{"id":24859,"date":"2023-03-28T05:30:27","date_gmt":"2023-03-28T09:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=24859"},"modified":"2023-02-02T15:52:41","modified_gmt":"2023-02-02T20:52:41","slug":"avant-garde-in-wnc-min-xiao-fen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/28\/avant-garde-in-wnc-min-xiao-fen\/","title":{"rendered":"Avant Garde in WNC: Min Xiao-Fen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Min Xiao-Fen<\/a> relocated to Asheville from New York City in 2020. By that point she was already an in-demand, world-class musician. Min\u2019s primary instrument is the pipa, an ancient lute-like stringed instrument from her native China. Once she emigrated to the U.S., she fell in with an adventurous crowd of fellow musicians. Her work to date has included collaborations with John Zorn, Jane Ira Bloom and Bj\u00f6rk, among many others. White Lotus<\/i>, her original score for the The Goddess<\/i>, a motion picture from China\u2019s golden age of silent film, has been released on CD, and Min mounts live performances (with the film projected behind her) around the country, including a 2021 showing at the Orange Peel.<\/p>\n

Min Xiao-Fen\u2019s music deftly combines classical, ethnic\/folkloric and avant garde elements. Among her upcoming events is a performance in Germany at Cologne Philharmonie, as part of a trio called Min\/Wu\/Xu. \u201cLike me, [Wu Wei and Xu Fengxia] are trained as traditional Chinese musicians, but they\u2019ve opened their minds to doing all kinds of music,\u201d Min says. \u201cThey\u2019re very active, improvising with a lot of German avant garde musicians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Min\u2019s schedule also includes White Lotus<\/i> dates (with guitarist Rez Abassi) at Brevard Music Center and Lincoln Center. And she recently received a commission from the Smithsonian\u2019s National Museum of Asian Art to compose soundtracks for two more Chinese silent films. Those will premiere in May, with Min joined by Asheville-based percussionist River Guerguerian.<\/p>\n

Her schedule of engagements is slightly less packed than it was back in Min\u2019s New York days. \u201cBecause New York is such a big city with so many musicians, it\u2019s always \u2018Let\u2019s do this project,\u2019\u201d she says. But since relocating to Asheville, Min has found the smaller local avant garde music scene remarkably welcoming. \u201cI\u2019ve played at Isis Music Hall, The Orange Peel, the Black Mountain College Museum of Art, The Grey Eagle and Static Age Records,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Min notes that the Static Age show \u2013 part of the Catalytic Sound Festival \u2013 was especially inspiring for an outside-the-box artist like herself. \u201cThere were lots of young people there, and they were really into it all,\u201d she says. \u201cI was so encouraged; I moved to Asheville, and I\u2019ve never regretted it for one second!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Min Xiao-Fen relocated to Asheville from New York City in 2020. By that point she was already an in-demand, world-class musician. Min\u2019s primary instrument is the pipa, an ancient lute-like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24862,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,41],"tags":[4556],"class_list":["post-24859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-avant-garde","category-interview","tag-min-xiao-fen","cat-7-id","cat-41-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24859"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24868,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24859\/revisions\/24868"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}