Lai Kwan Yee and Wong Man Ching
The largest piano contest of Hong Kong will be held from January 5 to February 17 with around 3,488 participants from children to adolescents. Mr. Fok Siu Lun tells the reporters, sighing music education is neglected by local universities.
Mr. Fok, the music director of Yuen Long City Hall choir says the Hall will host the contest, called “Hong Kong Children and Youth Piano Competition”.
Currently, the choir consists of six groups of children, six groups of teenagers, and two groups of the artistic performers with about 50 people in each. While as the Yuen Long Children’s Choir was founded in 1978, there were only 20 persons or so. Lots of community choirs were established during 70s and 80s, but most of them are no longer active nowadays.
Fok claims that most community choirs are dormant because most parents tend to focus solely on their children’s academic performance in this day and age. They would rather want their children to attend academic helping classes like Mathematical Olympiad, abacus calculation and mind map training, etc.
“And for teenagers, who get to decide their own after class activities, I believe most of them would rather stay home and play video game,” he said. “It is like no one likes learning music anymore; many are only learning multi music instruments for the sake of better access to great schools or colleges.
“Hong Kong does not put great emphasis on music development, especially for choirs. The government only pays attention to the development of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. Seldom does it care about other music associations.”
As a music tutor himself, Fok reckons that the golden age to learn music is the toddler stage. Music is like a language, it has to be taught in one way or another. “It is a pity that many kindergarten teachers think that children are not capable of singing at the right pitch, so they tend to skip teaching anything about music and just focus on making the children verbally visible.”
He adds: “but the fact is, children are always sensitive enough to identify pitches.” He frowns upon that twisted concept, and sigheds that enhancing kindergarten’s teachers’ quality would be crucial to make children’s choirs bloom again in Hong Kong.
“Neither choral techniques nor conducting methods do university’s programs comprise. So most of the conductors were graduated from foreign countries like England and Canada.”
Being asked if he planned to take the choir to a higher level, Fok smiles: “Honestly, we do not need to be a top-level choir; we do not need to organize a concert and sell audience tickets. Our goal is to let students learn musical knowledge, widen their horizons, develop self-esteem, independence, collaboration and cooperation skills.
“My goal is to inspire my students and share my love and passion of music with them, igniting those hearts that have a strong and unwavering passion of music to pursue their own dreams, at least, to get enjoyment and excitement from the appreciatoin of music after school or work.”
