Melissa Evans Tierra Premieres Yifan Guo's Assembled Diary

It's not every day a score asks a performer to compose and play a one-to-two-minute classical cadenza, improvise a collection of sounds on an X/Y pad alongside a percussionist, or simply "play like a child." For Melissa Evans Tierra, that was just part of the assignment when she was asked to premiere Assembled Diary, a new work by composer Yifan Guo, on top of a passage of triplet sixteenth notes at 157 beats per minute that alternates which note value carries the beat.

She admits it turned out to be more than she bargained for, but the piece's creativity made the challenge worth it.

About the Composer

Yifan Guo is a Chinese composer, performer, and intermedia artist whose works have been performed around the world. His honors include the Prix Marion Tournon Branly, the Carl Schachter Award, and the Ise-Shima International Composition Prize. He holds a bachelor's degree from Mannes and a master's degree from the New England Conservatory, and is currently completing his doctorate at UCSD.

About the Piece

Assembled Diary is built from the fragmented memories Guo carries of time spent with his grandfather as a child: practicing piano, watching TV together, playing backgammon, the phone ringing. It's scored for a small conducted ensemble, a pianist, a videographer, and the composer himself, who performs as the grandfather.

Because the pianist faces away from the ensemble, and the video needs to stay in sync with the music, Melissa and the conductor performed to a click track, taking their cues from a monitor in their ears. What struck her most was how precisely Guo captured the sound of memory itself, the way distorted ideas and fragments surface in dreams or half-remembered moments.

The passage before the cadenza quotes the second movement of Clementi's Sonatina No. 3, a piece familiar to piano students everywhere. Melissa built the cadenza herself: starting with arpeggios and a scale leading into the first movement's theme, then taking the second movement's main theme and turning it minor, layering in classical patterns, sequences, and more arpeggios, before closing with a standard set of trills. Her father-in-law, hearing it, assumed it was Mozart.

Watch the premiere here: Assembled Diary