NOĒMA

NOĒMA is a chamber choir dedicated to advancing Hong Kong’s choral scene through the pursuit of performing at an unprecedented level of artistic excellence. The ensemble comprises some of the city’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 critical acclaim. The success was followed by an invitation from HKU MUSE, who presented NOĒMA’s Inaugural Concert at HKU Grand Hall in October 2022.

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 harnessing the expressive landscape in every piece in its repertoire. Known for its innovative programmes ranging from Renaissance polyphony to newly commissioned works, NOĒMA continually seeks to bring relevance among music, poetry, and contemporary society.

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 composer and music 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, which has a ‘sweetly stimulating and astonishingly soothing effect on the ears and spirit’.

資料來源：NOĒMA