Composer Yi-Ting Lu releases her debut album, An Unopened Seashell, a collection of five solo works that demonstrates her capacity for using musical materials to explore extra-musical phenomena. Featuring performances by bassoonist Ben Roidl-Ward, harpist Ben Melsky, pianist Lam Wong, saxophonist Thomas Giles, and guitarist Daniel Lippel, An Unopened Seashell is an exciting first release from a composer with a captivating balance between her management of development and structure, creative approach to instrumental writing, and a flair for expressive character.
# | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
---|---|---|---|---|
Total Time | 49:15 | |||
01 | Slimy Tracks | Slimy Tracks | Daniel Lippel, guitar | 9:23 |
02 | Taxidermy | Taxidermy | Ben Roidl-Ward, bassoon | 6:53 |
03 | Half Decorations | Half Decorations | Ben Melsky, harp | 10:48 |
04 | Sewing in Thin Air | Sewing in Thin Air | Lam Wong, piano | 7:51 |
05 | An Unopened Seashell | An Unopened Seashell | Thomas Giles, alto saxophone | 14:20 |
Yi Ting-Lu’s compositional voice is grounded in her observations; she contemplates scenes and experiences and extrapolates them into sound. She shares a deconstructive quality with the painter, seeing/hearing beneath the superficial presentation of an object to its obscured qualities. Complementing her creative observational bent is a finely cultivated discipline in how she develops ideas. Motives evolve in a transparent way that binds the composition together, supporting a cohesive structure even in the freest works.
Slimy Tracks for classical guitar, performed by Daniel Lippel, focuses not on the snail’s speed, or lack thereof, but instead on the tracks it leaves behind on the road. A radio tuned to white noise acts as the foundation from which the piece springs from and ultimately returns. Glissandi, with and without a bottleneck slide, tapping techniques, and pizzicato lend the work a fluid, tactile quality that evokes a small creature. The musical ideas in Slimy Tracks tend to undergo diminution over time, as Yi-Ting Lu compresses material after it has been introduced, interspersing it with other motives to intensify the texture as it heads towards structural arrivals.
Taxidermy for solo bassoon, performed by Ben Roidl-Ward, is the title work in a series of pieces that explore the instrument. The piece is oriented around linear passages that are interrupted by various timbral irregularities. In this way, Yi-Ting Lu establishes a duality between the conventional persona of the bassoon and a darker alter-ego that is steadily infiltrating and imposing its will. As the structure enfolds, the alter-ego comes to the fore as the primary character, painting with a rough, multihued brush.
Half Decorations for harp, played by Ben Melsky, opens with a delicate, tinkling texture (the byproduct of playing the high strings with harp tuning keys) accompanied by airy harmonics. An assertive moto perpetuo figure emerges with accented bursts that increase in frequency, and expand in register. A rhythmically free section follows, establishing a counterpoint between obscured pitches played on prepared strings and the resultant non-pitched artifacts from the preparations. By allowing the sonic vocabulary to include these textures, Lu brings our attention to the physicality of the harp itself, the strings, the soundboard, and the mechanics of sound production. In performances, the harp is decorated by Christmas ornaments steadily throughout the piece, adding a theatrical element.
Yi-Ting Lu studied piano as a child. The process of composing Sewing in Thin Air brought memories back of her school days growing up in Taiwan, and specifically her father’s patient sewing of her school uniform. One can hear the threads in the repeated ostinato figure in the right hand in the piece’s opening, and the way in which it is interwoven with the contrasting line in the middle register. A flowing moderato section follows, in which an implied melody emerges from subtle accents that pop out of the regular texture. Brilliant arpeggio figures and ornamented scale bursts are pit against ominous low register tremolos, all primarily articulating one central harmony. Pianist Lam Wong is heard on this recording.
