Tangram is a collective of performers and composers, who as a group celebrate Chinese and Western cultures in music. They are Associate Artists at LSO St Luke’s.
As humans become more global, living outside places of birth or inhabiting multiple cultures, trailblazing collective Tangram’s mission will feel familiar to many. The group explores ideas of ‘transnational identity’ through celebrating Chinese and Western cultures in music. But their aims are deeper than that. The group wants to break down the idea that China and the West are mutually exclusive entities and connect both ancient traditions in multiple ways.
Co-founded by British-Chinese composer Alex Ho and Chinese-American yangqin (hammered dulcimer) player and singer-songwriter Reylon Yount, the nine-strong collective performs, composes, and carries out research into the richness and breadth of transnational Chinese identities. And they want audiences to join them on their journey.
The impetus for Tangram arose when Yount and Ho found themselves wanting to delve into their feelings of a ‘strange fracturing’ due to their dual cultural identities.
Ho was born and raised in London to parents from Hong Kong. ‘I grew up not very connected to Chinese cultures,’ he says. ‘I think the closest things that would link me to them would be things like Lunar New Year celebrations, family, friends, and very specific customs. But there was a moment when I had just graduated from the University of Oxford and was commissioned by the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra to write a piece for erhu (sometimes known as a Chinese fiddle) and orchestra. I’d never worked with an erhu before and had to Google it to understand what it was. That process of writing for a Chinese instrument was interesting, not least because I found it weird that I didn’t know anything about it.’
He found it discombobulating going to Shanghai for the performance. ‘There were many moments where I was forced to confront how little I knew about Chinese cultures. Everyone was calling me a British composer, yet as I walked around the streets, all the people looked like me and assumed I spoke Mandarin. That created a really strange fracturing feeling. Ever since then, I’ve been interested in continuing to learn about the plurality of what it can mean to be Chinese today.’
Yount’s experience as a child was the opposite of Ho’s. Born in San Francisco, which has a very prominent Chinese community, they were bathed in Chinese culture from a young age, attending Chinese-speaking daycare and having a bilingual education. ‘I studied Chinese music from age seven, studied Chinese martial arts from age eleven, would do Chinese poetry recitals, speech contests, and we’d go to China every other year. So I felt very Chinese and very in touch with my culture. Playing the yangqin (hammered dulcimer) in that sheltered environment, I was lucky enough to believe it was normal until I was fifteen, when I realised not many people play Chinese instruments in the US.’
Yount says it was at this point they realised they didn’t feel a sense of ‘home’ musically. ‘Even if I was studying or competing in China, people would see me as American, and they were surprised that I was playing a yangqin. At the same time, I was playing classical crossover music in the US, which I loved, but I had a very strong feeling of impostor syndrome. So coming to London was my chance to examine my practice and question who I am musically. Because I’m not Chinese, per se, and I’m not Western, per se. There’s a sense of fracture and angst, which is where Alex and I found a shared purpose.’
Alex and Reylon first collaborated in 2018 on a new work Ho wrote for solo yangqin, Rituals and Resonances, which saw Yount win promoter nonclassical’s Battle of the Bands. Realising they were both grappling with similar ideas, the two musicians found the process incredibly stimulating and wanted to work together more. Over the course of subsequent projects, including a yangqin concerto for the Cambridge University Chinese Orchestra and a yangqin-guitar duo for Syracuse University, Tangram was born and launched in January 2019 at LSO St Luke’s as part of the Chinese Arts Now Festival.
But Tangram’s goals go further than exploring multiple identities. Ho says within the context of the UK, there’s an inherent racism that needs to be addressed. He adds: ‘Showing that we are here, that there are different versions of ‘Chineseness’ which aren’t presented in popular media, is really important to us. That’s why we want to examine how we can present these social messages more powerfully than solely through a concert.’
The hegemony of Western music is a key reason why there aren’t more concerts featuring Chinese or other non-Western instruments, suggests Yount, which is something the collective hopes to challenge. ‘I tell people from China that I play the yangqin, and they sometimes don’t know what it is because we live in a world where we’ve been told that playing music means playing the guitar, the violin or the piano. There are thousands of other instruments and traditions that exist, but as part of colonialism, these global systems have been set up that prevent knowledge of them, and music is absolutely intrinsic to that. So, unfortunately, there’s a huge imbalance in terms of the availability of players and instruments in the world. It takes a lot of time to find common ground between these different music cultures and to present that in a way that’s not superficial.’
Importantly, though, Tangram seeks to explore these ideas by removing binary concepts of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Western’. Yount says although they use those terms to describe what they’re doing, it is important for the collective to be intentional in how they are being used, not least because of a plurality of experience within the collective as artists hailing from many different countries. ‘We’re in the space between these cultures and we name the two, but at the same time, we don’t think of ourselves in terms of either,’ they say. ‘We’re not trying to define Western music; we’re not trying to define Chinese music. We’re not even trying to define the merging of the two. We’re trying to express ourselves authentically. And to question and challenge ourselves.’
Through all this, music is the language they use to explore these concepts. ‘Identity issues are so thorny, and language is so clumsy and divisive as a tool for dealing with them, but when we use music and movement to express what’s going on, I feel like we can communicate and connect on a deeper level than Twitter discourse,’ says Yount.
Their appointment as Associate Artists at LSO St Luke’s will see the collective produce two events per season at the east London venue from 2022 to 2025. Ho, who spent time on the LSO Discovery Soundhub scheme in 2018 and 2020, says the announcement was a ‘really special moment’. ‘It’s not just about the implied support that comes with this role, but on a social level too. The team at the London Symphony Orchestra and LSO St Luke’s, including the tech team and administration, are so supportive. It really feels like a home for us.’
Header image © Tom Lovatt
