Of all the musical genres to develop in the history of humankind, few have the power to terrify audiences quite like “new music,” the nebulous term used to define contemporary composition of a formal but often experimental nature, with an academic yet oppositional bent.
The Hong Kong New Music Ensemble (HKNMEW) is evidently on a mission to quell such fears, with its ongoing 2025-2026 season enjoying record audiences while making pronounced overtures to demystify the dark arts of new music. Nowhere is that more evident than in an upcoming programme of string quartet works composed with the intent of provoking snickers of delight, rather than stroked chins and pensive analysis.
Antiphon — a piece penned by Daniel Lo for the August 2025 season opening – Photo courtesy HKNME
Does humour belong in music?
Staged at the Quarryside community space in Quarry Bay on February 7, the all-ages Humour Me! programme promises to “depart from dense academic discourse, connecting contemporary music to relatable, everyday experiences, making it more approachable and enjoyable,” according to promotional material.
The entire repertoire is drawn from living composers that are popular today but which remain unknown to even most musicians in Hong Kong, according to HKNME’s director of programming, Daniel Lo. “When most people hear the term contemporary music, they will associate it with something dissonant, something alien to an audience, something very harsh,” he says. “But to me, contemporary music is to think outside of the box, to just explore the unlimited possibilities of sound organisation.”
Exhibit A: Simon Steen-Andersen’s “Study for String Instrument #1” has no conventional score, but instead instructs the player(s) how and when to move their hands up and down their instrument’s neck(s). “It’s basically the choreography of two hands,” says Lo. The result is a series of cartoonish sliding noises, more percussive than melodic. “When you see the movement and its relationship to the glissando produced — that’s the interesting part of the work. It’s like a choreographic game, a kind of dance,” says Lo, “and it’s just really funny.”
Also on the Humour Me! programme, Sky Macklay’s “Many Many Cadences” is a musical in-joke; a whole score built out of the punctuation-like cadences typically used to signpost the end of musical phrase. Elsewhere, Hong Kong composer Adrian Wong’s “Cracked” is a series of evocative miniatures each replicating the various ways one can cook an egg — from energetic bowed movements for frying, to the lengthy legato of boiling.
“It’s very humanistic in a way,” says Lo, who is better known as Hong Kong’s busiest composer; notably his “Asterismal Dance” has represented the city in a string of storied olde-worlde concert halls, performed on two consecutive European tours by Asia’s top orchestra, our very own Hong Kong Philharmonic (HK Phil).
A systemic disconnection from this concert-going audience may be why so few composers anywhere in the world enjoy such exposure. “In Bach’s time, classical music was related to the church, and then Mozart was for the royal family, and Beethoven’s work was related to rich patrons — and this all connects to a public,” says Lo, who blames the formal education system for alienating today’s generation of “university composers” from even an elite, musically literate consumer. “The audience has to love the music — whether it’s the church people or the rich guy — you have to write pieces that connect with that target audience. But when the composition of contemporary music is institutionalised, you can produce something purely academic.”
Alice Yeung’s Neutral Humanity – Photo courtesy HKNME
Playing musical games
When HKNME was founded by William Lane in 2008, there was no notable contemporary ensemble in the city. The viola player had recently returned to the city to join HK Phil after playing “with all the big cats in Europe,” says Lo, who, somewhat ironically, had just begun studying composition at the University of Hong Kong at the time.
A decade later, HKNME commissioned Lo to write a piece for its 2019 tour of Taiwan and South Korea, and in 2022 performed his chamber opera Women LIke Us at the Hong Kong Arts Festival. A year later, Lo joined the group’s ranks as director of programming, with an unofficial brief to coax new audiences into the concert hall. His first full season in charge began in August 2025 with a personal coup: the regional premiere of Steen-Anderson’s multidisciplinary masterpiece “Black Box Music” — a concept that sees an ensemble conducted by two hands performing a miniature puppet-style show inside a box, simultaneously projected behind the stage for the audience to observe – a thrilling and frequently humorous technical feat which attracted an audience of 200 to Freespace’s main room, The Box.
