Written by Thomas Harper and NUS Wind Symphony
Daily life as a student at NUS is challenging. Not only is the workload significant, but there’s a constant, underlying message that today’s students will be tomorrow’s leaders, and that it will be our challenge to forge the future Singapore needs.
The 2017 NUS Arts Festival evolved out of this idea; the concept that the future is both a gift and a trap, but it is up to us to make it what we want. Everyone has a vision for the future, and the festival is a chance for everyone to perform and share their own Brave New Worlds.
At the 2016 Festival, the NUS Wind Symphony was courageous enough to perform Daisuke Shimizu’s Highlights from Lost Moon: Man on the Moon as part of our annual performance InTempo (Singapore’s longest running concert series). As fans of wind band music know, Daisuke’s pieces are engaging, exciting and always a little unexpected so it will be our pleasure to debut a newly commissioned piece from the inventive composer at this year’s festival.
Under the title InTempo 2017: Rise of the Transhuman, our performance at the Festival has been developed with the NUS Centre for Biomedical Ethics as our creative partner and guided by our Resident Conductor, Professor Ho Hwee Long, and Associate Conductor, Mr Francis Tan.
The performance explores concepts of transhumanism: the ideology of enhancing human intellectual, physical and psychological performance through technology. Through this exploration we have selected (or commissioned) works by Steven Bryant and David Maslanka alongside Daisuke Shimizu’s new composition H.P. Human Progress.
Electronics come alive in Steven Bryant’s Ecstatic Waters. The harmonious blending of electronic music into traditional wind band sounds serve as an allegory to the possibilities of a transhuman future. In contrast, Daisuke’s compositions use a more traditional wind band instrumentation to express ideas about the future and stories of technology and human endeavour through harmony and percussive execution. These are themes that repeat throughout many of his pieces.
Show Details
Title: InTempo: Rise of the Transhuman
Date: Sunday, 19th March 2017
Time: 8pm
Venue: University Cultural Centre, National University of Singapore
Tickets: Public – $27, Full time students- $19, 10% discount for bulk purchases of 10 tickets
Tickets are now available at http://bit.ly/intempo17
Win Tickets to the Show
Like NUS Art Festival’s Facebook page and The Band Post article on the Facebook page and stand to win two tickets to InTempo 2017: Rise of the Transhuman.
For more information on InTempo 2017: click here
A contributing editor at TBP.