Reimagining Performance in Community Contexts
Framing community music-making as an artistic practice shaped by listening, co-creation and care, this presentation explores how musical practice can connect people across time while responding to everyday realities. It considers how musicians reimagine performance when working with communities, engaging with seniors’ musical memories as living heritage and transforming familiar tunes through improvisation, re-arrangement and shared forms of musicking. Through this process, relationships and responsiveness support a more person-centred approach to creative practice.
The presentation offers strategies for artists seeking to interweave heritage and experimentation, imagination and constraint, and artistic expression with communal impact.
Rachel Ho
Rachel Ho is a baroque and modern flautist and founding member of Red Dot Baroque and Gaolat Quintet. She gave the world premiere of Eric Watson’s Concerto Arabesque with Resound Collective, and her cross-cultural collaboration with Vamshika Quintet, an Indian bansuri ensemble, was praised for creating “true objects of beauty” (The Straits Times, 2024).
Passionate about music’s role in fostering intergenerational connection and wellbeing, Rachel has facilitated creative music-making programmes with children, at-risk youth and seniors. These include Music for Life, an improvisation-based practice for people living with dementia at WoonZorgcentra Haaglanden; Sing Out Loud! with Esplanade; and Take Flight at Singapore Girls’ Home. She has presented her work at symposiums in Singapore, Thailand and Australia.
Rachel holds a Master’s in Music Education from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and is pursuing a PhD in Music Practices at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, where she also teaches community engagement and professional integration.
YST Conservatory of Music