CCA Previews, CCA Previews 2021, Commentary, Please Mind the Platform Gap

CCA Previews ’21: Chinese Orchestra
Reading Time: 5 minutes

By Damien Low (21S06A), Chairperson and Justinian Guan (21S03F), Vice-Chairperson

Even if you’ve never watched a Chinese Orchestra performance, you probably think you know what a Chinese Orchestra sounds like. At the very mention of the word, distressing Chinese New Year memories of cacophonous flutes, strings, and cymbals invading seemingly every supermarket in Singapore start to flood your mind and you begin to cower in fear involuntarily… That’s what a Chinese Orchestra is, right?

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Music Reviews, Raffles Reviews

Lady Gaga: The Fame Monster Lives On
Reading Time: 4 minutes

By Shaun Loh (21A01A) 

“Lady Gaga? The meat dress woman? The one from the movie with Bradley Cooper?” A classmate blurted out earlier this year when someone mentioned the singer. 

“Ummm…yeah, both of those things.” 

Somehow, in spite of Lady Gaga’s status as an omnipresent musical giant, there always seems to be a sense of doubt, a sense of uneasiness, in attempting to grasp the concept, or personhood, beneath the title “Lady Gaga”. 

Many used to remember her by her odd theatrics. Now, people think of her as a prolific embodiment of musical versatility. Yet, few understand where her true power and place in the music industry lies. It’s only in tracing her discography that we discover the true source of her meteoric rise. Just a decade ago, with a poker face shrouded in mystery, she released her most revolutionary record to date, The Fame Monster. 

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Commentary

Prelude To Our Bicentennial: Rethinking Raffles
Reading Time: 7 minutes

By Matthew Ethan Ramli (21S03F) and Thet Hninn Zin (21A13A)
Cover image by Neo Xin Yuan (21A01D)

Behind the grand piano at the Yusof Ishak Block atrium lies a room that not many know about. Commonly thought of as just another storage facility, it bears the remains of the previous Heritage Gallery, the long-standing precursor to what we now know as the Raffles Archives and Museum. It has largely remained out of use for the better part of the decade, until a new exhibition discussing the life of Stamford Raffles necessitated its use as an annex of the museum. 

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Clubs, Commentary

Raffles Business Symposium 2020: Food Wastage
Reading Time: 8 minutes

By Clarice Tan (21A01C) and Neo Xin Yuan (21A01D)

Like all other events in 2020, the Raffles Business Symposium (RBS) took a different form this year. Hosted entirely on a Zoom video conference call by the Raffles Entrepreneurship Network (REN), competitors, judges, emcees and viewers all attended from the comfort of their homes. Despite all these changes, the spirit of the Symposium still remained the same. The two main components of RBS are unchanged too—Symposium and Competition.

This year’s theme was Food Wastage, a relevant and important topic of discussion in today’s context. The RBS 2020 opening video provided news reports of increasing food wastage both globally and locally, and explained its negative impacts—wasted food not only produces methane, a greenhouse gas which contributes to global warming, but it also serves to perpetuate food insecurity. 

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