Hwang Long Pan Pan, Hwang Long
Composer Professor Hwang Long Pan was born in 1945 in Puli, the geographic center of Taiwan. He graduated successively from Taiwan Provincial Taipei Normal School (predecessor of National Taipei University of Education), the Department of Music at National Taiwan Normal University and the Zurich Conservatory in Switzerland; he then went to Germany, where he studied twentieth-century compositional techniques at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover and the Berlin University of the Arts. In 1982 he returned to Taiwan at the invitation of the National Institute of the Arts. Professor Pan served as Director of the Center for Academic Research and Development from 1998 to 1999 and as Dean of Student Affairs of Taipei National University of the Arts (the renamed National Institute of the Arts) from 2000 to 2002. In 2002 he was elected the first Dean of the School of Music, and was re-elected in 2005, serving until 2008.
Professor Pan founded the ISCM Taiwan Section and served as its founding president. In 1990, at the invitation of the National Chiang Kai-shek Cultural Center, he presented the “Hwang Long Pan Music Festival” at the National Concert Hall. In 2005 the Center invited him again to present “Hwang Long Pan Orchestral Works: A Sixtieth-Birthday Retrospective” at the National Concert Hall, with his orchestral works performed by the National Symphony Orchestra. He has served on the juries of the International Mozart Composition Competition in Austria, the International Witold Lutosławski Composition Competition in Poland and the International Tansman Composition Competition, and as a juror and convener for the performing arts category of the Taishin Arts Award. In 2010 he was elected Honorary President of the ISCM Taiwan Section, and was re-elected President of both the Taiwan Composers Association and the Asian Composers League Taiwan Section.
His works include orchestral music, choral and vocal music, chamber music, chamber music for traditional instruments, percussion ensemble works, solo works, and solo works for traditional instruments. His theoretical publications include “The Focus of Contemporary Music” (現代音樂的焦點), “Let Us Appreciate Contemporary Music” (讓我們來欣賞現代音樂) and “Concepts of Sound-Imagery in Music Composition” (音響意境音樂創作的理念). Books about him include 羅基敏’s “Musical Dreams Where Past and Present Meet” (古今相生音樂夢, China Times Publishing) and 宋育任’s Pan Hwang-Long, Leben und Werk (Life and Works of Pan Hwang-Long, Shaker Verlag, Germany).
Professor Pan’s honors include the Jürgen Ponto Foundation Composition Prize in Germany, a composition prize at a Hochschule composition competition, and, in Taiwan, the Wu San-Lien Award for Literature and Arts and the National Award for Arts. His works have been performed across Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia by internationally renowned ensembles such as the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Ensemble intercontemporain of the Centre Pompidou in France, the Arditti Quartet in the UK, the New Japan Philharmonic, Klangforum Wien, and Taiwan’s National Symphony Orchestra and National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, and at festivals including the International Gaudeamus Music Week in the Netherlands, ISCM World Music Days, the ACL Asia-Pacific Music Festival, contemporary music festivals in Paris and Vienna, the Berliner Festwochen, the Taiwan Forum at Yale University, a contemporary music festival in Alaska, and the International Tansman Festival in Poland.