Jing Jing Luo

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Jing Jing Luo (b. Beijing, China, 1953) is a Chinese composer. After her father's death, during the Cultural Revolution, she was forced to work in a physical labor camp in the middle of the Gobi Desert, until the age of sixteen, when she walked out of the desert on foot one moonlit night. Following her escape, she became a nurse aid, and at the age of eighteen entered the nursing school at an Army hospital in southern China. A year later, again at the hand of the government, she was sent to study music at the Conservatory of Music in Shanghai, where she majored in piano performance and composition. Jing Jing would never forget her teachers like Chengang and Sang Tong, whom she respected highly. She learned to play the traditional Chinese wind instrument xun and plucked string instrument guqin, the techniques of which she often integrates into her chamber works. By a stroke of luck, she was chosen as the Rockefeller Fellowship recipient, and came to United States in her late 20s and was quickly identified as part of the first generation of Mainland Chinese avant-garde composers, along with Tan Dun, in the early 1980s. Since then, she has been the winner of numerous important awards, grants and prizes for composition, and has made her mark both as a composer and performer.

Luo's personal life is a drama, and her ability to transform this happiness and anguish into each musical work… dark and melancholy, fantastical and uplifting… has dazzled many music producers, directors and musicians around world.

At age fifteen, while living in the Gobi Desert, she conceived her first musical composition, entitled The Little Paper Boat, for solo voice and piano. This piece won her a prize for the best children's song in Beijing, and later fascinated many American musicians, including Michael Lorimer, the young classical guitar prodigy who asked her to transform the melody into a solo piece for guitar. Later, she integrated the same tune into Four Seasons, a vocal piece for female voices and piano commissioned by the concert choir at Nazareth College in New York. Another piece for solo piano, DunHuang Poems, was born right before she was sent to the Shanghai Conservatory, and was chosen as one of her first album of recordings, produced by the International Limit Inc in 1984 by a German producer.

Luo's first piano concerto won the second prize in a China National Symphonic Composition Competition, bringing her to the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation and Asian Cultural Council in New York. In 1982, the Foundation chose her as the Visiting Scholar for a one year fellowship to study at Columbia University and Juilliard School, where she studied with Chou Wen-chung, Geroge Edward, and Vincent Persichetti. Luo also received a three-year Master's Degree from the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Malcolm Payton and Robert Cogan. In 1987, her work for percussion and voice, Monologue, won the prize at Nederland Dans Theatre for dance music. Her love for electronic music in the early 1990s brought her to the electronic music pioneer Bülent Arel at the State University of New York at Stony Brook where she earned her Ph.D. Her additional study with Jacob Druckman and Bernard Rands at the Aspen Music Festival inspired her to create the a successful chamber work entitled The Spell, which won the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996. Her piano solo mosquito later won the third prize in the Fanny Mendelssohn international Composers Competition in 1993.

Her most mature work, The Slough, for chamber orchestra, brought the special attention of the Women’s Philharmonic in San Francisco in 1999, and won third prize in the Centara Corporation New Music Festival with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra in 2001. An Huan: A Chinese Requiem, for mixed choir, was the winner from the Dale Warland Singers Reading Competition in 1995.

Luo was invited to be the Visiting Professor in Composition at Oberlin Conservatory of Music for 2002-04, Visiting Professor in Composition at Nazareth College in 2002-03, and Ashland University from 1991 to 2001. In addition, she has lectured throughout the United States and has been teaching piano techniques since 1989.

Other honors include:

Two New York State Art Foundation Individual artist fellowships
Eleven annual ASCAP standard awards
First prize in the Music From China International Composers Competition for traditional Chinese instruments
Eight Individual Artist fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council
American Academy of Arts & Letters Walter Hinrichsen Award
Grants and other honors have been awarded to her by: