Performed Friday, April 26, 2024
PROGRAM NOTES: Double Jeopardy
Certain deeds, once done, can never be done, at least not in the same way. That is the law of music. Walking the way of music one is both at the moment and through time; objects present themselves blunt and front, shaking off droplets when one is just making out the shape of them, and flee away with too much said and unsaid, leaving one at the mercy of recognition and recollection. Each object once appeared can never appear, and each presence is the compromise of its own possible double. Even déjà-vu entails the existence of a set of Anothers – another time, another presence, another experience. Therefore it is allowed for every musical gesture to exert its transgression over and over in repetition, in disguise, in reverse, in distortion, in magnitude; and it is therefore just for every countergesture to respond over and over in subversion, in annihilation, in coercion, in assimilation, in mergence. Hence the double jeopardy in multitude.
(Mu-Xuan Lin, 2014)
MU-XUAN LIN (Taiwan/USA)’s music has been heard worldwide as well as on the radio stations SRF2 kultur (Switzerland) and WQXR (New York), on SOOND (France) and ein_klang (Austria) records. She is a guest-composer/faculty at the Novalis music+art Festival (Croatia) and the New Music on the Bluff (Los Angeles), the winner of the Protonwerk No. 3 award (Switzerland) and Ensemble Adapter’s commission project “Adoptions 2017” (Germany), an artist-in-residence at the Cité des Arts in Paris (France), an awardee of New Music USA, Mellon, FACE Croatia, and multiple NCAF (Taiwan) grants, etc.. Formerly, she has participated as an active fellow at various festivals and conferences such as the Summer Academy at Schloss Solitude, Darmstadt Summer Course, EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO’s Matrix15, June in Buffalo, Sävellyspaja, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and was an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts working with Master Artist Georg Friedrich Haas. Her works have been featured at Festival AFEKT (Estonia), the Donaueschinger Musiktage – Next Generation (Germany), Innovation Series 2017 (Taiwan), deciBels Festival 2020 (Latvia), Piano Spheres (Los Angeles), Mise-En Festival (New York), and Splice Festival (Missouri) among others. She is working with ensemble 3peoplemusic (Taiwan) and loadbang (NYC), etc., and has worked with TAK Ensemble (USA), Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart (Germany), Ensemble Adapter (Germany), Ensemble Proton Bern (Switzerland), Secession Orchestra (France), Avanti! Chamber Orchestra (Finland), Urbanity Dance, pianist Vicki Ray among others. Since 2023, in addition to composition, Mu-Xuan is venturing into the work of performing arts curation and dramaturge, and has founded Studio Nekton with Paris-based flutist/performer Shao-
Wei Chou.
Mu-Xuan received her BM in Composition from the New England Conservatory, and MFA and Ph.D. in
Music Composition and Theory from Brandeis University. 2023-24, she is enrolled in Zürich University of the Arts’s CAS Curating program. She has previously taught at Brandeis University, California State University Long Beach, and Chapman University.