In An Unopened Seashell, performed by Thomas Giles, Yi-Ting Lu imagines the sound world inside of a seashell, using fragile extended techniques on the saxophone to conjure this unique resonant space. Breath is at the core of the work, specifically notating inhalation and exhalation sounds and inviting the listener inside the respiration process of the performer. Subtle slap tongueing, altissimo, and multiphonics are combined in modular cells that embody the breathless quality of trying to express an idea faster than one can get the words out. Contrast is achieved through extroverted music that boils over the simmering surface of the prevailing delicate texture that has been established. The work closes with an extended passage of elemental breaths, a poignant moment of collective ritual.
These five solo pieces offer an excellent introduction to Yi-Ting Lu’s craft, as we listen to her approach to timbre and gesture under the microscope of the limitations of a single instrument. There is an understated joy in how she expresses phenomenon in sound, never hitting the listener over the head with the “program” of the music, but instead subtly engaging with it as a catalyst for sophisticated play.
— Dan Lippel
Executive producers: Yi-Ting Lu and Daniel Lippel
Recording engineers: Ryan Streber (#1 and #5), Dan Nichols (#2 and #3), Frank McKearn IV (#4)
Recording locations: Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, NY, 2023 (#1 and #5); Northwestern University Galvin Recital Hall, Evanston, IL, 2023 (#2 and #3); Northwestern University Regenstein Master Class Room, Evanston, IL, 2023 (#4)
Session producers: Daniel Lippel/Ryan Streber/Yi-Ting Lu (#1), Ryan Streber/ Yi-Ting Lu (#5), Yi-Ting Lu (all other tracks)
Editing producers: Daniel Lippel/Yi-Ting Lu (#1), Ben Roidl-Ward/Yi-Ting Lu (#2), Yi-Ting Lu (all other tracks)
Editing, mixing, and mastering: Ryan Streber and Charles Mueller, Oktaven Audio
Design and layout: Ray Weng
Photography: Ian Liu
Yi-Ting Lu, born and raised in Taiwan and currently based in Chicago, is a composer whose works often reflect and reshape live scenes or experiences through fragmented acoustic sounds. Concepts of transcultural exchanges and collectivity can be discovered
within her compositions.
She is a recipient of the Carl Kanter Prize for orchestral composition, the William T. Faricy Award for creative music, Nief-Norf Summer Festival International Call for Score Winner, and Transient Canvas Composition Fellowship. Other honors include being chosen as a representative of Taiwan at the 66th International Rostrum of Composers in Argentina, recognized for honorable mention at the DeGaetano Composition Institute, and selected as a finalist in the Talea Ensemble Emerging Composer Commissioning Program, National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra Competition, and the Young Composers’ Competition of Rudolph Award. Her work has also been the 2019 Ilsuono Contemporary Music Academy’s Choice to be published by AltrEdizioni Casa Editrice.
Her music has been featured in Time:Span Festival (USA), Gaudeamus Festival (NL), Ilsuono Contemporary Music Academy (IT), Musiikin Aiko Time of Music (FI), Musikinstitut Darmstadt (GR), Sound of Wander (IT), Voix Nouvelles Academy in Royaumont (FR), International Double Reed Society (USA), Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium (TL), Nanhua Ethnomusicology International Symposium (TW), Asian Classical Music Initiative Conference (USA), and others; has been performed, and/or commissioned by the Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Suono Giallo, Ensemble vocal Les Métaboles, Ensemble Mise-en, Mdi Ensemble, Mivos Quartet, Orkest De Ereprijs, PushBack Collective, Quatuor Tana, Yarn/Wire, 3 People Music, Clarinetist Vasko Dukovski, MSM Orchestra (under the baton of George Manahan), National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, among others.
