Yuan-Chen Li

Yuan-Chen Li first arrived on the contemporary music scene in Taiwan with her very personal use of instrumentation and style in her chamber music piece Zang (the funeral) in 2000. In 2003, the expression and orchestration of her orchestral work Awakening won the Tsang-Houei Hsu Memorial Prize at the Asian Music Festival 2003 in Tokyo from the Asian Composers’ League, and was premiered by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. In recent years, Li’s music reflects her transformation of processes and concepts in Chinese phonology, Asian chamber and aboriginal music, Asian traditional arts, literature, and Buddhism into a compositional technique for instruments of both Western and Chinese practices, offering new experience to her audience and collaborators with the cross-cultural and cross-disciplined approach to musical time, space, and drama. With her virtuosity in instrumentation and fluency in converging and synthesizing contrastingly cultural, musical and conceptual ideas, her treatment of the space of the sonority, temporality, texture, and syntax have engaged musicians of different practices, critics, researchers, and worldwide listeners. Her works have been included in catalogs such as Alexander Street Music and Londeix Guide To The Saxophone Repertoire, Composer Diversity Database, and etc.
Committed to cultivating the combination of new music composition, interpretation, and community, she has frequently collaborated with Paul Ching-Po Chiang, conductor of Moment Musicaux Philharmonia (Taiwan), National Symphony Orchestra (Taiwan), and Chinese ensemble Chai-Found Music Workshop (Taiwan). Since 2011, Li has been mentored by Maestro Cliff Colnot, from whom she has been introduced to professional notation, rehearsal techniques, and editorial work for orchestra, chamber music, and songs. After holding a visiting professor position at Reed College, she has since lived and worked in Portland.