deRE-construction

Violin I

Violin II

Viola

Violoncello

fixed media (stereo)

deRE-construction takes an existing phrase in Cantonese and deconstruct it into phonetic units – the signature six tones which nearly symbolizes Cantonese speech, the starting consonant of each character, the quality of the vowel following it, and the closing consonant. The separated elements would then be permutated against each other, which form the pitch organizational materials for the piece. The pseudo-discourse setting of the music would feature mainly the fixed media of real human voices and instrumental sounds as “call” and the string quartet as “response”, in which the string quartet would play, and sing in real-life situation an “other”-text that supports or opposes the original. Hence, the title “deRE-construction” has to be taken literally, where the permutated fragments of the characters not only deconstructed and destined to become unintelligible of the phrase’s original semantic meaning, it also gives rise to reconstructed text, which are multiple unexplored secondary “texts”, be they meaningful texts that can make new senses, or gibberish texts that merely resemble the identity and form of Cantonese, like Cantonese copies of Lorem Ipsum.