Vienna Teng has played to sell-out crowds across the country and in Europe. She’s been featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition, The Late Show with David Letterman, and the top of Amazon’s music charts, building a devoted following across generations and continents. She is a former software engineer at Cisco Systems as well as a classically trained pianist. Now her pop-musical chops and highly original songs are bringing audiences captivating and thoughtful evenings of “indie chamber folk.”

In 2002, Vienna released her debut album, Walking Hour, which brought her international attention. Four albums followed, most recently Aims, which became the first album to win four Independent Music Awards. She has also composed the music for “The Fourth Messenger,” by playwright Tanya Shaffer, which premiered in 2013 and was a featured production in the 2017 New York Musical Theater Festival.

A computer science major and a nerd at heart, Vienna is as comfortable with spreadsheets as she is in the spotlight. She returned to academia in 2010 to study environmental sustainability, which led to a new career working on climate change, energy, and waste issues. She has also become a bonus parent to her partner’s two kids and in early 2020, welcomed a newborn addition to the family, just in time for pandemic lockdown.

“I learned a lot about what it means to hold two truths in your head at the same time, as the saying goes,” Vienna says of the period. “The situation can be dire and full of possibility. Both kindness and fierceness are so very necessary.”

She wondered: What if two songs with seemingly contradictory perspectives were written so they would “mashup” into a duet? The result is her song-pair “We’ve Got You”: one about serving as a beacon for one’s community, and the other about leaning on that community in one’s darkest hour. It’s some of the most intricate and impassioned songwriting she’s ever done. When she performs it on stage — solo, live-looping her voice, keyboards and percussion to layer the two songs together — the audience response is electric. “And there are so many ways for songs to be in dialogue with each other,” she notes. “I’d love to keep exploring that idea, hopefully in dialogue with other creators, too.”

Fittingly for a piece about reinvigoration and connection, “We’ve Got You” marks the start of a new chapter for Vienna, where her environmental and musical vocations converge. In 2022, she launched a “music x climate action” community on Patreon, combining monthly livestream shows and recording studio updates with Zoom climate action sessions, as well as working one-on-one with patrons on their own climate proj­ects.

On the road, she has started hosting workshops between concerts, bringing members of her audience together to share knowledge and take real steps for climate. Participants have described these events as “life-changing,” “rocket fuel,” and “the perfect antidote to despair.”

The long distance phase is over. Now it’s time for communion and moving forward. Welcome the incomparable Vienna Teng to Marblehead.

. . .

Opening for Vienna for this special concert will be Amber Rubarth, whose music has been heard around the world and who has opened for Emmylou Harris, Richie Havens, Kenny Loggins, Dr. Ralph Stanley and many others. Amber was awarded the Grand Prize on NPR’s Mountain Stage New Song Contest and that led to her recording an album produced by Jacquire King, who also produces for Norah Jones and Tom Waits.

In her unassuming and beguiling way, Rubarth draws you into a world where wonder and high-minded concepts weave a poetic tapestry, a world where space and time comes screeching to a halt with her “unique gift of knocking down walls with songs so strong they sound like classics from another era.” (Acoustic Guitar)

She can currently be seen on Apple TV starring alongside Joe Purdy in the feature film American Folk, which has won numerous film festival awards and was recently released to theaters. The music road trip film received high praise with the Hollywood Reporter calling it “superb . . . a heartfelt homage to American folk music.”

Rubarth left home at 17 to become a chainsaw sculptor in Nevada, covered in sawdust for four years while waitressing at night. As they were putting the final touches on a 24 foot commission of leopards, the head sculptor spoke about following your number one passion to serve your unique purpose in the world and Rubarth traded in her chainsaw for a guitar and began writing songs. In the early days, she opened for a flea circus at a Texas theme park, moving on to perform an original duet with Jason Mark at a sold-out Carnegie Hall concert and performing with the Ithaca Chamber Orchestra to full orchestral arrangements of her music.

Vienna Teng’s  Website | Video
Amber Rubarth’s  Website | Video

This concert is supported by a grant from the Marblehead Cultural Council, a local agency, which is funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.