The London Symphony Orchestra regularly promotes new music, but surely their recent performance featuring composer Tonia Ko as bubble wrap soloist was a first for them. The concerto, titled Breath, Contained III, was a highlight of the Nonclassical 20th birthday celebration concert in October 2024. Ko’s music is informed by her international heritage.
Born in Hong Kong and brought up in Hawaii, Ko now resides in London where she is Senior Lecturer in Composition at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her music is performed around the world, and she has received many prestigious awards from organisations including the Koussevitzky Foundation.
I first encountered Ko’s work at a concert by Tangram, a collective who are reimagining the synergies between Chinese and Western classical music. In this concert, her Farewell Dwelling, inspired by her family caring for her grandmother, blended the sonorities of the yangqin (Chinese zither), flute, piano and percussion. Another recent piece, Concertino for Scavengers, was premiered by the Riot Ensemble cellist Louise McMonagle; according to Ko, the work is a ‘celebration of the little sounds that happen on a string instrument:’ these tiny accidental noises are amplified, decontextualised, and projected around the performance space.
Ko’s imaginative approach to sonority takes us well beyond conventional instruments. Her music revels in the unexpected and challenges the audience’s preconceptions: her bubble wrap pieces stimulate us visually and make us smile. She is also an improviser who is inspired by the tactile and visual qualities of the material with which she engages. We caught up with Ko to discuss her current work.
Tell me about your experience working with the Tangram collective and how their mission speaks to you.
Tangram reached out to me during the first Covid lockdown, when I had only been in the UK for a few months. Initially I was a bit sceptical about writing a piece that overtly signals my heritage, as having grown up in the US, I often don’t feel ‘Chinese-enough.’ Being from Hong Kong and Hawai’i, two places that are very in-between culturally, I have always struggled to see myself in terms of an East vs West binary, much less to consider my work along those lines. But in our first meeting, the directors of Tangram at the time, (Alex Ho and Reylon Yount a.k.a Mantawoman) acknowledged my scepticism, making it clear that they were out exactly to question this binary and to highlight the complexities of the modern diaspora.
I was won over by that and Farewell Dwelling was premiered, with a year’s delay, in 2022. The formal structures of this piece were inspired by a personal family narrative, but the surface of the sound is a simple investigation of timbral blend between yangqin, Chinese percussion, piano and flute. In hindsight, I realize that the project was also a way for me to reckon with the fact that I had moved once again across another ocean.
How does your practice as an improviser feed into your notated music?
Improvising with bubble wrap as my instrument has opened my ears up to an expanded sense of time, one in which sounds can percolate or simply exist. When I first started playing with others, it surprised me how 20-minute sets would fly by, without me once feeling bored or not knowing what to do. This is partially due to an established slower-evolving style of improvised experimental music, and partially because my friction-based instrument allows me to tap into a tactile sense of musicality. My playing is led as much by how the instrument feels under my hands as it is by the sounds coming into my ears.
When I am at my desk composing, it is very tempting to change the material just to keep the score visually appealing to read. If the focus is manipulating pitch and rhythm, writing based on visual cues can be effective. However, it can be a missed opportunity to dive into a complex sonority and more importantly, to give listeners the time to enjoy it.
Tonia Ko — Photo by Kaupo Kikkas
Although improvisation and notated composition rarely cross paths in my work, the former practice has inspired me to incorporate a greater variety of pacing in my writing. I still admire the level of control offered by traditional notation, so it is a matter of deciding what context is best for the sounds I am working with.
Like many people, I love playing with bubble wrap! I was really struck by your playful reimagining of the concerto form in Breath, Contained, III – it even featured a cadenza. What particularly attracts you to air packaging as a sonic medium?
Air packaging was not something I carefully considered and chose back in 2013; I just decided to try to add electronics to it on a whim. In fact, I owned a large roll of bubble wrap at the time because I was attracted to its visual qualities and was painting on it (I know this fact is already weird – that it was not even because I needed to pack something…).
