Title: Emanations of Tara
Commission: 2012
Completed: 2015
Instrumentation: clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, cello, piano, pipa
Premiere Location: March 15, 2015 in Evanston, IL
Premiere Ensemble: Civitas Ensemble and Yang Wei, pipa
Notes:

In works of various dimensions, YAO Chen seeks paths toward transcendence. His music, always ritual in nature, eschews contemporary vogues and instead aims at a timelessness and an otherness that exists beyond the standard categories—music for the moment, but also music for then and music for what lies ahead. Whether his work is brittle or forceful, or often both in coexistence, melancholy and a sense of wonder are recurring characteristics, as is an internationalist orientation grounded in a quest for maximal musical meaning. His perceptions on musical time, timbre, intonation, pulsation, and expression are always at frontiers: between the old and the new, between the East and the West, between irrational mysticism and rational logic. While devoting himself mainly to the field of contemporary art music, YAO also experiments with other genres, writing music for films and theatre productions. Cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary concepts permeate his creative inspiration and compositional output, presenting his understanding of the value of new music in enlivening global cultures.