Music Journal | Isaac Chap

Hong Kong music education

Grade 8 and the Myth of the Finished Musician

Grade 8 has a legitimate meaning within a qualification and a much larger social life in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong’s Music Meritocracy Starts After the Expensive Part

A young musician shows up to an audition after years of unequal access to time, space and adults who can open doors.
Why Cantopop Still Has to Prove It Belongs in a Music Classroom

The music a child hears outside school can enter the classroom as a treat, an illustration or a serious object of thought.
The Child Who Can Play by Ear Has the Wrong Kind of Evidence

Musical institutions frequently reward what they can write down.
The Perfect Music Student Can Be the End of the Music

A school can produce a technically fluent student who never enters a musical situation without looking for the answer an adult wants.
Hong Kong’s Hidden Music Curriculum Is Permission

Hong Kong’s published curriculum gives creativity a place alongside listening and performance.
The Adjudicator Can Be Right and the Festival Can Still Get It Wrong

A festival can give a young player an audience, accurate feedback and an experience worth keeping.
The City That Grades Its Ears

A piano grade can describe a performance and still do damage when it becomes the main language families have for talking about music.
Hong Kong’s Piano Parents Are Being Sold Certainty

Grades offer anxious families something legible in a field where progress is hard to judge.
The Timetable Is Hong Kong’s Real Music Policy

A school can believe in music and still arrange its time so only certain students can take it seriously.

Where music is going

An Album Is an Argument About What You Should Hear Next

Putting songs in order can make a weak song important and a great song hard to bear.
When Hong Kong Music Travels, What Travels With It?

A recording can find listeners overseas with most of its local associations attached to the place it came from.
When Cantopop Nostalgia Stops Listening

Nostalgia can preserve a way of hearing a city across generations.
AI Music and the Credit for a Decision Nobody Had to Make

Generating music can move choice from shaping a phrase to choosing among plausible finished takes.
A Scene Dies a Little Each Time Familiarity Becomes the Booking Policy

Programming can favour artists who can already bring an audience while depending on earlier rooms that once helped those artists develop one.
A Credit Changes the Music You Think You’re Hearing

Music credits describe a distribution of work the ear can go back and investigate.
The Future of Music May Sound Too Finished

Cheap polish can widen access to making records and make it harder to hear the decisions that distinguish them.
The Record Business Can Grow While a Music Scene Goes Hungry

Industry revenue measures commercial activity in recordings.
The Playlist That Knows Your Mood Has Already Decided What Music Is For

Mood playlists can keep people company and introduce them to work they would never have found.
What Can a Song Do That Takes More Than Thirty Seconds?

Streaming gives the first half minute a significance that comes from accounting.

Inside composition

An Arranger Can Give an Empty Bar a Job

The meaning of an absence depends on what a listener learnt to expect from the sounds around it.
A Cantopop Melody Has to Negotiate With the Words

Cantonese song can make the contour of speech part of what a listener hears as a musical decision.
Counterpoint Gives Two Voices the Right to Disagree

Independent musical lines can share a pulse and hold different ideas about where a phrase should end.
Groove Is an Agreement the Players Keep Revising

A sense of time can remain clear while two players disagree about where part of the beat lives.
A Key Change Can Move the Floor Under a Familiar Melody

A modulation can intensify a chorus and can also make a previously familiar note seem to belong to somebody else.
A Piece Teaches You What to Wait For

A section can promise an arrival by letting us learn a pattern.
Repetition and the Ear That Won’t Sit Still

Repetition can produce difference without adding an event to a recording.
The Bass Can Remember a Different Song

The lowest voice can preserve a history the chord above it might prefer to forget.
Timbre Can Do the Work We Give Harmony Credit For

A sound can prepare an arrival, blur the border between sections or make the same chord acquire a different demand.
An Ending Can Be the First Time You Hear the Beginning

A passage can make the opening assume a new character in memory.

Listening to artists

Anita Mui Makes Time Audible in “似水流年”

In “似水流年,” Anita Mui can make a sustained note sound like somebody waiting for its feeling to become clear.
Beyond’s “海闊天空” Lets a Private Trouble Become a Public Voice

Beyond’s anthem can sound as if its chorus always belonged to a crowd.
Björk Puts a Private Ritual on a Dance Floor

“Hyperballad” puts a private act of fear and relief inside a rhythm that can carry a room.
Faye Wong Changes Who a Familiar Tune Is Talking To

Faye Wong’s Cantonese recording of “Dreams” keeps enough of the original to make the change of voice unusually exposed.
Kendrick Lamar Gives the Dead a Voice and Leaves Himself a Problem

“Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” makes remembrance depend on who gets time at the microphone and who can be cut off.
my little airport and the Power of Sounding Small

The early my little airport recording makes a tiny outing feel like enough material for a song.
Radiohead Makes Order Sound Like an Unsettling Idea

“Everything in Its Right Place” offers an orderly keyboard pattern and a voice that keeps making that order harder to trust.
Ryuichi Sakamoto Lets a Note Tell You What Happened After It Was Played

The opening of “andata” puts unusual weight on what is left after an event.
SOPHIE Makes a Voice Feel Exposed by Making Everything Around It Huge

SOPHIE’s “Is It Cold in the Water?” makes a small question survive inside a sound of immense scale.
Taylor Swift’s Ten-Minute “All Too Well” Changes What Remembering Is For

The longer “All Too Well” gives memory room to argue with itself.

Hong Kong teacher guides

Logic Pro and Songwriting Teachers in Hong Kong

Compare Hong Kong teachers for developing a demo, learning Logic Pro, or helping a young producer get started.
Pop Piano Teachers in Hong Kong for Playing by Ear

Compare four Hong Kong teachers for learning songs by ear, arranging pop piano, and accompanying singers.