Commissions

In addition to the Renaissance polyphony that we so love doing, contemporary music also plays an important part of our repertoire. In 2019 we appointed our first Associate Composer, Vanissa Law, who will compose a series of new choral works to be premiered in our upcoming concerts which follow our acclaimed approach in programming contemporary works alongside renaissance polyphony.

Her first commission, ‘O Holy Night‘, is a new setting of the English text of the much-loved carol by Adolphe Adam. The work has received support from the CASH Music Fund, and received its world premiere at our Christmas concert in December 2019.

Her next commissioned works for Tallis Vocalis will be premiered in 2021.

Vanissa LAW Wing Lun

Vanissa Law was born in Hong Kong and began her studies at the Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) majoring in piano under Chinese composer Cui Shiguang. After graduating from HKBU, she turned her focus towards electroacoustic composition at Ball State University in the United States majoring in voice and music composition for her master degree. Law returned to Hong Kong and obtained her PhD in 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Christopher Keyes at HKBU. She studied voice with Katusha Tsui-Fraser and Dr. Mei Zhong, and was the winner of the regional (Indiana) audition of the National Association of Teachers of Singing in the United States in 2008. 

Law’s works and installations have been premiered and exhibited internationally at various events and festivals including the 13th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (Seoul, Korea), Zvukové Dobrodružství (Brno, Czech Republic), the Society of Composers (SCI) Region VI Conference (Texas, USA), the University of Central Missouri New Music Festival (Missouri, USA), the soundSCAPE festival (Italy), the 2013 International Workshop on Computer Music and Audio Technology (Taipei) and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Her collaborative music theatre piece, ‘Bubble’, was premiered by the Neue Vocalsolisten at the Munich Biennale in 2018.

Law was granted a Fulbright Research Award in 2014 and undertook a 10-month scholarship at the Louisiana Digital Media Center of Louisiana State University in the United States. She is now a part-time lecturer in the music departments of the University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University, the School of Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong. (2020)