“My Asko|Schönberg GRASpunt residency marked the beginning of a multi-year project to create an opera that brings together the musical traditions of Southeast Asia with Western classical chamber music. Specifically, I’m working with elements of Piphat (ปีพาทย์) music—a term I use to describe the ceremonial and court music traditions of mainland Southeast Asia, including those from Burma, the Tai Kingdoms, and Cambodia.

This first phase focused on developing a shared musical language between two very different traditions: aural/oral traditions (where music is passed down by listening and memory) and notated Western classical music (where musicians read from written scores). One of my key goals was to test a harmonic language I’ve been developing using a 14-tone tuning system (instead of the 12-tone scale standard in Western music), applied to ranats—a type of traditional Thai xylophone—and analyzed through their spectral components (the unique mix of overtones or sound colors each note produces).

This was, of course, a very ambitious set of goals for a short residency. Before arriving, I spent several days in Thailand with a traditional instrument maker, working with different types of bamboo and discussing tuning techniques based on historical practices. I also collaborated with a Thai musician, Mr. Artit, exploring how Piphat musicians learn and memorize music—typically by ear, through repetition, and not through reading sheet music. Together, we developed a semi-free mnemonic notation—a kind of simplified visual guide that helps remember parts while still preserving some freedom of interpretation. For now, we kept the traditional rhythmic patterns used in Piphat music, especially since we had limited rehearsal time to record a demo scene.

During the residency, we spent the first three days working with Mr. Artit, percussionist Gonçalo Martins, and Claudio Jacomucci on a microtonal accordion (an accordion adapted to play pitches between the usual notes of the Western scale). We then brought in string players and singers, first rehearsing them separately, then together.

The outcome was a 10-minute scene inspired by a Nat Pwe performance (a ritual in Burmese tradition involving music and spirit possession), structured loosely on a Thai musical form called Pleng Tao (เพลงเถา). This form starts with a basic melody and elaborates it across three different rhythmic layers—similar to a cantus firmus (a fixed melody used as the basis for complex arrangements in Western music). We found this structure very effective for setting the opera’s text.

The rhythm was grounded by a repeated non-melodic percussion pattern called Na Tub (หน้าทับ), which we adapted for a single percussionist. In this experimental phase, we didn’t include traditional Southeast Asian metallophones (metal instruments like gongs or xylophones), and instead used a vibraphone—a Western instrument with a similar tone. However, since it uses the standard Western 12-tone tuning, it didn’t fully match the more finely tuned microtones played by the strings and accordion.

Looking ahead, I plan to develop the project in three key areas:

1. Incorporating authentic Southeast Asian metallophones into the ensemble;
2. Creating a more flexible notation system that allows deviations from the fixed rhythmic pattern;
3. Allocating more rehearsal time to allow for heterophonic improvisation—a style where multiple musicians simultaneously vary the same melody, a key feature of many Asian traditions.

In conclusion: combining musical cultures that rely on written notation with those passed down by ear is inherently complex. There’s a long history of superficial or stereotyped appropriation (as seen, for example, in Puccini’s operas), but there’s also a subtler danger—using only the most unusual aspects of Southeast Asian music to make Western music sound exotic or avant-garde. I’m striving instead for a truly collaborative process, built on shared listening and experimentation. Ideally, this will lead to a result that is richer and more nuanced—one that moves between different perspectives, combining openness and critical reflection, a balance described in metamodernism as oscillating between naïveté and skepticism.”