Mei-Fang Lin is currently an Associate Professor of Composition at Texas Tech University. Lin received her PhD in composition from the University of California at Berkeley and her master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also taught as Visiting Assistant Professor of Composition from 2007 to 2009. From 2002 to 2005, she lived in France and studied composition with composer Philippe Leroux and participated in a one-year computer music course, “Cursus de Composition”, at IRCAM in Paris thanks to a Frank Huntington Beebe Fellowship and Berkeley’s George Ladd Paris Prize. Lin’s music has won awards at the Musica Domani International Competition, American Composers Forum, Seoul International Competition for Composers, Fifth House Ensemble Composer Competition, Bourges Competition, Look & Listen Festival, Pierre Schaeffer Competition, SCI/ASCAP Student Commission Competition, Luigi Russolo Competition, Prix SCRIME, NACUSA, Music Taipei Composition Competition, etc. Her music has been performed and broadcast in over 30 countries.

Hovor II – The piece was named after African artist El Anatsui’s installation piece Hovor II. As soon as I saw Anatsui’s piece, I was immediately struck by its incredible power and energy. The installation consists of flattened aluminium bottle caps strung together by copper wire. The caps may be perceived as a basic pattern that serves as the main building block for the entire tapestry. It not only provides an interesting texture to the work, but also lends an organic flow and continuity to the piece. What I tried to convey through this composition is the relentless energy and sense of continuity that I found in Anatsui’s work. I also derived a type of writing based on slightly varied repetitions of motivic patterns/cells, with the aim of creating a false sense of stasis that has so much energy inside that it actually starts moving forward.