Tzyy Sheng Lee Lee, Tzyy Sheng
Born in Taipei in 1965, Tzyy Sheng Lee began piano lessons at four and attended the first experimental music education classes at Taipei Municipal Fuxing Elementary School, Nanmen Junior High School, and the Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University. Lee began majoring in theory and composition in high school and graduated in 1988 from the Department of Music at the National Institute of the Arts (now Taipei National University of the Arts). After two years of military service, Lee went to the United States, earning a Master of Music in composition from Boston University and a master’s and doctorate in composition from the University of Pennsylvania, and was an exchange scholar at Harvard University. Lee studied composition with Professors 盧炎, Hwang Long Pan, Theodore Antoniou, Lukas Foss, Richard Wernick, and George Crumb.
During university, Lee studied guqin, Peking opera percussion, and traditional opera singing with the traditional arts masters 孫毓芹, 侯佑宗, and 楊傳英, so that the exploration of a contemporary compositional voice was nourished by the essence of traditional Chinese musical arts; Lee also took world music courses with Professor 韓國鐄, broadening cultural horizons. Lee’s works have been performed at music festivals in the United States, Canada, Poland, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Austria, New Zealand, Japan, Thailand, as well as in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Selected for the NTCH “Young Musicians” series, Lee presented a portrait concert of original works at the National Recital Hall in Taipei on 30 December 1990. Lee’s works have won six Council for Cultural Affairs music composition awards, the Ministry of Education Literary and Arts Creation Award, the Asian Composers League’s Yoshiro Irino Memorial Prize, Boston University’s Malloy Miller Composition Prize, the University of Pennsylvania’s David Halstead Music Prize, the Raymond Hubbell Music Award of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), and the Kaohsiung City Literary and Arts Award for best instrumental work, and have received composition grants from the National Culture and Arts Foundation several times.
After returning to Taiwan in 1996, Lee joined the Department of Music at National Sun Yat-sen University, teaching composition and music theory, and also taught at the summer continuing education program and Graduate Institute of Music and Art of Taipei Municipal Teachers College, the Department of Music at National Kaohsiung Normal University, the Institute of Applied Arts at National Chiao Tung University, and the music class of Kaohsiung Senior High School, among others. Lee twice received the Outstanding Teaching Award of the College of Liberal Arts at National Sun Yat-sen University, in the 1999 and 2000 academic years. Since summer 2004 Lee has been an associate professor at the Institute of Music at National Chiao Tung University.