Between Ground and Sky (2023)

for soprano and piano (15min)

This song cycle contains settings of five poems by contemporary Malaysian-American poet Shirley Geok-lin Lim (b. 1944) that were published between 2010 and 2015. In terms of Lim’s poetic style, the poems in this cycle clearly demonstrate her acknowledged Anglophone influences, ranging from the near-quotation of American poet William Carlos Williams’s famous line in A Sort of Song (‘No ideas/ but in things’) in Drizzle to the playful appropriation of the villanelle form in Do you live in Singapore?. Nonetheless, multilingualism is also used in some of the poems, such as A History of Aunties, ‘to get a remembered character, a memory, a fleeting detail to step forward with its non-anglophone presence’, as Tamara S. Wagner describes.

The dazzling and multi-levelled heterogeneity of the poems in the cycle has motivated an individual compositional response to each of them. Together, they form no unified stylistic project, illustrated in the title of this cycle – Between Ground and Sky, taken from a line of the last poem of the cycle (Marble and Peonies). Instead, they explore cultural in-betweeness, and the complexities of home and belonging.

I am grateful for Lim’s permission to set her poetry and to reproduce her texts in the score of this work. I hope that these settings go some way to doing them justice.

The first performance of Between Ground and Sky was given by Wong Yong En (soprano) and Koh Kai Jie (piano) at the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre Recital Studio, Singapore on 29 April 2023 as part of an eponymous interdisciplinary production. The songs were subsequently recorded and released alongside films by renowned photographer and videographer Khoo Guo Jie.

— Tan Tiag Yi

Please contact me for a perusal copy of the score.