History Music / ViennaTeng

** Also see ''Between''. Beautiful waltz that a friend of Vienna's was planning to use at her wedding until Vienna pointed out the song's [[TriangRelations meaning]].

* TriangRelations: One [[ShrugOfGod possible]] interpretation of ''Between''.

* MotherEarth: Narrates "Never Look Away". [[spoiler:[[DownerEnding And apparently ''dies'' at the end of it.]]]]

Vienna Teng (born Cynthia Yih Shih in 1978) is a UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco Bay Area singer/songwriter who works in a style she likes to call chamber-folk. A classically trained pianist, she left a job at Cisco Systems to write and record music full-time. She has taken to touring in the past few years, often accompanied by professional percussionist Alex Wong, who co-produced ''Inland Territory'' with her.

* BerlinWall: ''St. Stephen's Cross'' is set the night of the fall.

She provides examples of:

** "''The Breaking Light'' has become a subtler example of this, with the audience joining in on the background vocal part at the climax of the song.

* SpokenWordInMusic:

** ''St. Stephen's Cross'' has very lumpy time signatures, featuring 9-beat melodic phrases complicated by
drums that plod along at their own steady 4 beats a measure and a dropped beat or two in key spots, and a relatively subtle shift to 6/8 in the instrumental sections.

* AfterTheEnd: ''Enough to Go By'', through WordOfGod.
* AllDrummersAreAnimals: When introducing "Antebellum" on the live album, Vienna mentions Alex drooling over the arrangement, which Alex notes is a very clichéd thing for a drummer to do.

-->''And she dreams through the noise, her weight against me.''

* AmazingFreakingGrace: The penultimate line of "Recessional" is "oh words like rain, how sweet the sound," sung almost exactly to the familiar tune.

* AudienceParticipationSong: ''Enough to Go By'' was supposed to be, before Vienna realized that audiences do not have eidetic memories. ''Soon Love Soon'' is her more successful attempt at this.
** Grandmother Song is her most recent example, since Vienna tends to let the audience clap the beat for her. She also invites them to hoot, holler, and make other raucous interjections.
** "The Breaking Light" has become a subtler example of this, with the audience joining in on the background vocal part at the climax of the song.
* BawdySong: Subverted in ''1BR/1BA'', in that the narrator is none too happy about the bawdiness.
* BewareTheNiceOnes: [[spoiler:''Whatever You Want'']] is built entirely around this trope.

** Quite hilariously, one of the string players decides to do an impression of TheImmodestOrgasm right between those two lines.

* [[EducationMama Education Grandmama]]: ''Grandmother Song'', as every 2nd-gen Asian immigrant kid can relate, although the song gives damn good reason.
* EmotionlessGirl: The above-mentioned "I Don't Feel So Well."
* FadingIntoTheNextSong: "Shasta" into "Homecoming" on ''Warm Strangers''.

* GoodGirlsAvoidAbortion: Played with ambiguously in ''Shasta''.
* IntercourseWithYou: "Momentum". Vienna noted this at a concert once after sharing with the audience that a publication reviewing her first album had described it as "Music to get you into a woman's pants."

* MotorMouth: The verses of ''In the 99'' fly by so quickly, and are buried under so much instrumentation that they're difficult to understand without a lyric sheet.

* PersecutionFlip: ''No Gringo''.
* PosthumousNarration: ''Passage''.

* SelfBackingVocalist: Done via live looping during the ''Inland Territory'' era, most notably "The Last Snowfall".
** Used to extremely creepy effect in ''The Hymn of Acxiom''. She introduces it as her "Vienna Girls' Choir."

* SorryImGay: The back story of [[spoiler:''Unwritten Letter #1'']]

* StalkerWithACrush: On the live album, Vienna personifies "The Tower" as a finicky woman who will only agree to be part of the setlist when Alex is part of the gig, because "The Tower has a crush on Alex".

* SurvivalMantra: Two in "Radio": ''It's just the radio, darling, just the radio'' and ''We are not some Third World country... This is not some Third World country...''

* UncommonTime: ''Harbor'', which she wrote for her boyfriend, a drummer who loves uneven time signatures.
** Also notable in her devilishly difficult [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSK3DRVEqBE ''Signal Fire'']].
** ''The Last Snowfall'' too.
** ''St. Stephen's Cross'' has very lumpy time signatures, complicated by the fact that the drum track seems to be at half the tempo of the rest of the song.
** ''Level Up'' applies this to a upbeat, electronic dance music.
** ''Close to Home'' toys with this as well.

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Vienna_Teng_vienna7.png

Vienna Teng (born Cynthia Yih Shih in 1978) is a SanFrancisco Bay Area singer/songwriter who works in a style she likes to call chamber-folk. A classically trained pianist, she left a job at Cisco Systems to write and record music full-time. She has taken to touring in the past few years, often accompanied by professional percussionist Alex Wong, who co-produced ''Inland Territory'' with her.

** Used to extremely creepy effect in ''The Hymn of Acxiom''.