Teng quit her Cisco Systems job, taking a 50 percent pay cut, and embarked on a schedule of nationwide touring. He flew to see her perform in Mountain View, California, signed Teng to his new Seattle-based Virt Records label, and released Waking Hour in late 2002. " Asian Americans do come out to my shows in numbers that the promoters say they've never seen before." She added a Taiwanese folk song called "The Green Island Serenade" to her shows, and included it as a hidden track at the end of her second album, Warm Strangers.Įntrepreneur Michael Tarlowe, a former financial analyst bitten by the music bug, heard one of Teng's recordings on the Web.
"I didn't want to be billed as an Asian-American artist, but it is undeniable," Teng conceded to Jon Bream of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Asian Americans, too, flocked to her shows. Her songs, mostly romantic or narrative pieces drawn from her life at Stanford, resonated with young audiences. She moved into an apartment in San Francisco's up-and-coming Mission District.
Dr who never look away vienna teng free#
Miller helped Teng develop a website, and she began putting files on free mp3 distribution websites. The early version of Waking Hour that she offered for sale found a thousand enthusiastic buyers over the course of a year, and she began to focus on developing her musical career. She started performing at parties and coffee houses around the Bay Area.
Dr who never look away vienna teng software#
An audio engineering student named Eric Miller recorded some of her songs for a class project, and Teng developed the nucleus of what became her first CD, Waking Hour.Īfter graduating from Stanford in 2000, Teng got a job as a software engineer at computer giant Cisco Systems and started taking classical voice lessons, "which amounted to paying $40 a week to be told that I was doing it all wrong," she said in an interview posted on her website. She switched her major, not to music, but to computer science, "a good way to save money for the music," she told Liu. But I realized music was another way to achieve the same effect." Teng began performing in her Stanford dorm, which had a piano, and friends encouraged her to get serious about music, distributing mp3 copies of her songs around campus. I really love affecting people in a deep and personal way. "I realized that I was not meant to be a doctor," she told Liu.
That decision brought Teng to a crisis point. After graduating from high school and enrolling at Stanford, however, she decided on a pre-med program. She also began writing popular songs at age 10, and two songs she wrote while a student at Saratoga High School later showed up on her debut album, Waking Hour. Teng was a talented pianist, and for a while she dreamed of a concert career. Her parents "didn't force it on me at all, and they never scolded me into practicing," she told Marian Liu of the San Jose Mercury News. Many Chinese-American parents in California require piano studies of their children, but Teng asked for them on her own after trying out pianos at the houses of family friends. Piano lessons also helped push Teng in the direction of a musical career. "It was a tradition that was taken with the poetry of words and with the idea that lyrics should say something." "It was sophisticated stuff-'You read your Emily Dickinson and I, my Robert Frost,'-that's not simple English," Teng recalled to Joel Selvin of the San Francisco Chronicle. She got some early exposure to the art of the singer-songwriter when her parents started listening to records by Carole King, James Taylor, and Simon & Garfunkel in order to improve their English skills. Teng's parents, natives of Taiwan, came to California to work in the San Francisco Bay Area's technology industry. Vienna Teng is her stage name, taken at age 12 to honor the Austrian city that was home to classical composers Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms her birth name was Cynthia Shih. Teng was born in 1978 in San Jose, California. She has released two albums on the Seattle-based Virt label and has appeared on CNN, The Late Show with David Letterman, and National Public Radio's Weekend Edition. After her graduation from Stanford University, she caught the public's attention with her graceful, intricately accompanied original songs. Teng studied classical piano from age five until she finished high school. California-born singer-songwriter-pianist Vienna Teng has drawn numerous comparisons from journalists attempting to characterize her style-comparisons not only to other female singer-songwriters like Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos, but also to classical composer Fréderic Chopin.
0 kommentar(er)
