Nief-Norf Summer Festival, the interdisciplinary summer music festival hosted by experimental and contemporary music organization Nief-Norf, has named Bienen School doctoral student Yi-Ting Lu a winner of the 2020 International Call for Scores.

Each year, the festival invites submissions of contemporary scores for chamber ensemble. Traditionally, the winning scores are performed by performance fellows at the annual Nief-Norf Summer Festival. Lu’s work will be performed at a future in-person Nief-Norf concert when it is safe to do so.

Lu’s winning composition is “Raindrops on Cracked Mud” for bass flute, soprano saxophone, percussion, and piano. She writes that it calls to mind “the moment when raindrops falling on mud creates a momentary manifestation that brings their trajectory into focus, yet is fragile that they can be erased by the next rainfall. I wanted to capture this moment by shaping on a musical object as its wake takes different forms across repeated iterations to marvel at the numerous processes that had to occur to create this image.”

Yi-Ting Lu

Yi-Ting Lu is a Taiwanese composer and third-year PhD student in composition at the Bienen School of Music, studying with Hans Thomalla, Jay Alan Yim, and Alex Mincek. Her compositions focus on exploring the experience of timelessness evoked through fragmented musical materials.

Lu has received numerous prizes, awards, scholarships, and commissions, including 2021 Transient Canvas Composition Fellowship program, 2020 Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium Call for Scores, a finalist of 2020 Talea Ensemble Emerging Composer Commissioning Program, 2019 Ilsuono Contemporary Music Academy’s Choice to be published by AltrEdizioni Casa Editrice, 2019 the nominated exchange composer of the Académie Voix Nouvelles (Royaumont), 2018 the Representative Piece of Taiwan in the 66th International Rostrum of Composers, among others. Her music has been performed, and/or commissioned by performers and ensembles, including Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Mise-en, Ensemble Suono Giallo, Ensemble vocal Les Métaboles, Mivos Quartet, MSM Orchestra (under the baton of George Manahan), PushBack Collective, Quatuor Tana, 3PeopleMusic, and many others.

Lu completed a master's degree in music composition at the Manhattan School of Music, where she studied with Reiko Füting and Susan Botti. Prior to her graduate studies in the United States, she studied with Tsung-Hsien Yang and Wan-Jen Huang and received her bachelor's degree in music composition and theory at the Taipei National University of the Arts.