Yi-Ting is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in composition and music technology at Northwestern University under the tutelage of Hans Thomalla, Jay Alan Yim, and Alex Mincek. She completed a Master’s degree in Music Composition at Manhattan School of Music, where she studied with Reiko Füting and Susan Botti. Prior to her graduate studies in the United States, she studied with Tsung-Hsien Yang and Wan-Jen Huang and received her Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition and Theory at Taipei National University of the Arts.
https://www.yitinglu.meOne way to ensure different sounds in works for a single instrument is to create pieces for different single instruments, which is what Yi-Ting Lu (born 1993) has done for a New Focus Recordings release featuring five pieces for soloists. Although this disc, at 49 minutes, is even shorter than Zhang’s, it does have the advantage of a variegated sound world – although it also has longer pieces that do not necessarily stand up well from start to finish. Slimy Tracks for guitar does not sound like guitar music: white noise from a radio underlies the kinds of percussive elements of which avant-garde composers are fond, including tappings and pizzicati – the idea is to evoke the track of a snail, although that connection is far from evident. Taxidermy is for bassoon and turns the instrument into an electronic amplification of itself, with a series of irregular self-interruptions on top of amplified note sequences. Half Decorations, for harp, starts with what sounds like an evocation of birdsong from the instrument’s highest strings, then continues with individual, clear notes interspersed with ones on prepared strings that therefore do not sound particularly harplike – one of Lu’s primary interests appears to be in figuring out what individual instruments sound like and then doing what is necessary to make them sound like something else. Sewing in Thin Air for piano, however, does allow the piano to sound like the keyboard percussion instrument that it is – although as the work’s title indicates, part of the piece is designed to replicate the sound of a sewing machine. An Unopened Seashell, for alto saxophone and the longest piece on the disc, returns to Lu’s approach of using an instrument’s inbuilt sound world to produce something aurally different. The idea here is to draw attention to the techniques – some typical, some extended – used in playing the sax, all while producing a kind of sound cloud representing what Lu imagines the inner world of a seashell must be like. Whether or not that is accurate is beside the point: the focus is on extending the natural sound production of the alto saxophone into new realms and in so doing to pull listeners into those environments. Like much contemporary music, Lu’s works make no attempt to reach out to audiences beyond those that already gravitate to new ways of hearing instruments and experiencing the extension of those instruments’ capabilities. Certainly for a narrow audience, these five pieces will provide some interesting aural experiences with material that may not strictly qualify as music in the traditional sense, but that is intended to engage the ears of listeners who are strongly inclined to want to hear beyond instruments’ typical ranges and methods of sound production.
— Mark Estren, 6.06.2024
Like Luciano Berio with his Sequenza series, Yi-Ting focuses on the possibilities of individual instruments in this first collection. However, there’s less of Berio’s cataloging approach (admittedly part of the charm of the Sequenzas) and more of a sense of an intuitive attraction to the guitar (Dan Lippel), bassoon (Ben Roidl-Ward), harp (Ben Melsky), piano (Lam Wong), and saxophone (Thomas Giles) as featured here. Everyone contributes incredible performances, addressing Yi-Ting’s challenges flawlessly and with flair.
— Jeremy Shatan, 6.10.2024
An album consisting entirely of works for solo instruments poses some issues before listening begins. New Music composers seem to be inordinately attracted to the genre, using it as an opportunity to explore the limits, technical and expressive, of the chosen instrument. The process of finding new sounds is creative for the composer and fun for the performer, but the listener, who should be part of the equation, is left out too often. Self-involvement is a chronic issue in New Music, but even if you grant the young Taiwanese composer Yi-Ting Lu her own personal aesthetic, which is only fair, something must be communicated that is enjoyable and meaningful.
I know I’m veering into the didactic, and I hasten to say that Yi-Ting, who received her master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music and is currently pursuing her doctorate in Chicago at Northwestern University, has several things going for her. She applies considerable imagination in devising these five works for guitar, bassoon, harp, piano, and alto saxophone. The performances are expert and totally involved. There is an intriguing hint of cross-cultural influences from traditional Chinese music, even if these hints are generally evanescent and obscure.
We start off strong with Slimy Tracks for guitar. The semi-repellent title doesn’t inhibit the composer in her program notes, who writes that the piece draws inspiration (?) from “the distinct textured and colors of tracks left by various types of snails.” To a small extent I can see some interest in snail tracks when they are iridescent, but this is a good place to warn that Yi-Ting chooses titles and descriptions that, for me at least, have close to nothing to do with the music, a common trait in New Music.
