Newsletter (2017-2018) April 2018 Newsletter | Page 15

Fill Up the Container and Empty It
By Tyler Wong
At 9 p.m., as I got lost on Nathan Road, I rum-
maged for my iPhone and opened Google Maps
to find the restaurant in which my group of
friends had decided to meet. Following the map,
I waited for the traffic light to turn green. The red
standing man shone and I stood there, waiting.
Then, I looked up at the sky. The night seemed to
have fallen for a long time.
The group and I, in fact, met in an intensive
music programme the previous summer. We
were stuck in a campsite in Cheung Chau for
two weeks to learn about contemporary music,
of which I had no idea. The programme per se
wasn’t that interesting; it was Connor and Alfred
that made the programme worth taking part in.
We were to compose a music piece to perform
at the end of the programme. Halfway through
the programme, we had only conceived a few
dumb ideas like splashing water everywhere
and spraying water from our mouths to create
sounds.
“Oh! I have an idea,” said Connor one morning.
“How about we pour water back and forth be-
tween two containers?”
“Oh!” Connor shot up and clomped to the cen-
tre of the room. “Imagine the whole room’s
like a Buddhist meditation room. In the room,
we bring our problems and ‘think’ them out by
pouring water until it becomes visible to us.”
Seeing our baffled faces, he continued, “Think
about our public exams in secondary school.
Although we prepared well for the exam––say,
reading the textbook from front to back and back
to front––we would feel nervous. Sometimes it’s
not the situation that is problematic; sometimes,
it is us.”
George and I pondered on the last sentence, fall-
ing between the notch of understanding and not
understanding. Unlike George, Connor hadn’t
received any formal music education. He was
sometimes hit by what he called the “slap-on-
the-table” moment, when he came up with a big
idea and struck the table with his hand. He told
me he did not do it on purpose. I believed him.
Eventually, we still adopted Connor’s idea and
performed in front of a large audience. The per-
formance was set in a pitch-black room. The
background music played, and our team blend-
ed with the audience, shaking and hitting Bud-
dhist bells and bamboos. George held a trans-
parent cylinder which contained pure water
under the spotlight. He made careful steps to the
table on stage, grabbed the other cylinder, and
poured water back and forth between two cyl-
inders. Water repeatedly touched the bottom of
the glasses, making a swirling sound. The sound
was somehow amplified and the background
music became imperceptible. Our instruments,
too, merged with everything to construct a cha-
otic assemblage.
“Why? What does it mean?” asked George,
crossing his arms. George, who was classically
trained in music, could not bear the idea of mu-
sic without “proper musical instruments”. Con-
temporary music, after all, based on my learning
and observation in the two weeks of training, was
about finding meaning out of meaninglessness.
It was random musical notes arranged within a
time frame, similar to absurd poetic words writ-
ten on a piece of paper. George taught me a lot.
It was not through sharing his knowledge about
classical music, but simply him being himself––
critical and sometimes cynical––that enlarged Returning backstage, I couldn’t remember a
my world of understanding.
single face from the audience. I guessed that I
didn’t even look at them. But as the performance
“I don’t exactly know what it could mean,” Con- came to a proper end, I was flooded with relief
nor mumbled.
and pleasure. Yeah, the performance has finally fin-
ished, I thought. While the audience stood and
George frowned and said, “Well, then -”
left, performers stayed and took group photos
in a frenzy. I watched them take a record of that
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APRIL 2018