The Department of Music is pleased to announce two new Assistant Professors of Composition joining the Music Faculty in 2025: Matthew Evan Taylor and Mu-Xuan Lin. These hires are the result of a rigorous, global search to build upon the Music department's already world-renowned faculty in composition. Professors Taylor and Lin are accomplished professionals in the field, each with a celebrated career that has seen their work performed at festivals and venues around the world.
Reflecting on the hires, Professor David Milnes, Department Chair, emphasized the outstanding body of work each professor brings to the department. "We are beyond fortunate to welcome two new members to our faculty who are truly at the cutting edge of compositional studies. Professors Taylor and Lin will bring their own touch of creativity to our rigorous curriculum, ensuring that we will continue to challenge and inspire our students for decades to come."
Short bios for Professors Taylor and Lin are below. We look forward to welcoming Matthew Evan Taylor for the Spring 2025 semester, and Mu-Xuan Lin in Fall 2025.
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Composer and multi-instrumentalist Dr. Matthew Evan Taylor (1980) has been hailed as a "risk taker" (Neil De La Flor, Huffington Post), who has "...wrestled with the societal boundaries of Black artistry only to blast them apart..." (Dr. Kori Hill, I Care if You Listen) by making music that is "insistent and defiant...envelopingly hypnotic" (Alan Young, Lucid Culture). His work includes concert music, such as okussa: for Damascus (2023, commissioned by the Next Festival for Emerging Artists) for string orchestra; chamber music like Get Up! (2022, commissioned by Timothy McAllister) for alto saxophone and piano; online streaming projects, most notably Postcards to the Met (2021–2022, commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art) which has accrued over 500,000 views on Instagram and free improvisations as in his acclaimed Unheard Mixtapes (2020 – 2021, commissioned by Metropolis Ensemble; New Amsterdam Records). Dr. Taylor calls his recent work AfroPnuemaism: a liberatory practice that centers the human breath as a primary organizational structure of music. These compositions subvert the accepted assumptions of virtuosity, precision, and the sublime while harnessing the breathing process as a means to celebrate the humanity of performers and their witnesses.
In 2025, Dr. Taylor will release his first LP, Life Returns, which was recorded live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022.
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Composer (/curator/writer/researcher) Mu-Xuan Lin (林慕萱) (Taiwan/USA) defines her life as a quest for an artistic autonomy poetically engendered by both its will and its vulnerability to one's corporeal experience and to the world one lives in. Having extensive training in the visual arts and creative writing and frequent exposure to theatre, dance, and literature from an early age, and profound influences from the cinema, Mu-Xuan is interested in the montage and the mise-en-scène of contemporary individuals' fragmented yet interlaced truths, of the confusion of time and place, and of identities construed and broken. She creates with an emphasis on the kinetic formulation and transfer between various expressive art forms or matters with the sonic and temporal one.
Dr. Lin enjoys an international career; her music has been heard worldwide and on SOOND (EU) and ein_klang (Austria) records, and at many festivals and series such as Festival AFEKT (Estonia), Donaueschinger Musiktage (Germany), Innovation Series (Taiwan), and Piano Spheres (Los Angeles). She has worked with Ensemble Proton Bern (Switzerland), Ensemble Adapter (Germany), Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart (Germany), Avanti! Chamber Orchestra (Finland), Urbanity Dance (Boston), and pianist Vicki Ray among others, and is currently working with loadbang (NYC), 3peoplemusic (Taipei), duo NéMeu (Paris), and sheng artist Li-Chin Li. As a researcher and writer, her article "The Erotic and the Melancholy of a Sincere Postmodern Identity – the cinematic spaces and a vulnerable time" will be published by Cambridge Scholars in the volume "Crossing into Distance: Contemporary Composers on the Present and Future of Art Music" in 2024/25. Her interview (co-authored with Maria Sorensen and Dorothee Richter) with sociologist Klaus Theweleit about his psychoanalytic works on right-wing fascism, will be published in the E-journal OnCurating. Since 2023, in addition to increased activities as a video artist, Mu-Xuan is venturing into the work of performing arts curation and direction, 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, MFA and Ph.D. in Music Composition and Theory from Brandeis University, and Certificate of Advanced Studies in Curating (CAS) at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. She has taught at Brandeis University, California State University Long Beach, and Chapman University.
(https://muxuanlin.com/)
(Mu-Xuan Lin photograph courtesy of Yi-Chen Lee)