![]() ![]() He worked unremittingly, sustaining his passion for composition and pressing on tirelessly from beginning to end. But he was never content to rest on his laurels, and in the 1980s he went to the US again, this time to the Dick Grove Music Workshop in Los Angeles for the advanced course in music there. He won several prizes, including the Best Music Awards at the Golden Horse Festival, Taiwan and the Asia Pacific Film Festival, and his reputation began to take off. After graduation he returned to Hong Kong, where he composed, arranged and provided soundtracks for the two big film studios Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest. ![]() He also enjoyed the generous sponsorship of Sir Run Run Shaw, which enabled him to give all his attention to his studies and complete the course successfully. Then the Berklee College of Music in Boston, USA, recognizing his excellence, offered him a scholarship to study music there and learn traditional music theory. Dr Koo’s musical talent had emerged for all to see. It harmonised brilliantly with the plot of the film, the music and the images enhancing each other, and the haunting melody lingered movingly in the mind. Dr Koo’s first composition ‘Dream’ was duly chosen for the soundtrack, and was sung by his sister Koo Mei: “They say that life is like a dream, but I say dreams are just like life.” The song was a stunning hit, and was instantly popular all over Hong Kong. In 1961 the Shaw Brothers started shooting Endless Love, and were looking for a theme-song for the film. This was the beginning of his long career as a composer and his dazzlingly successful life in music. He therefore changed course and became a pianist, and was employed as a bandleader in a night club. He worked with concentration and practised hard, and such was his extraordinary natural talent for music that in a very short time he had mastered the principles of musical theory, the ramifications of harmony and the skills of a performer he also had great powers of assimilation, and was gifted with enormous facility. At the age of 18, as a consequence of the practice needs of his sister, the famous singer Koo Mei, he began to learn the piano, studying with a professional teacher from the Philippines. He went to work by day and studied at night, and life was hard. When he was 17, he came to live in Hong Kong. Dr Joseph Koo was born in 1931 in Guangzhou. He is the consummate musical craftsman Dr Joseph Koo. Renowned in the world of music for over half a century, he has been called the Godfather of Cantopop. The last few decades have seen the composition of a great number of moving pieces, and foremost among the composers of these is the man standing on the stage today. Hong Kong’s creative achievement in music is extraordinary, and is famous at home and abroad. In the ‘Record of Music’ in the Book of Rites, we read that ‘music originates from tone, and its root lies in the human heart being moved by external things.’ Because the composer’s production of beautiful sounds starts with a movement of the heart, music is the most emotionally expressive of the many art forms, and its performance in turn moves audiences more than other performing arts.
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