This is connected with another trait: New Music typically departs from common identifiable emotions, which is a problem for the general listener. Slimy Tracks has the guitarist, the eminently skillful Dan Lippel, combining taps and raps on the case, glissandos, and strumming to create the texture of the piece. I can detect no structural or thematic features, so it is a testament to Yi-Ting’s imagination and Lippel’s bravura performance that the music is always compelling on its own terms, the major effect deriving from a wide range of dynamics and moods that extend from the delicate to the raucous. The ear is captivated even when the meaning of these sounds remains opaque.
The notes make no attempt to explain why Yi-Ting’s solo bassoon piece is titled Taxidermy (just as well), part of a series of works she is composing for the instrument. As usual in New Music bassoon pieces, overtones and multiphonics are employed, along with fuzzy and blurry tones, to add interest. In the absence of linear progression, what sounds like a random scramble has been organized in the composer’s mind—here the scheme is obscurely related to opening and closing the holds on the bassoon—while leaving the listener in the dark. Yi-Ting adds tapping and scraping on the bassoon’s shell for variety. As an incentive, the performance by Ben Roidl-Ward is thoroughly engaging. Individual reactions will vary, naturally, but I heard enough imagination in the piece to hold my attention, however baffling the actual panoply of strange sounds. The image that comes to mind is of a chuffing choo-choo train running into very rough tracks, which steadily demolish it.
The other piece restricted to a single line is the title track, An Unopened Seashell, for alto saxophone, the title for once being relevant to the music: “By metaphorically ‘opening’ an ‘unopened seashell,’ this piece experiments with the use of breath … introducing a variety of harmonics and multiphonics.” The music is as good as its word—we hear hushed breathing and ethereal harmonics that vaguely evoke the sea. There is a sense overall of fleeting yips and disconnected fragments, along with occasional harsh outbursts. Saxophonist Thomas Giles conveys every gesture vividly, and he is fearless in the face of the score’s sonic complexity. Yi-Ting’s imagination for novel effects, which I’ve been repeatedly praising, is just as effective here.
Making a harp sound new or strange would seem to be difficult. Yi-Ting’s attempts, in Half Decorations, are ingenious if esoteric. The most typical harp technique, the sweeping glissando, is sparingly employed compared with repetitive single notes and faint harmonics. Some effects are harsh and ballistic, which is at odds with the harp’s celestial personality. I wonder if the courageous and virtuosic performer, Ben Melsky, enjoyed taking the instrument into such forbidding terrain. The description by the composer that the music alternates stasis with movement, stillness with disruption ,is a helpful, but I have no idea what is meant by “the imagery of the harpist decorating the instrument.”
Finally, Sewing in Thin Air for piano is evocatively titled, and stretches of rapid constant passagework could be viewed as sewing. Here Yi-Ting faces a major challenge because of the piano’s vast contemporary repertoire. Much reliance is placed on single isolated notes along with simple repetitive figures in the left hand. In keeping with Minimalist practice, the dynamic level is often static. There are also scale passages and other familiar keyboard gestures, all enthusiastically handled by pianist Lam Wong, but for me, the result is unmemorable. Deprived of her ear for unusual instrumental sounds, Yi-Ting puts the piano through very familiar paces in which I heard little originality or personal expression. This is a case where leaving the listener out has serious consequences.
Yi-Ting’s bio lists a number of prizes, and as her career unfolds, she has a chance to join the elite among New Music composers. That is hard to judge in repertoire restricted to solo instruments, and for many general listeners, the drawbacks I began with might be decisive. Yet as a showcase for one strong suit in Yi-Ting’s abilities, her ear for instrumental color, this release is valuable and well worth a listen.
Four stars: A worthy New Music exploration of exotic instrumental sounds
— Huntley Dent, 6.30.2024
I’ve never understood what I’m supposed to do at the beach. Should I swim and embrace frivolity? Should I immerse myself in the beauty of light and sound? Or should I just ‘relax’—whatever on earth that means? I end up swinging back and forth between all the available possibilities, and what I take away is inevitably odd; not the memory of a dazzling sunset, but rather the indelible image of a dying shorebird.
