Bryant So, violin
Andrew Jung, viola
Robin Park, cello
Aster Zhang, cello scordatura
Emily Liushen, clarinet
Carlos Dias, audio engineer

Quintet: II.

QUINTET

Bryant So, violin
Andrew Jung, viola
Robin Park, cello
Aster Zhang, cello scordatura
Emily Liushen, clarinet
Carlos Diaz, audio engineer

Quintet: I.

LIVE AT SPRAGUE HALL
Alexander Franco Goldberg & Miranda Werner, violins
Katie Liu, viola
Amanda Chi, cello

Implex III.

Implex II.

Implex I.

Amer Hasan and Lloyd Van't Hoff, clarinets
Tianyi Shen, basset horn
Jonathan López, bass clarinet

--
Dedicated to Amer Hasan, Lloyd Van't Hoff, Tianyi Shen, and Jonathan Lopez. 

Catalogues do not go on forever. They are exhaustive, and then they end. Someone has decided, according to some conviction, upon a perimeter of boundaries, which are made known, and has cast off many more objects in order to present only the things which belong in the catalogue. Here, they say, I can promise you this. Only this, but nothing else.


Edition Breitkopf Nr. 3765 is a collection of Johann Sebastian Bach's Choralgesänge. On the back cover of the book are printed four sentences in German and English: "The present edition contains all the chorales by Johann Sebastian Bach with and without obbligato instruments. The greater part stems from Bach's cantatas, passions, oratorios, and motets. The only source for the remaining was the edition of four-part chorale hymns which Carl Philip Emanuel Bach published during the years 1784-1787. The chorales are listed alphabetically after the melody." These sentences are paraphrases, in modern German and English, taken from the preface written in 1912 by the editor, Bernhard Friedrich Richter. Richter's preface, which is printed at the start of the collection, is at pains to make transparent the decisions that went behind the inclusion of certain chorales ("Der einzige figurierte Choral, Nr. 199, "Weg, weg mit allen Schätzen", wurde wegen seiner Zusammengehörigkeit mit den übrigen Chorälen der Motette "Jesu meine Freude" aufgenommen, ebenso Nr. 259 "Nun danket alle Gott" trotz seiner übrigens kurzen Zwischenspiele wegen seiner bequemen Verwendbarkeit") as well as the people who made his labor easier (Johannes Zahn, Ludwig Erk). The verbose anxiety arising from his confrontation with finitude touched me.


What follows is a catalogue of all the ascending minor thirds between consecutive printed noteheads in each of the four or five voices printed in the Richter edition of Johann Sebastian Bach's Choralgesänge. Five-part chorales have been reduced to four voices by means of tremolos or consolidation (Nr. 198. "Jesu, meine Freude", Nr. 350. "Welt, ade! ich bin dein müde"). For the most part each ascending third, consisting of two notes, is lifted from its context, and the rest of the voices of the chorales are truncated according to the length of the two notes of the ascending minor third. In the rare cases when the occurence of one ascending third in one voice dovetails with an ascending third in another voice, these ascending minor thirds are kept together to avoid redundancy. 


My interest in the Bach chorales began last semester with the C.P.E. Bach collection, originally as an exercise in reading open scores of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass clef. I still love pitches, and the creativity with which Bach voices his chords and the little notes which facilitated chord changes sucked me in, and I began to catalogue in a little notebook his voice-leading "maneuvers" sorting by the intervals in the melody. When spliced and juxtaposed in this way, they seemed to follow a delightful direction within the rhythmic logic of free dissonance. The idea for this piece began to take over my life in the spring: what would it sound like if every ascending minor third in every voice would rise from the depths of the harmony in which it was embedded, and be experienced in turn? The clarinetists of David Shifrin's studio at Yale welcomed me with open arms my first year here and I wanted to give the piece to them.

Every ascending minor third in my Breitkopf Nr. 3765 book (Bach Chorales)

commissioned by Nadege Hottier and the Premiere Division ballet

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Commissioned by and premiered by Henry Ando.

Ando Triptych III. SK808

care (practice room version)

Forrest Eimold plays a piece with no pedal

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Katie Liu, viola
2024 Primrose International Viola Competition
Los Angeles, CA, USA

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Ezra Calvino & Yale Philharmonia
Woolsey Hall
December 12, 2024

emilyliushen

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