Singaporean composer Joan Tan Jing Wen’s Study of Fragile Objects #1 was awarded third place in the 2024 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest.
Hit the PLAY button above to listen.
Composed in 2024, Tan Jing Wen shared notes with Musicworks about how Study of Fragile Objects #1 took shape.
“A collection of recorded sounds taken from discarded glass bottles, falling marbles, and an old wind-up music box with a broken crank. Study of Fragile Objects #1 derives materials from seemingly forsaken items, as if found in a child’s abandoned toy box. In this piece, sounds are spliced, distorted, and recombined, obscuring sound sources to different degrees, wandering between liminal soundscapes that thread reality and hidden sonic worlds.
“I use recognizable sound sources such as glass bottles, which I associated with reality, and then work with them to form alternate realities, which stray further and further away from the familiar. I am also attracted to sounds with high frequencies, which are often produced by objects made of metal or glass, and sounds created through interactions between objects, for example, the dropping of marbles into glass bottles, or two glasses striking against each other. These sounds were recorded and used as materials in the piece.”
Joan Tan Jing Wen is a Singaporean composer currently based in Cologne, Germany, whose music draws on her lived experiences and those of others. She graduated in 2023 with a Bachelor of Music (Honours) in Composition from the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music (YSTCM), under Associate Professor Peter Ivan Edwards and Martin Jaggi, and is currently doing a Masters in Instrumental Composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln, under Brigitta Muntendorf and Oxana Omelchuk.
She has collaborated with percussionist Max Riefer, saxophonist Andreas Marinello, bassoonist Christoph Wichert, and pianist Benjamin Kobler. She has also worked with Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Ensemble Chromoson, soloists from Musikfabrik and the Neuevocasolisten Stuttgart, amongst others. She participated in the RED NOTE New Music Festival Composition Workshop 2021, the International Young Composers Academy Ticino (IYCA) 2023, and most recently, Sommerblut KulturFestival 2025 and Frequenz_Festival Kiel 2025.
