Tanya Chua's Where I Belong (2021)

This piece was commissioned by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra for Singapore’s National Day, 2021. Where I Belong was first commissioned for National Day 20 years ago in 2001 and was an extreme success, especially for a patriotic, national day song. In approaching this arrangement, I wanted to take the song from it’s fun, but heartfelt feel and highlight the latter emotion. Especially during a time of lockdown and struggle for the arts community, it felt more sincere in that approach. To achieve this, I employed the choir and solo violin to give an air of struggle, tension, and even sometimes, uncertainty, and divided the chorus into two parts, allowing the ensemble to take more time to rise to it’s full strength in the middle of the chorus, as opposed to the beginning.
However, I couldn’t just make this a sad sob story type of piece. The song is not just about missing home and nostalgically remembering good times, but it’s also about hope, and the future, and laughter. The essence of this is felt in it’s simple but catchy melody. Different instruments take little sections of this melody and play around with it, as the orchestra tentatively takes ownership of the song. In the middle of the piece, a little narration was added to include Tanya Chua describing what she misses about Singapore - I used the section after that to employ the orchestra and show it’s strength, even with the smaller numbers Covid has restricted us to, but rather just brute force and power, I employed a little bit of quirkiness, typical of my aesthetic, in the melodies played by the orchestra. This melody came about from Tanya Chua’s original melodies - they were performed in response to them.