Observing a group of teenagers transporting instrument cases through an airport with the knowledge that, by nightfall, they will be tuning up in a concert hall thousands of miles away from the rehearsal rooms they are familiar with on Bencoolen Street is subtly amazing. That is essentially what is happening as the Singapore National Youth Orchestra travels to Japan for what organizers are referring to as a historic concert run, which will continue the more than thirty-year-old relationship between the music scenes of the two nations.
The SNYO is not your average school band. It is a Ministry of Education-recognized National Project of Excellence that attracts more than 200 musicians between the ages of 10 and 21 who are chosen through an infamously difficult audition process. The Singapore Symphony Orchestra has been in charge of day-to-day operations since 2016, but its history dates back to 1933, when a choirmaster by the name of E. A. Brown founded a children’s orchestra at St. Andrew’s Cathedral. It’s unlikely that many of the young violinists traveling to Japan this season give that history much thought. Regardless, it is present in every rehearsal.
This tour feels different rather than new because SNYO members have been visiting Japan for a long time. Since the orchestra’s 1993 performance in Kumamoto, smaller groups have traveled nearly every year to participate in the Toyota Youth Orchestra Camp, including in Okinawa in 2016, Nagoya in 2017, Gifu in 2018, Tokyo in 2019, and Izumo as recently as last year. The majority of those excursions were camps—intensive, instructive, and somewhat behind-the-scenes. An actual test of the orchestra’s ability to compete outside of Singapore’s well-known halls would be a full concert run in front of paying Japanese audiences.
It’s difficult to ignore how much importance is given to these tours, both in terms of music and symbolism. A youth orchestra that performs overseas serves two purposes for Singapore, a small nation with an excessive appetite for cultural diplomacy: it develops young musicians’ skills while subtly representing the country. Joshua Tan, the principal conductor of the SNYO since 2018, carries on a legacy in which touring was practically institutional muscle memory rather than an occasional treat. Vienna, Berlin, Aberdeen, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou have all been visited in the past. However, because of the decades of interaction through the Toyota camps and the cultural fluency that results from frequent visits rather than one-time acts of kindness, Japan has a special resonance.
This tour also contains a generational tale that is easy to overlook if you just look at the programming notes. During SNYO’s previous trips to Japan, many of the musicians on this trip were young children, some of whom had not even been born. By playing a repertory that probably combines Western classical classics with works intended to highlight Singaporean composers, they are entering a relationship that their predecessors established. The orchestra’s previous incarnations took this practice seriously, even though the young musicians themselves reportedly complained about struggling with new and sometimes challenging scores.
Time will tell if this specific run merits the “historic” designation. Many concert tours are referred to as historic, but not all of them fit the description. However, there is a compelling argument here: a full concert presence in significant Japanese venues, based on real institutional history as opposed to a one-time invitation, suggests something more long-lasting than a single attention-grabbing visit. One camp, one concert, one curtain call at a time, it appears to be, at the very least, the next chapter in a relationship that Singapore’s young musicians have been subtly writing since the 1990s.
