong Kong Jockey Club Scholar, and a B.A. in Music (First Class Honors) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he received the Bernard van Zuiden Music Prize.
  • Stella Chan graduated from the University of Hong Kong. She was conferred a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Philosophy in Musicology. Her master's thesis "Becoming a Tradition: Re-inventing the Sanxian" investigates how the identity and performativity of the sanxian is constantly (re)-invented through concert touring.

Acknowledgement

Born in tumultuous times, this project was entangled with Hong Kong's social unrest and the global pandemic from its inception to completion, surviving changes in personnel, investigators' relocations, various unanticipated disruptions to MO's regular operation, and the closure of performance venues and suspension of activities. Without the support of numerous goodwill individuals, this project would never have come to fruition. We would like to thank Mr. James Leung, MO's ex-Chief Music Officer, who introduced us to MO's collection of over 1400 pieces of Chinese ensemble music; Mr. Tsui Ying-Fai, MO's then Senior Music Officer (Chinese Music), the current Chief Music Officer, who not only served as the point of contact for MO and helped to resolve copyright issues on our behalf, but also provided valuable information on the classification of Chinese instruments, least to say taking charge of HKYCO's performance of three of the collection's pieces. Many thanks also to HKBU's Department of Music for its support, particularly its technical team for video-recording of HKYCO's live performance, and to Lai Ching Kong of NOVA SONIC for audio-recording and mixing. We would also like to acknowledge the Hong Kong Arts Development Council project grant secured by Ho Chak Law that helped fund the research into the collection's pieces. Most importantly, our deepest gratitude goes to all the composers, arrangers, and copyright holders who granted the research and performance rights to the users of this website. Their generosity is most commendable and contributes to the promotion of Chinese music and culture. Naturally, without the effort and dedication of HKBU Library's Digital Initiatives and Research Cluster, this project would never have materialized. Many thanks to Rebekah, Eric, Sun, Katie, Chung, Kimmy and many others who have worked for this project.