NOĒMA

NOĒMA is a chamber choir dedicated to advancing the city’s choral scene through the pursuit of performing at an unprecedented level of artistic excellence. The ensemble comprises some of Hong Kong’s finest choral musicians under the dynamic leadership of its Artistic Director and founder Sanders Lau. It gave its pilot performance in June 2022 at Tai Kwun to great critical acclaim, and was then invited by HKU MUSE to give its Inaugural Concert at HKU Grand Hall.

The group’s ethos is ruled by a determination to apply ideals of rhetoric, the art of persuasion, to its singing through always exploring and exploiting the expressive means in every piece in its repertoire, from Renaissance polyphony to newly commissioned works.

In classical Greek rhetoric, noēma (νόημα) means ‘the content of thought’, which arises when a certain utterance reveals more than what is expressed literally. In the 17th century, Renaissance theorist Joachim Burmeister borrowed the term and coined it as a musical-rhetorical figure. According to him, the figure noēma denotes the homophonic declamation of text together in all the voices, and has ‘a sweetly stimulating and astonishingly soothing effect on the ears and spirit’.

NOĒMA 合唱團薈萃香港合唱精英，由藝術總監劉卓熙創立。合唱團致力透過精進演出，為本地合唱發展帶來新可能。2022年6月獲邀於大館進行試演，大獲好評，隨即獲邀於港大繆思樂季舉行創團音樂會。

NOĒMA 深信無論是演唱文藝復興複調音樂、以至全新委約作品，都能通過不斷探索每首歌曲中的表達和修辭方式，找出最動人的演繹手法。

在古典希臘修辭學中，noēma 一字意指「心之所想、言外之意」。在文藝復興時期，音樂學者布米斯達在他的音樂修辭學著作中借用此古字，以形容所有歌者齊聲合唱的寫作手法，能為聽者帶來「甜美又撩動心靈、格外療癒」的感覺。