Boldly, “Black Box Music” was paired with a new composition Lo penned for the occasion, “Antiphon,” an abstract but virtuosically playful piece utilising a “spatialised ensemble” that saw the musicians divided into three groups. The score was accompanied by live-processed video by visual artist Yu Wing-yan, “responding to the ensemble’s sounds, echoing Black Box Music’s exploration of the relationship between sound and visual elements in performance,” says Lo.
This opening programme also set the tone for the bold tech-heavy commissioning programme ahead. “When we decided to bring Black Box Music to Hong Kong, we designed the whole season around it,” he says.
Historically, HKNME has played a key role in offering exposure to outré Hong Kong composers, having premiered and commissioned more than 100 new works since its founding. Taking its cue from Steen-Anderson, the recent Music as Gaming platform saw three local composers offered the rare chance to conceive and develop a debut concert-length programme, through multiple workshops with the ensemble’s professional players over the arc of a year. “It’s a platform that’s full of love, seriously,” adds Lo. “We just provided the composers with the resources — human resources, as well as, you know, real resources – and they do whatever they want.”
United by the guiding theme of gameplay, the series concludes/concluded on January 31 with Jing Wang’s “Ivory Tower,” a piece inspired by children’s games like hopscotch and hide and seek utilising found objects and body percussion. It began a fortnight earlier with Eric So Ho-chi’s semi-spontaneous, game-theory inspired project “A Private Language Machine.” The middle chapter, Alice Yeung’s “Numeral Humanity” explored numbers viscerally with two keyboard players and two percussionists counting phrases while ominous, Matrix-inspired green digital numbers nagged on screens behind, before the whole thing ended with a fake auction.
Black Box Music — the main blockbuster season opening piece described in the piece – Photo courtesy HKNME
Challenges and opportunities
HKNME continues its warm welcome of wider audiences with a family concert on April 25, Here Comes the Animals, presenting animal-inspired works by 20th century icons Luciano Berio and Olivier Messiaen alongside a toy piano piece by Hong Kong’s Joyce Tang. On June 13, homegrown composer Linus Fung will have the honour of presenting a new piece alongside John Zorn’s monumental game-piece “Cobra.”
However these upcoming performances are likely to be HKNME’s last of 2026, after which its current existing funding expires. While the group enjoys operational support from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC), the bulk of its performance budget comes from the government’s Arts Capacity Development Funding Scheme (ACDFS), which awards generous financial support on a project-based basis every two years. This summer, the group will find out if they have the funds to proceed with planning performances for 2027.
“I mean, if you’re not one of the big nine, it’s basically impossible to do long-term planning,” says Lo, referencing the core group of major performing arts organisations that receive ongoing governmental support, including the HK Phil, Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, Hong Kong Repertory Theatre and City Contemporary Dance Company. Although HKNME has been running for nearly 20 years, he notes, “we don’t have regular funding.”
Regardless, the ensemble remains steadfast in its unofficial mission of rehabilitating contemporary music’s beleaguered image. “We have an identity problem. I have to admit it,” says Lo, who believes the key is not necessarily in winning over the same stubbornly snobbish — and often ageing — classical music fans that might hold loyal HK Phil subscriptions. Instead, the wide-ranging, conceptual and frequently multimedia-grounded work he’s programming is a natural fit for the city’s omnivorous cultural crowd. “The Hong Kong audience is very open-minded — we need to find ways to connect with them,” he adds. “If you ask me, the compositions speak for themselves. If you programme pieces that the audience can really feel engaged with, over a period of time, they will be more interested.
“I just trust the music, the compositions. I try to find works that I feel very touched or inspired by — and then hope those works will also connect with the local audience.”
Hong Kong New Music Ensemble presents Humour Me! at Quarryside on 7 February 2025 at 8pm, proceeded by a lecture/demonstration at 17:00; tickets. View future performances here.