Myriad Meanings in Singaporean Music: Between Qualitative and Practice Research

How do Singaporean composers approach musical meaning, locality, and identity within Western classical music (WCM)? Situated within ongoing debates around representation, tradition, semiotics, and ‘multiculturalism’ in music (Lizeray & Lum, 2018; Zubillaga-Pow, 2014), this paper presents findings and methodological considerations from an interview study with six composers. The study reveals the myriad ways in which composers experience and express their identities, the tension between aesthetic ideals, social positioning, and lived experience, and the meaning-making values in WCM which shape attitudes towards signification and ambiguity.

Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), which analyses data through its ‘double hermeneutic’, I interpret the composers’ responses to identify emergent themes (Smith et al., 2022). As a method frequently applied in underexplored fields, IPA’s creators have advocated for the researcher’s contextual embeddedness and shared experience with the participants as an analytical strength. In my performance practice, concert programming is a form of co-authorship with the composer (Gilmore, 1993), shaping how lesser-known music is heard, understood, and valued. The paper therefore also considers how practice research can serve as a reflexive foundation for qualitative research. The concurrence of practice and qualitative studies enables me to interpret composers’ insights with insider sensitivity, recognise their agency, while making sense of multiple and sometimes competing forms of value.