Contemporary classical music, storytelling, poetry, and film come together in Liham: A Digital Song Cycle. The online project celebrates Filipino history and storytelling.
Loosely translated from Tagalog, Liham means correspondence, a written message or communication. The project is a multimedia art-song cycle and love letter to the spirit of the Filipino people and their stories.
Liham: A Digital Song Cycle
Musically, the work revolves around four songs based the colonial version of the Philippine national anthem. They share the stories of four Filipino Canadians — two who are business owners in British Columbia, along with Vancouver-based visual artist Bert Monterona, and Toronto actor and singer Carolyn Fe. The BC business owners also opened up their spaces to serve as filming locations.
Their stories are diverse, from those who’ve recently arrived in Canada to the long settled, without stereotyping or focusing on trauma.
The work premiered in a live version in New York at the MISE-EN Festival in 2024, and went live online on June 12, 2025 in celebration of Philippine Independence Day.
With Feliz as the composer, the libretto was written by Montreal-based poet Revan Badingham III (Riley Palanca). The work was commissioned by Filipino opera and theatre artist Renee Michaela Fajardo, who performs in it along with baritone Danlie Rae Acebuque and pianist Vivian Kwok. Solara Thanh-Bình Đặng acted as director and producer, with cinematographer and associate producer Rachel Chen.
“It was important to us to work with folks within our community here, and I wanted the project to tell their — our — stories, wherever that took us,” Fajardo says in a statement. “This is a love letter to those of us who, for one reason or another, know what it’s like to have a heart constantly between identities, between oceans.”
We spoke to Toronto composer Juro Kim Feliz about the project.
Juro Kim Feliz, composer; Riley Palanca, poet; Renee Fajardo, Mezzo-soprano; Andrea Grant, pianist, filmed and recorded at Grace Church on the Hill, Toronto on August 18, 2021 (Sound and video capture by Ryan Harper):
Juro Kim Feliz
Juro was the inaugural composer-in-residence of New Music Concerts, and has been active in Torontos’ contemporary music scene for about eight years.
Work by Toronto-based composer, pianist, writer, and synth-pop singer-songwriter Juro Kim Feliz has been performed across Asia, Europe and the Americas. In 2009, he won the Southeast Asian Young Composer Award, launching his career. He’s been commissioned and performed, and collaborated with ensembles and artists such as Continuum Contemporary Music, Liminar, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Ensemble x.y, dissonArt Ensemble, Marilène Provencher-Leduc, Guy Few, and Wesley Shen.
His musical journey began in his native Philippines, where he studied piano, winning the Weinstein Piano Competition in 1999. He studied compositions at the University of the Phlippines, and at McGill University in Montreal.
Feliz has also been active as a community radio producer, and as an educator. He has taught classical piano and Western music theory at the Royal Conservatory of Music for more than 14 years.
The Interview
“I started as a pianist back in the Philippines,” Feliz says. He first studied piano during high school, and became involved in competitions. The repertoire he was learning led him to think about composition.
“I think there was that fascination with modern atonal music,” he says. “I was heavily listening to Bartók.” He was also discovering Stravinsky.
“If they consider these sounds as music, then I could for sure create my own sounds as well.”
He eventually dropped piano performance to delve into composition full-time.
“As a composer I could be versatile,” he says. It didn’t rule out performance altogether, but added other layers to his musical practice.
By the time he got to university, he was sure of his choice.
“Most of the time, I would rather be the guy behind the scenes,” he says. Along with composition, he also studied percussion instruments, and the Japanese koto.
“It’s about redirecting them into my composition practice.”
Liham
Renee Michaela Fajardo, producer of the project, recruited Feliz. “She came to me in 2021.”
Her commission asked for a song cycle that dealt with themes of identity, migration, and other related topics, in reference specifically to Filipino Canadian identities.
“I think I was the first one in line,” he says. After the composer, she was looking for the writer and librettist. Poet Revan was a long time collaborator of Feliz’s. “That became our team at the time,” he says. “It started there.”
Renee already had a digital multimedia format in mind.
“We already know that there’s going to be filming, some bits of storytelling,” he says. Getting all the pieces, and of course funding, in place took some time.
Fajardo, who was based in Toronto to begin with, moved to Vancouver. It meant finding a new presenter for the project.
“That’s when Sound the Alarm came up,” he says.
The Song Cycle
“As a contemporary composer I’m more attuned to creating an avant garde work,” Feliz explains.
For Liham, however, he was writing for two singers, and incorporating poetry that had social and political nuances, even to revolutionary themes.
“I thought, I have to respond very carefully musically.”
He says he was inspired by composers like Charles Ives and Luciano Berio, and branching into directions he wouldn’t normally take. “Trying to sound a little different than what I’m used to,” he says, describing the result as a kind of Frankenstein monster. “It does evoke a lot of conceptual frameworks,” he says. It’s somewhat anachronistic in flavour, compared to his other works. “This is not born out of a vaccuum.”
Filipino art song also became an important influence. “It became very, very significant.”
Despite his tongue in cheek reference to Frankenstein, the finished result came out just right. “I will be very honest about it,” he says. “I suddenly unexpectedly liked it. I had many misgivings. Surprisingly it turned out really great.”
He describes it as art song stitched together with post-modernist expression. “It sounds surprisingly familiar. Somehow, musically it really unfolded in a nice way.”
The work incorporates the varied influences and different sound worlds as elements that flow past in performance. “It’s like a river of consciousness.”
There are even elements reminiscent of pop ballads, and in certain passages, he provides only the chords, asking the pianist to improvise. “There is that kind of element that surprisingly worked,” he says. “It sounded really nice.”
Passages of familiar music burst out of the post-modernist flow. “Suddenly you’re plunged into a certain world, even for a few moments.”
The vocalists are treated differently. “The idea thought is that the vocal melodies are detached from it,” he explains. The piano and vocals interact, albeit in different ways. “There is also that kind of ambiguity.”
While he’s paid a lot of attention to the music, he notes that the overall thrust of the project is storytelling, and reframing opera in that sense.
“It’s not opera per se, [but] four songs intertwined with four actual stories,” Feliz explains, “It creates that kind of effect. I like the idea that they’re not necessarily connected with each other. I do appreciate the idea that they’re sitting together.”
Feliz wanted to be more than just the person who wrote the music; he also conducted the interviews that formed the basis of the stories that are told. “While I did the music, I also wanted to make sure that my participation in this project wasn’t just as a composer.”
It’s about a community and its resilience.
“This is not just a musical.”
- You’ll find Liham: A Digital Song Cycle [HERE].
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