composition
Photo: Drew Alexander
"...flute wisps, hushed cymbals... simulated bird twitterings and tweetings, attract and hold the attention."
Jet Kye Chong’s music is gripping and diverse, often engaging with symmetries or other phenomena of the natural world and bringing their beauty and drama to the fore through sound. He has been commissioned by soloists, ensembles and schools, and has had his music performed around the world.
For more information on the works, other recordings, commissions, or score purchase, please contact me.
Featured Works
Umbral Orbits
for string quartet (2018)
Written for the Flinders Quartet (VIC) in 2018, and developed with the quartet members and composer Stuart Greenbaum. The work is inspired by Cubist-styled snapshots of 2-dimensional projections of 3-dimensional projections of the 4-dimensional pentachoron (5-cell) polytope. Umbral Orbits won the Flinder’s Quartet Scarlet’s Fund Award 2018.
Anticommunication
for two percussion and tape (2017)
Commissioned by percussionist Euphina Yap, this theatrical work dissects elements of communication we take for granted: verbal language, phonetics and body language. It then reconstructs them in mismatched, dysfunctional and humorous ways to play on audience expectations. The piece has since been toured around the USA by Louis Pino and Matt Moore.
Rev 3
for solo marimba (2017)
Rev 3 was written in one week for a local project, and underwent three major revisions before being performed at the 2017 Malaysia Percussion Festival, where it won the Best Solo Performance Prize. The piece has since been developed with percussionists Aiyun Huang and Emmanuel Séjourné into its current form.
Still Drumming, 2020
for percussionists over video conference
Commissioned by Louise Devenish and instigated by the Drumming@50 project, this work enables live performance between musicians across the world by taking advantage of the latency and other “tech issues” in order to play together. In homage to Reich’s drumming, rhythmic cells phase and fade in a bright and rich texture. Every performer and audience member hears something different, and listeners pick out resultant patterns and melodic cells to share with the ensemble. When performed, the work simultaneously exists in as many versions as there are listeners, hence a meaningful public recording is impossible. Premiered Nov 1 2020 in the Digital Phasing project. Next performance scheduled for 2021.
Paraphrasis
for piano trio and live electronics (2019)
Commissioned by the Irwin Street Collective, Paraphrasis brings the colours of the piano trio to the foreground through stasis. The work comprises the opening bars of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata Op. 69, but slowed down by several orders of magnitude, and rearranged and restructured through golden proportions. Looping electronics capture beds of sound that slowly evolve and fade in a harmonic arc from resonant consonance, through raging dissonance, towards resolution.
List of compositions
- '说了 (Shuole)' (2021) - for SSAATTBB
- 'Still Drumming, 2020' (2020) - for percussionists over video conference, commissioned by Louise Devenish
- Score to play 'Our Country's Good (1988), by Timberlake Wertenbaker' (2020) - staged production with All Saint's College
- 'Match' (2019) - fanfare for brass ensemble, selected and recorded for the Perth Festival 2020
- 'Picctionary' (2019) - for piccolo and marimba, commissioned by Chelsea Davis
- 'Paraphrasis' (2019) - for piano trio and live electronics, commissioned by the Irwin Street Collective for the UWA Chamber Music Festival
- 'Impartial Reflections' (2019) - for amplified ukulele, written with the support of the Scarlet's Fund at All That We Are, Tasmania
- 'Dawn Prelude' (2019) - for percussion, clarinet, electric guitar and double bass
- 'Prelude' (2019) - for percussion, violin and double bass
- 'A Persistent Memory' (2018) - for wind quintet
- 'Sixth Season' (2018) - for symphony orchestra, Winner and People's Choice Award for the 2018 Ransom Prize
- 'Umbral Orbits' (2018) - for string quartet, winner of the Scarlet's Fund Award
- 'Des cloches étranges' (2018) - for ukulele, kalimba and pressurised bottles
- 'Sonata for Snare Drum' (2018) - for solo snare drum
- 'On the Tearing of Graphene' (2018) - for piano trio and electronics
- 'A Movement Each for Orchestra and Musicians' (2017) - for symphony orchestra, commissioned by the Perth Orchestra Project
- 'Not All Those Who Wander' (2017) - for chamber orchestra, developed and premiered in the 2017 WASO Composition Project
- 'Anticommunication' (2017) - for two percussion and tape
- 'Rev 3' (2017) - for solo marimba, premiere performance winning the 2017 Malaysia Percussion Festival Solo Category
- 'Words by the Gentle Waves' (2017) - for bass clarinet and marimba
- 'Gedanken II - Symmetries' (2017) - for two theremins (art installation)
- 'Gedanken I' (2016) - open instrumentation
- Score to play 'Bonehouse, by Rupert Williamson' (2016) - staged production
- Score to play 'Beckett Fitzgerald, by Harry Goodlet' (2016) - staged production
- 'Low Frequency Operation' (2016) - for solo vibraphone, premiered for the Graviational Waves Research Celebration 2016
- 'Splice' (2016) - for marimba and vibraphone