Yun Chang '19, piano

Advanced Music Performance Student Recital

March 24, 2017 | 03:00 pm

Free
March 24, 2017 | 03:00 pm

Emerson Fellow Yun Chang '19, piano, will perform Beethoven, Sonata in F major, Op. 54; Liszt-Mozart, Reminiscences of Don Juan; and Charles Shadle, A Tale of my Native Land.  Charles Shadle is Senior Lecturer in Music at MIT.  Yun Chang currently studies with David Deveau.
 

About Yun Chang
Yun was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1997; he moved to Honolulu, Hawaii during middle school, and is now a sophomore at MIT studying Aerospace engineering. Yun started playing the piano at age four and studied with Wei Qi Lin at the National Taiwan Normal University, entering numerous national piano competitions in Taiwan. After moving to Hawaii, Yun studied with Dr. Thomas Yee at the University of Hawaii and participated in competitions and performances around the islands. In 2015 he performed Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the Hawaii Youth Symphony and Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with the Punahou Symphony Orchestra. Yun is currently studying piano under David Deveau at MIT.
Yun will like to thank David Deveau for this year of music making and precious guidance; all the mentors throughout the years for their wisdom and knowledge; his family for their long distance encouragement and his friends for their support this year.
 

About Charles Shadle
Charles Shadle teaches composition, music theory, and music history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol0gy where he serves as a Senior Lecturer in Music and as Theory Coordinator. Numerous institutions, including SUNY Buffalo, Longwood Opera, The Lake George Opera Festival, The Handel and Haydn Society, The Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, The Newton Choral Society, the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, and Lontano(UK) have commissioned his work. For the National Film Preservation Foundation he has composed six film scores, all of which are available on DVD. A career-long focus on vocal music has resulted in commissions from such distinguished singers as Carlos Archuleta, Fernando Del Valle, Gale Fuller, Jason McStoots, Margaret O’Keefe, Stephen Salters, Frederick Urrey, and Jeremy Huw Williams. Dr. Shadle collaborated with MIT colleague and librettist Michael Ouellette on two operas, Coyotes Diner and A Question of Love, as well as the cantata, A New England Seasonal. Having previously served as Composer in Residence to the Ecclesia Consort in 2000, he held the same position with Intermezzo in 2007-08 during which tie he compose the critically acclaimed opera A Last Goodbye, again to a Ouellette libretto.

Major recent works include the song cycle Primordia for Baritone Jeremy Huw Williams, a Missa Brevis Sanctii Oswaldi for the Schola Cantorum of St Stephen’ Providence, and the Third Symphony for the MIT Symphony Orchesta. He received his Ph.D. in Composition and Theory from Brandeis University and counts among his teachers Cecil Effinger, Richard Toensing, Barbara Jazwinsky, Martin Boykan, Yehudi Wyner, Edward Cohen, Harold Shapero and Eloise Ristad. Dr. Shadle is enrolled Oklahoma Choctaw.

 

About a Tale of my Native Land (Ballade after Hawthorne)
Late in the spring of 2015 the gifted MIT student-pianist Yun Chang appeared at my office. It seems that he was taken with my Nocturne: On the River, recently performed by the MIT Symphony Orchestra. Did I have any pieces for solo piano, about 10 minutes long? I told him that I would check to see. But as I suspected, everything I had was either too long (a pair a big sonatas) or, frankly, too easy. So I decided to take the opportunity to write a substantial single movement work of some virtuosity for Yun. Completed in June, A Tale of My Native Land was the result.          

The title of the work derives from the “Seven Tales of My Native Land”, the lost first collection of stories by the young Nathaniel Hawthorne. When contemplating composing this piece I thought about the great Romantic single movement pieces of Chopin and Liszt, of Mendelssohn and Schumann. I particularly liked the idea of a composition that was implicitly, but not explicitly narrative; where the “tale” was a musical one, even if the material occasionally might suggest extra-musical elements.  In addition, a walk in the New Hampshire woods had me thinking about the nature of New England-ness, a quality I wanted the bring to the piece. Consequently, A Tale of My Native Land sometimes evokes fiddle-tune, folk-song, or Protestant hymnody. The final ingredient of the piece takes us back to Hawthorne, in that my Ballade seeks to duplicate some of that author’s sense of the uncanny. The supernatural, as part of the Puritan legacy of deep anxiety about the spiritual world, invariably informs Hawthorne’s work. Often it can be quite oppressive, quite dark. But sometimes in manifests in a wistful fancifulness that I find compelling and that I believe informs A Tale of My Native Land. Certainly it is less “Young Goodman Brown” and more “Feathertop”. I hope that like that animated scarecrow it lurches on its way, by turns giddy or melancholy, but always leaving a little enchantment in its