Busy schedule: Musician Vienna Teng is pursuing her master's degree at the University of Michigan and performing when she can on weekends.THREE RIVERS — Since graduating from
Stanford University in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in computer
science, Vienna Teng
has worked for Cisco Systems, toured through the United States and
Europe and also has released six full-length albums, including
2009’s Inland Territory and a 2010 live album.
The classically trained pianist certainly enjoys where her life and her travels have taken her, though she often has one burning
question: why?
“I had come to this point where I wasn’t
sure what I wanted to say next as a songwriter. When you’re a full-time
recording
artist signed to a label (Rounder Records), it’s an amazing
opportunity but at the same time there are these expectations,”
she said.
Expectations that include an endless cycle of writing, recording and touring.
“I felt like I can do that, but I felt like I needed some time to figure out if I write a song why does it matter? Why do
I really care that it goes out in the world?” Teng said.
So the San Francisco native listened to
her heart and took a break from music, sort of. In the fall of 2010, she
enrolled
at the University of Michigan to earn a master’s degree in
sustainable enterprise, a field that looks to improve how people
and businesses interact with the environment. Teng had her eye on
U-M since performing at the 2005 Ann Arbor Folk Festival,
a show Teng called “an amazing, amazing experience.”
If you go
Vienna Teng
What:
San Francisco/Ann Arbor-based pianist and songwriter
When:
7:30 p.m. Friday
Where:
The Riviera Theatre, 50 N. Main St., Three Rivers
Cost:
$12 in advance, $15 day of show
Contact:
269-278-8068, www.trriviera.com
Connect
“I’ve gotten to open for some other artists before like Joan Baez and Shawn Colvin and folks like that, but that was the first
one where I was a part of a festival lineup. I was on stage with The Blind Boys of Alabama, the Indigo Girls and all these
other amazing artists. I was pretty much star-struck the entire time,” Teng said.
She may have been in awe of her stage mates that night, but it was the audience that really got her attention.
“Michigan actually has the greatest singing audiences that I’ve ever had, just really friendly, very down to earth people,”
she said.
Teng mentioned the people she has met in her tours through the state helped to make her move to the Midwest an easy one, that
and the pull she had been feeling to further her education.
“Every time I came through Michigan I tried to stop in and attend a seminar or sit in on a class or something like that, it
was kind of a long time coming when I finally arrived here last August,” Teng said.
Teng has called herself a professional musician for more than a decade and has found it difficult to fully separate herself
from that existence
“Music is actually the day job that’s
paying for school,” Teng said with a laugh, also mentioning that she
spent her spring
break on a tour of the East Coast. “It’s just going to be a
balancing act, sometimes there won’t be time for music and sometimes
music will be a main priority.”
So far, Teng has done a masterful job
balancing the rigors of both a graduate degree and being an in-demand
performer. Touring
only on the weekends has allowed her to focus solely on her
studies during the week. Her abbreviated tour schedule will translate
into three Michigan shows during the course of her spring semester
at U-M: a performance at the East Lansing Folk Festival
in May; a Calvin College show in Grand Rapids on April 9 and
Friday night’s stop at the Riviera Theatre in Three Rivers.
“I really love the ability to kind of shift and move between two worlds because they really are very different. I kind of
missed school when I was touring and performing all the time,” Teng said.
Teng plans to finish her program in 2013 and hopes to use her degree “to make myself useful.”
So what of her internal question, what of her desire to know why? Why continue playing music?
“I think the only answer to that is music compels you. There’s something that has to be said and it finds a way, one way or
the other,” Teng said.