Creativity and Color – My views on the launch of I-Lin Tsai’s first album

The lines on the front cover of the album by I-Lin Tsai are both artistic and scientific. I have some experience in graphic design and when I reached out to her to let her know I’d be reviewing this album, I asked where she got the front cover designed. Smiling, she said, “I did it!” And I’d later find out that it was machine generated and then edited by her after. For me, this was a sign (even before listening to it) that her album would have elements of creativity, but also structure.

When downloading the album off of Apple Music and sitting in my foyer I expected the first piece to be ambient or almost meditative. The Image Book I by Claude Debussy starts off with a water-like texture low in the bass, but immediately I heard colors that were unexpected. They felt orange and pink with dark green, instead of the more predicted lavender and gray tones. The second movement was used as a reprieve from the rhapsodic approach to the opening. The use of rest was the most calming feature, dynamics were generally plain, but this could have been intentional. In the final movement, the stoic nature of the second movement caused the opening 8 bars to pop – again in hues of bright pink and orange. The tone in the final movement was never harsh, but did lean towards more acidic at times.

In the Suite for Piano Duet on Themes by JJ Lin, we got to hear how I-Lin Tsai performs as a chamber musician. For this arrangement that she created, she wrote it for fellow pianist Julian Toha and the two took this piece seriously. Originally a Chinese Pop Singer and Songwriter, JJ Lin writes love ballads and music that has velvety tunes and r&b-like harmonies. But in this arrangement, I-Lin shifted the tone to more of a classical ballad. The overall arc on the duet was, for me, one massive crescendo from start to finish. The two have chemistry as performers and are clearly complementary in approach. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this piece and look forward to more arrangements like this by I-Lin.

For the Bartok Sonatina – another three movement composition – I-Lin found a way to make it sound improvised or made up on the spot. Her stretching of the pulse and agogic placement of downbeats was very fitting to the genre of contemporary music and set the tone as a folk dance. In the Rachmaninov Duet and the Kapustin, I-Lin finished up with both a low and high to match the low and high of the first part of the album. Structurally, the album is short, but it has a clear plan of execution – be creative, free and pack the music with unpredictable colors.