Music and Placemaking — George Tsz-Kwan Lam, Composer

In my work, I am primarily interested in what I term “musical placemaking”, which is to create music through a local, community-focused lens.

For example, I incorporate oral history and instrumental music in two recent projects that spotlight underrepresented communities’ perspectives and connect them more closely with local audiences. My 2018 work for cello, percussion, and digital playback, titled The Emigrants, includes collected oral history recordings from various emigrant musicians living or working in Queens, New York City, one of the world’s most ethnically diverse urban areas. I interwove the interviews with instrumental music inspired by the recorded speech. As a result, I explored how the absence of a visual record can create space for a musical documentary form.

My 2022 work, Family Association, is a 16-minute GPS-based, app-driven soundwalk for Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood, co-commissioned by University Settlement and Music At The Anthology (MATA). Audiences explore Manhattan’s Chinatown while listening to the work on a mobile app, where they can hear recorded oral history interviews with members of the Chinese-American community and music inspired by the recorded speech. Functioning as aural focal points in the soundwalk are the buildings for five “family associations” in Chinatown. These organizations provided Chinese immigrants with tight-knit, social, and imagined communities based on a common family name. When the listener approaches each site, the speech becomes more recognizable, recalling how such micro-communities helped generations of Chinese-Americans reconnect with their past. As the listener moves between two locations, the recorded oral history fades into musicalized speech, transitioning from one site to the next. National Public Radio featured the work in a segment that was broadcast nationwide, and the iOS app was downloaded more than 1,000 times since its launch in May 2022.