In 2010, seven Taiwanese songs from the pop genre and folksongs in four different dialects were put together with a new arrangement, presenting a refreshing aspect of the most well-known songs to the audience. The "Olive Tree" is not only a heartfelt telling of a nostalgic traveler, in Li's arrangement, the complexity is that the nostalgia is evoked by encountering Schubert's Der Lindenbaum. 

The cycle is written for fl, cl, 2p, hp, mezzo, vla, and vc (same instrumentation as Berio’s Folk Songs), commissioned by Philharmonia Moments Musicaux, Chin-Po Chiang, conductor/artistic director. The mezzo soprano in this recording is Jo-Pei Weng. 

#021.5 Folksong - Homage to Formosa ｜福爾摩沙之民歌新聲集 - Olive Tree (橄欖樹)

Yuan-Chen Li - Works

#007 Aqua (aka. Hy-)｜三點水 (2003) for piano solo

#023.3 Intermezzo: Shang｜間奏曲：商 - mvt. 3, Strange Shore, for Orchestra (2011)

Chamber ensemble for fl, ob, cl, vib, hp, pf, cel, vn, vla, kb and Chinese 7-string zither. Composed for the completion of the master’s degree at TNUA. Awarded the first prize of 2005 Literature and Art Creation Award for chamber music under the Council of Cultural Affairs and Ministry of Education, Taiwan. 

The subtitle “Tsan” here refers to its Buddhist meaning of “seeking one’s being through meditation” in Buddhism. Consequently, this piece, through recurrent waxing and waning, employs voices as “will” in the process of meditating existence, evoking a plain motif that beckons the forthcoming material creation. The purpose of this piece, furthermore, is nothing but presenting the movement of sounds, which plays the role of the catalyst of the audience’s imagination, helping the audience enter the self-conscious mind space of their own. 

The concepts of timbre in this piece bases on the theory of Chinese phonology in drama, turning the analytical-singing process into chamber music. Pitch E, the major pitch of this piece, is the centerpiece of the entire work. Contributed by various orchestrations and textures, it bears the articulations and the complexities by each instrument. Accordingly, this piece is characterized by the emphasis on the flexibilities of rhythm and musical events, which highly provides the music the quality of musical time.

We may call this piece a reading upon music’s essence and assets, which, as we can imagine, is an endless journey we must relieve it with a reluctant period. This is the first phase of the author’s exploring music presentation; and the expectation within the work is to listen to the sounds of every moment􏳵from the author’s mind, the performers’ tunes, and the listeners’ hearts.

#10 Intermezzo - Tsan｜間奏曲：參 (2006) - for 11 players

Jeremy Rose / Saxophone
Yuan-Chen Li / Piano
Alberto Novello / Electronics 

Three musicians are fellows of 2017 Omi International Center of Arts- Music Residency, Ghent, New York.

Improvisation by Jeremy Rose, Yuan-Chen Li, and Alberto Novello

Conductor: Cliff Colnot
Musicians: Cliff's Friends in Chicago 
Sound Engineer: Christopher Willis

The composer imagines a journey under celestial sky. The reddish star of Aldebaran symbolizes an eternity. The traveler follows it. But depending upon the longitude and latitude. the traveler’s viewpoint during his ongoing journey, in relation to the star, is never the same. Ever -changing is therefore the nature of the unchanging.

The focal pitch of On Aldebaran is F#. Its pitch identity is ambiguous and arbitrary, implied by the constant conflicts among multiple sets of harmonic patterns alongside moving and different rhythms. The tone color of F# is created by a mixed ensemble, either well-blended or extremely contrasted. The form of the piece is also open to interpretation, not limited the perception of it as a through-composed movement or multiple sections. On Aldebaran draws upon the composer’s memory of the tune from Nan-quan music and also pays tributes to Japanese Gagaku. The orchestration gives the harmony a greater role to form strata and eventually becomes a conflux of everything, without boundaries.

#32 On Aldebaran | 之於畢宿五, For Orchestra (2014)

Works commissioned and premiered by Ensemble Mise-En for their Mise-En Music Festival 2018 in International Festival in New York, programed by artistic director and conductor Moon Young Ha.

The work is about the soundscape of the homeless living in the lower level of downtown Chicago. There are bridges, tunnels, railroads and cars that are built to suppress the service people and utility to the lower space of the city. Listeners are taken to the journey of the sound produced in the area of such as well as the upper level of so-called "Magnificent Miles."

#042 Indispensable Dislocation (2018, World Premiere, Mise - En)

Fauna Republic For Ensemble Of 9 Musicians (2013)

West Coasts

Rain Noir Noir | 雨黑黑 (2018)
For Harp Trio
Performers: Liya Huang/Harp (黃立雅), I-Jeng Yeh/Flute (葉怡礽), and Kyu-Ri Jim/Cello (金窺利)

Commissioned by harpist Liya Huang, Rain Noir Noir shows Li’s exploration of musical language to minimalism and improvisation, stretching the fragments of the folk tune “Tien Hey Hey” (Cloudy Day) to a multi-moment set of trio. The atmospheric, humorous, and tender side of Li’s musicianship is very well spoken by the musicians, handpicked by Liya from the China National Center for the Performing Arts Orchestra which she herself serves as the principal harpist.

#39 Rian Noir Noir for harp trio

Li first arrived on the contemporary music scene in Taiwan with her very original use of instrumentation and style in her chamber music piece Zang (the funeral) in 2000. In 2003, the expression and orchestration of her orchestral work Awakening won the prize at the Asian Music Festival 2003 in Tokyo from the Asian Composers’ League, and was subsequently premiered by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. In recent years, Li’s music reflects her transformation of processes and concepts in Asian traditional arts, literature, and Buddhism into a compositional technique for solo, chamber, and orchestra of both Western and Chinese instruments. With her virtuosity in instrumentation and fluency in converging and synthesizing diverse cultural, musical and conceptual frameworks, her treatment of the space of the sonority, temporality, texture, and syntax have engaged musicians of different practices, critics, researchers, and worldwide listeners.

Yuan-Chen Li

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