Chung-Yuan Yu: Wende (Twist)

Chung-Yuan Yu (b. 1984 in Taipei) has been awarded in numerous musical composition competitions. His compositions have been performed by outstanding musicians and ensembles such as Ensemble SurPlus, Formalist Quartet, Reborn-the Voice of Suka, Taiwan Philharmonic Orchestra, National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, Taipei Chinese Orchestra, the Little Giant Chinese Orchestra, Taipei Chamber Singers, and the Unique Atayal College. Yu began studying composition at the age of 13 with Ms. Yi-Chun Tung. In 2007 he obtained the bachelor degree of National Taiwan Normal University, where he studied composition with Prof. Gordon Shi-Wen Chin. From 2010 to 2015, he studied at the Universität der Künste Berlin (University of Art Berlin) with Prof. Walter Zimmermann, Anton Safronov, Marc Sabat, and graduated from the Meisterschule. In January 2019 he participated in the 4^th Qigang Chen’s Musik Workshop in Gonggeng College, Zhejiang, China. To seek the personal music languages from his own cultural gene and to react his personal taste of sound, in recent years this Taiwanese young composer has been converting voice elements of Taiwanese and Chinese traditional music into his compositional techniques, and has composed numeral music works in different settings, such as While the Wind Suddenly Rises for string quartet (2014/15), Encounter for Chinese and Polish traditional instruments (2018), Song Valley for symphonic orchestra (2019), Mei-Luo for mixed choir (2020), and the work featured here, Wende for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord (2020). Since 2016 Chung-Yuan Yu has been serving as associate professor of composition and music theory at Quanzhou Normal University in Fujian province, China.

Yu’s 2020 quartet has a neutral name: Wende (Twist). The “twist” might come from the voice style of Nan-Guan. This traditional Chinese music genre has a sharp impulse, which, through strong twists, draws the audience’s hearing into the abyss of intensity, and establishes an important element of the quartet.The feeling “twist” might also be given by these four instruments. Personally, the instrumental setting of this quartet always implies “bumpy”: unbalanced; imperfect; and subtly, always “too weak”. This is why the heterophonic texture appears throughout in this piece, and makes the sound and lines between the four voices always “irregular” and somewhat “confusing”.The uncertainty and pessimism in my heart, which originates from the personal observation to the politic and society, are also represented in this piece and imply another meaning of “Wende”. In recent years my compositions have always been fascinated by a kind of narrative action: after approaching the climax, the boisterous party disappears unnoticeably, and the final scene of the story, which gets lost in the wind, is formed in a fragmented song, unbalancedly, imperfectly, without answer.A story, which is ended before perfection, may probably be a respectful metaphor of the reality of the life.