My Personal Project - Ruben Yam

Hi, my name is Ruben and if you know me at all, then you’d have no doubt that my Personal Project will be about music – especially classical and orchestral works. Way back in Year 9, I wanted to compose a piece for one of the great loves in my life: my viola.

An underappreciated instrument, I wanted to share its beautiful and mellow tones to prove that it is an instrument that deserves the same recognition and respect of its more popular counterpart, the violin. Therefore, I decided that I wanted to write and perform a baroque dance suite for solo viola, similar to how Bach wrote a set for solo cello. However, after writing the first few pieces, I found that I wasn’t enjoying the project as much as I thought I would. The only piece I enjoyed writing was the prelude, and I quickly realised why: conforming to the rhythmic constraints of the dances stifled my creativity and felt like a burden. ‘So’, I thought ‘how can I showcase the viola without having to restrain my creativity?’

This led to a short period of not doing anything as I tried to figure out what I needed to do. As I lay on my bed, listening to my playlist of assorted classical pieces, an idea struck me as I heard the prominent viola solos and countermelodies in, Smetana’s Quartet 1 in E minor: I would write a quartet, with the primary melody and important countermelodies given to the viola. Struck with inspiration, I opened my composition software and began work. I thought about what I wanted to write for a bit, and went with a classical feel, similar to the works of Mozart and Haydn. High violin melodies, steady quaver accompaniment on the second violin and cello, and close countermelodies on the viola. ‘Perfect,’ I now thought, ‘I have a project that showcases the viola and also can teach me about harmonisation and writing for quartets.’ That was, however, until I realised that in my writing of the piece, I had unconsciously copied similar melodic lines to the allegro movement of Mozart’s 19th String Quartet, despite only once hearing the piece a few days before I started my work. Whoops.

Fast forward a few weeks to New Year’s Eve. I was at the Broadwater Parklands with my Kung Fu school to do a traditional Chinese lion dance for the event. Before our performance, however, there was a DJ who was playing various EDM tracks, and another inspiration hit me during the build-up and bass drop of his piece. A few classical music pieces, I realised, had similar tension in their build ups to the climax – most notably Vivaldi’s Winter (mvt 1). When I returned home from the event, I quickly researched to see if anyone had remixed classical music with EDM. There were several results, but none of them stayed true to the intent of the music, often taking a single melodic phrase no longer than four to five seconds long and looping that over a typical four-chord progression of modern pop music, bearing very little resemblance to the original pieces. As such, I am proud to present my third and final project: making remixes of classical music that follow the intent of the melodical phrasings and harmony of the original music. These remixes will make classical music more accessible to a modern audience, and act as a gateway to enjoying the genre, breaking the stereotypes of benig old-fashioned, elitist and highbrow. So far, I’ve remixed four pieces: Vivaldi’s Winter, Paganini’s 24th Caprice, Bach’s Double Violin Concerto and Mozart’s Sonata Semplice. I aim to remix enough pieces to create a moderately-sized album and upload it to Spotify or print CDs for sale on the night.

Overall, I feel like the MYP Personal Project is more about the journey than the destination. All these plan changes are but stepping stones over the long river that is the project, and there is still a long way to go to work on it before I am done.