Of course, in the years since, I have gradually uncovered its huge sonic vocabulary. I like the fact that my instrument is unpredictable, as it is constant bending and stretching under my hands. I have to be careful not to press too hard and accidentally pop the bubbles, and in any case delated pieces have to be changed out. So, it requires constant adjustment and that is a fun challenge to contend with.
Despite these limitations, I feel I can be musically expressive and responsive with the material. With my table set-up of different sizes of bubble wrap, I can play extremely low rumbles that last forever up to the shortest, highest squeaks, and many, many sounds in between. There is something charming about the fact that every gesture is broken up into little stutters, due to the transition from bubble to bubble.
I can focus the sound to approach certain frequencies and mimic other instruments, and yet it remains extremely noisy and chaotic. I am still fascinated by how bubble wrap can easily dialogue with traditional orchestral instruments. For example, my technique is the same as bowed string instruments— a negotiation of speed and pressure. Finding these analogies of technique with other instruments became my impetus for writing the concerto.
Bubble wrap signals much more than its interesting sounds, and this also motivates me to keep using the medium. There is its mundane function of protecting items, the universally fun sensation of popping the bubbles, as well as the question of environmental impact. I do not purchase new materials for my performances and only scavenge or take donations of leftover materials, so it has also become a sustainability project. These ideas in turn have emotional consequences which motivate me as a composer, the feelings around being on the verge of release, breakage, or being discarded. All these ideas feed into the ‘Breath, Contained’ project.
You have composed a few pieces for the wonderful members of the Riot Ensemble. How does instrumental virtuosity inspire you?
Yes, I have had the honor of writing solo pieces for violist Stephen Upshaw (Soothe a Tooth) and cellist Louise McMonagle (Concertino for Scavengers). Both of these works focus on certain sonic artifacts of string playing, for example, how the fingers of the left-hand hammer on the fingerboard and then release the string. My writing then takes a magnifying glass to these little moments and tries to create entire textures and sections out of them. In doing so, I ask players for a kind of virtuosity that showcases the skill of control to create a special and complex sound, rather than just being able to play high and fast.
My favorite example of this expanded definition of virtuosity are three levels of violin caprices, which I wrote about in the chapter ‘Instruments and Invention’ for The Cambridge Companion to Composition. Paganini’s original 24 Caprices goes very high and fast within its early 19th century style, then in 1976 Sciarrino one-ups this idea by having the violin go even higher and faster via harmonics in his Sei Capricci.
Mari Kimura, on the other hand, takes things in an opposite direction in her Six Caprices for Subharmonics. Playing even lower than the lowest open G string, her innovative technique of subharmonics is no doubt virtuosic and difficult to pull off, yet offers space for reflection and lyricism. I love this kind of subversion!
More generally, studying virtuosic performances and ways of writing leads me to consider what feels ‘easy’ or ‘difficult’ on any instrument. Most virtuosos make difficult music seem easy, but could an easy passage be made to feel extremely difficult? Is there a gap between something that sounds difficult and what is physically difficult to execute? These questions of performer psychology, audience perception, and how they intersect with instrumental technique are intriguing to me.
What are you currently looking forward to creating?
I am currently beginning a song cycle for the Vertex Duo (mezzo-soprano Kristin Gornstein and pianist Jeremy Chan), commissioned by the Brooklyn Art Song Society for their annual New Voices Festival. It has been many years since I have written for the voice, so I am very curious as to how I might approach it differently now given my intervening years of focus on instrumental writing. London-based writer and community organizer Jenny Lau, also a friend of Tangram’s, will be contributing the text.
I also have plans for future iterations of Breath, Contained to conclude the project. I want to deal with the aftermath of the pop which ends Breath, Contained III, to finally release the ‘breath’ metaphorically, and possibly by then, to tell the end the story of our relationship with such plastics. With companies turning to sustainable packaging, it is becoming harder to find the ‘original’ styles of bubble wrap, but I am fine with it. I might be playing with just a few completely deflated scraps of bubble wrap in the last version, but I suppose that would be quite a poignant ending to this long adventure.
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