After receiving a degree in composition and music theory from the National Taiwan Normal University, Mei-Fang Lin studied composition in the United States. She obtained her master’s from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with Edmund Campion. Supported by the Frank Huntington Beebe Fund for Musicians and the George Ladd Prix de Paris, she went to Paris from 2002 to 2005 to study composition and join IRCAM’s Cursus program for composition and computer music, supervised by Philippe Leroux.

Her pieces have been played by the Nieuw Ensemble, the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, the SurPlus Ensemble, the Ensemble Cairn, the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain, the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Washington Square New Music Ensemble, the Parnassus Ensemble, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the California E.A.R. Unit. Her music has been programmed at festivals such as the ISCM World Music Days, the Asian Composers League, Résonances Festival, the International Review of Composers, the Asia Pacific Festival, Ostrava Days, and Synthèse Festival.

Lin draws her compositional techniques from her studies in the West, while incorporating elements of Taoism and Buddhism into her work. Rather than using poetic or traditional texts for her pieces, she is interested in imbuing her work with the abstract meaning of the Eastern aesthetic and the world that pertains to it. She draws inspiration from the I Ching (The Book of Changes), as John Cage did. Lin determines the structure of some of her pieces through the analysis of the I Ching’s sixty-four hexagrams. This was the case for her Cursus final piece, Multiplication Virtuelle (Virtual Multiplication, 2004).

Her approach to musical gestures is also influenced by Chinese philosophy. From her practice of qigong and tai chi, Lin has drawn on a relationship to movement and energy that she applies to her music, where lines and phrases represent the physical gestures and bodily movements learned in these arts. In Disintegration (2000), for example, to create the impression of change in space and time, Lin uses timbre to interlace the two kinds of movement, active and passive, from tai chi.

Lin was guest assistant professor of composition at the University of Illinois from 2007 to 2009, then associate professor at Texas Tech University from 2009 to 2017. On her return to Taiwan in 2017, she became associate professor of composition at the Taipei National University of the Arts.

As a pianist, Lin plays pieces from the contemporary repertoire, and as conductor, she has directed the Taipei National Symphony Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the Parnassus Ensemble.

Prizes and Awards

• Residency prize at the International Electroacoustic Music Competition in Bourges, 2001
• SCI/ASCAP Student Commission Competition, USA, 2001
• Honorary Mention at the Concorso Internazionale Luigi Russolo, 2001
• Prix SCRIME, 2000
• Prize at the 21st Century Piano Commission Competition, 1999
• Special Prize at the Concorso Internazionale Luigi Russolo, 1997