Subconscious for Wind Quintet (2021)

Earplay's performance of "Piano Trio" by Reynold Tharp on 5/19/2014 at ODC Theater, San Francisco as performed by Terrie Baune, Thalia Moore, and Karen Rosenak and recorded by Ian D. Thomas, copyright 2014 by Earplay, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
				

My Piano Trio was written from December 2013 to March 2014 for Earplay.  As in several other recent pieces of mine, the overall shape or flow of the piece is hopefully clearly articulated within a continuous single movement.  Unlike my other music, however, which typically bears programmatic or poetic titles, in this instance I fell back on a simple generic title.  Nevertheless, the trio still relies on the narrative and dramatic impulses that drive all my music, and evocative or atmospheric qualities (to me, at least) are hardly absent.  In particular, I imagined the slowly changing scales of the opening, with their uneasy rhythmic fluidity, as the slow surging of ocean tides.  These waves return in different incarnations across the fourteen-minute span of the piece, and are also gradually transformed into contrasting ideas--one faster and more rhythmically driven, one playful with its bouncing echoes, and a last one more darkly lyrical.  The trio was premiered by members of Earplay (violinist Terrie Baune, cellist Thalia Moore, and pianist Karen Rosenak) in San Francisco in May 2014.


							


Piano Trio (2014)

Composed as part of the L.A. based Lyris Quartet's 2015 "Intimate Letters" commission/recording project. I imagined that if a letter is meant to be read, then music is meant to be heard. In this is 10-11 minute piece for string quartet, all the twists and turns that instigate change are begun by the second violin and viola...the first violin and cello have no option but to oblige and follow suit.

inside voice for string quartet (2015)

Illinois Modern Ensemble, Stephen Taylor, conductor.  8 February 2017.
Sonic Illinois Festival, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.

Cold Horizon, for chamber orchestra, grew out of a piece for vibraphone and piano entitled Cold, which I wrote in Paris in January 2001.  The basic musical ideas and icy, shimmering instrumental colors of Cold have been stretched out into a supple, continuously flowing, and dramatic form, and colored as if seen at twilight under a fading and distant light.  

In a sense, Cold Horizon explores resonance as a model or metaphor for developing musical gestures and forms.  Often resonance is used to create a sense of perspective, reminding us that music takes place not only in time but also in space. Musical lines that are slightly out of alignment shadow each other as they seem to echo in a reverberant space.  Similarly, rhythmic processes and subtle changes of orchestration create the illusion of musical gestures that approach or recede.  The opening of the piece, a quasi-Doppler effect, is one example.  Another typical idea is the filtering of complex harmonies into simple intervals, floating points of stability that form a thread of consonance woven across the span of the piece.  The use of quarter tones blurs the line between harmony and instrumental timbres to create a sense of depth and shadow against the well-tempered, “normal” pitches.

Cold Horizon has passed through a series of incarnations, beginning with an initial sketch premiered in 2002 by the Orchestre Lyrique de Région Avignon-Provence under Sylvio Gualda at the Centre Acanthes contemporary music festival in France.  The complete piece was premiered in 2003 by the University of California, Berkeley Symphony conducted by David Milnes, followed by a revised and expanded version performed by the Minnesota Orchestra at their Composer Institute in 2006 with David Alan Miller.  I revised the piece one last time in early 2017 for this performance, making some minor adjustments to its pacing, clarifying the orchestration and several harmonic details, and pruning back some pretentious complexity in the notation.

Tensegrity for Piano and Electronics (2020)

Ian Yeonchan Chung

Related tracks