Leng Pleng

One of Phnom Penh’s great musical strengths is the sheer breadth of different styles that can be found – on the fringes, perhaps, but all it takes is paying attention.  This Sunday at Meta House you can witness the debut performance of Earth Tones Recorder Quartet, featuring Katy, Sharon, Irina and Sarah.  LengPleng sat down with band leader and bass recorder player Katy Lo Wing this week to see what’s going on.

LP:  Let’s talk recorders.

KLW (pointing at the handheld recording device capturing the interview):  This is also a recorder, am I right?

LP:  Yes.  Old school.  Even though it’s digital.

KLW:  I did a Nerd Night presentation on the recorder recently and I started by talking about the confusing name.  The instrument was named that 400, 500 years before any sound recording machine was invented.  [The English name draws on the idea of a memoriser or repeater, as it was portable, easy to play, and good for passing on tunes.]  Other languages use different words, often calling it a kind of flute, a sweet flute or a block flute.  It’s a question that people ask – how does it compare to a flute?

I’ve long had a curiosity about the recorder.  At primary and secondary school in Hong Kong, like many countries, it was part of music lessons, but I never took it seriously.  Can I really make a good sound?  I could hear some other people could play well.  Then when I came to Cambodia I worked at Sronos Music School for a couple of years, and they wanted to get a group class together for recorder.  So I gathered some books, and got myself a good quality recorder, and although the group class didn’t really work out – only two students enrolled – I now had better resources.  And the method books were helpful for melodica students.

My mum worked in a school in Hong Kong that had a large collection of instruments that were not being used, just put in storage – strings, clarinet, trombone, trumpet, everything – it looked like a bunch of unclaimed suitcases in an airport, and nobody knew how long they had been there.  Two years ago somebody asked the staff to clear everything up, so Mum thought I might be interested, and sent me lots of photographs of instruments.  I was surprised that they were in such good condition, but I was saying no, Mum, I teach piano, I don’t want any of these.  They are not trash but not for me.

However, she brought one case home, without sending me a photo.  And when I visited there it was, she wanted me to have a look.  Wow, a long tube.  It’s very pretty.  And hardly used.  A bassoon?  No, it’s not a bassoon.  I tried it out, it seemed usable.  Google told me it was a bass recorder, worth over US$1,000 brand new.  So that’s how it started.  In a way the instrument found me.

LP:  So your next thought was: what do I do with this?

KLW:  Exactly, that’s the big question.  There was a lot to learn, because I’m used to a piano, where you sit down.  I had to get used to holding it; I use a strap like a saxophone, because it’s quite heavy, and you need to balance while standing up and using your fingers.  Totally different.  Playing one single note you need all of yourself, not just one finger.

Recorders come in different sizes – soprano, alto, tenor and bass.  The mechanism is much the same but the parts are different.  Soprano and tenor share fingering in the key of C, while the alto and bass are in F.  So I bought myself an alto and taught myself that first – it’s way smaller, and plastic, and I could practice for longer periods.  It’s the alto that I keep in my backpack for a quick ten minutes of practice here and there.  With a wooden instrument you can’t just grab it and play for an hour, you need to warm it up, clean it down, it’s a lot of work.  I also bought a plastic bass recorder to practice on.

Practicing by yourself can be lonely.  I’m used to the piano, and I have students to play with, but I wanted to share the recorder with others.  The recorder books have a lot of ensemble parts, so when I was ready, I asked Sharon if we could play together.  We had been through the same school system in Hong Kong, and she had played in the school recorder team, and also being a string player she’s used to playing that kind of ensemble.  We actually found out we once both played in the same concert that involved 3,000 kids setting a Guiness World Record for most people playing recorder.

I asked Irina also – we had played melodica together a few times.  Do you want to give it a try?  She said count me in.  Now we have a trio!  A winning team.  Then I made a half-hearted Facebook post to see if maybe there was another recorder player around – have an instrument, can read music, ready to play.  And Sarah came back saying I’ve played the tenor recorder since I was seven!  Meant to be.  The quartet came together and we started rehearsing together in May.

Sarah Chhin (tenor), Katy Lo Wing (bass), Sharon Lui (alto), Irina Chakroborty (soprano).  Photo supplied. 

We considered whether to accept new members, because perhaps people would be curious once they saw what we were doing, and want to get involved.  But if you say yes to one maybe you need to say yes to five, and that makes more work for me as the organiser.  So we’re sticking to the quartet.

LP:  What sort of repertoire are you going to be playing on Sunday?

KLW:  There’s a lot of recorder music from the Golden Era, the Baroque period, medieval and Renaissance.  We do a little bit of that, but not too much – it’s all more or less the same style.  We also have a lot of three- and four-part arrangements of folk songs, well-known old tunes.  Also some more recent pieces.  It’s not a long programme – the first half is older music, then a break, and then the second half pieces from within the last century.

It’s hard to find the right name.  We didn’t want a general name like Phnom Penh Recorder Quartet.  The Four Block Sisters?  Nah.  You want something memorable.  So we decided to ask our first audience for ideas, that was our fallback position.  However, the first time we made a video to put on Facebook to show what we were up to, we decided to all wear earth tone colours, like we had at our first gathering, and eventually somebody said how about Earth Tones as a name?  Much better!

One last thing – you may have heard a bass recorder without knowing it.  In the Star Wars franchise movie The Mandalorian, the opening theme is played on the bass recorder.

Earth Tones Recorder Quartet play on Sunday 27, at Meta House, from 3 pm.