This is the way in which Yi-Ting Lu’s An Unopened Seashell is oceanic. It’s not pretty in a cliched way, like some JMW Turner painting of an open sky. Nor is it bombastic, drowning the listener in swells and waves. Instead, it’s delicate, fickle, and surprising. It demands attention and an open mind from the listener.
Lu is a Chicago-based composer, originally trained in Taiwan, now a graduate student at Northwestern University. Her debut album contains five solo works that echo and recall one another, as the bounds of each instrument are pushed and the lines between them blurred. There are times in Half Decorations where the timbre of the harp is flattened so much that its twang becomes almost indistinguishable from that of the guitar we heard two pieces prior. Later on in Sewing in Thin Air, we hear the drumroll repetition of a single, high piano key; the speed and pitch are intensely reminiscent of an earlier harp tremolo.
Slimy Tracks, featuring Dan Lippel on guitar, opens quietly as three ethereal notes chime us in. Throughout the first half of the work, it seems like a melody is trying to break through, but it is thoroughly masked by unceasing glissandos that span huge intervals, which give the piece a dizzying and almost psychedelic air. Halfway through, Lu abandons the swing-set sound for delicate finger-picking runs, which culminate in a furious burst – making Lippel’s technical virtuosity clear.
This rapid, percussive drill transitions seamlessly into Taxidermy. Here, Ben Roidl-Ward plays the bassoon in a lonely, haunting fashion; you can almost hear a foghorn blaring through the mist. As the piece progresses, we hear more and more of Roidl-Wold’s breathing, lending a power and tension to the work that is reinforced by accelerating atonality.
When performed live, the harp soloist for Half Decorations is supposed to add Christmas ornaments to their instrument one-by-one. In the absence of this lovely visual, what instead captures the listener on this recording is the run of minor second intervals. Harpist Ben Melsky acts as a self-contained ensemble in this piece; the lower notes sound like an accompanying piano, while the intermittent percussive slaps of the strings add rhythmic layering.
Sewing In Thin Air opens with pianist Lam Wong playing on the keyboard’s highest octave, where the sound is so taut it may as well be a plucked harp. Wong plays loosely, as though wondering where he is going, leaving the audience, too, unmoored at times. But the piece closes with a determined fury: the waves were teasing and playful, earlier, but now the tide is rushing in.
The work is supposed to evoke Lu’s memories of her father, who patiently sewed her school uniforms when she was a young girl growing up in Taiwan. The memory is warm, but the piece itself is cold and metallic; the pianist’s articulation is almost clanging. The music conjures sharp, bright, tangy imagery that ultimately feels at odds with the inspiration behind the piece.
As someone who also fondly recalls her father’s at-home tailoring, I found the discrepancy jarring. This disconnect between programmatic intent and the listening experience persists throughout the album: the compelling track titles and detailed liner notes often get lost in transmission. Lu creates vivid imagery, but you’re left with the sense that she isn’t always painting the picture she meant to.
The final and titular track, An Unopened Seashell, features Thomas Giles on alto saxophone. Heavy gasping is interspersed with virtuosic play. Giles’ quiet shrieks and loud taps evoke an interior ecosystem: maybe the inner world of a seashell, but maybe also crickets in a forest, birds on a seashore, or an unoiled motor on a small, faraway fishing boat.
Towards the end, we hear less and less ‘music,’ and more and more ‘breath,’ as though the sea is settling in for the night. The compositions on An Unopened Seashell are coherent and thoughtful intellectual exercises, but unfortunately, the experimental techniques often lose their novelty after a few minutes. The album would benefit from a demonstration of a wider array of Lu’s potential creativity: more melodic grounding, perhaps, or stronger rhythmic centering. Still, the listener can’t fail to be impressed by Lu’s technical mastery: her knowledge of each instruments’ potential and capacity alone is extraordinary for a young composer. Knowing that Lu has the chops to shine, listeners can anticipate her next album with curiosity and hope. Her potential seems limitless, even as the sea.
— Thulasi Seshan, 8.26.2024