Lu joined the Brown University faculty in 2015, where her coursework includes composition, music theory, orchestration and graduate seminars. She embeds her commitment to storytelling into her role as a teacher, aiming to connect one-on-one with Brown students and understand what they are seeking to express.

Supporting students’ academic journeys through the Open Curriculum and a liberal arts experience “fulfills something I didn’t do when I was a kid,” said Lu, whose secondary schooling and college education were entirely focused on music.

“The most rewarding experience has been to get to know the students,” Lu said. “I really value the human-to-human interaction, because there’s a wide range of backgrounds and cultures in our classrooms, so I really see that as a gift to get to know them.”

Telling stories, exploring history through music

The bustling, lively city of 10 million people where Lu grew up hummed with construction noise and music spilling out of shops and restaurants — so much so that she was unaware of the difference between natural and manmade sounds until she moved to the U.S., she said.

Having moved away and lived in New York, Berlin, Rome, Beijing, Chicago and Providence, Lu became attuned to drastically changing sonic environments, as illustrated in her compositions.

“Urban construction noise, ocean waves, café ambient sounds, Catholic church bells, and different kinds of subway tracks’ squeaking noise — all these sounds reflect human life and culture,” Lu said. “I don’t seek to avoid or exclude them from my writing — instead, I embrace them.”

On her album “Urban Inventory,” for example, she fused environmental sounds taken from public parks — like chirping birds, conversations and passing cars — with modernist instrumental timbres, distorted pop songs from the ’90s into ethereal melodies, and transliterated Indigenous poetry into microtonal textures.

Lu is also inspired by folk tales, poems and testimonials of peasant workers, coal miners and laborers. In China, she visited a textile factory where factory workers had long since been laid off due to automation and robotics, a fate that befell her grandmother’s six siblings. She sourced archival factory sounds and composed a piece for two pianos, two percussion instruments and electronics that premiered at the Miller Theatre in New York.

“My music reflects the urban lives I have experienced and witnessed and invites listeners to hear through a curated lens,” she reflected.

Lu has a deep appreciation for history that is vital to her music and scholarship.

“It’s important to learn history from different political and cultural perspectives, to engage with the knowledge, and to recognize its constraints and distortions,” Lu said. “When I present historical analysis, I give the historic context and present it as a question but not an authority.”

At Brown, Lu developed the course Music in China Since 1900, which stemmed from her access to a wealth of historical documents on 20th-century Chinese music after she moved to the U.S.

“After my initial excitement and shock, I felt compelled to create a course to learn this history together with our brilliant Brown students, who continually surprise me with their fresh perspectives and musical experiences,” Lu said.

Through the analysis of any piece of music, Lu works to guide students through an examination of pitch space, acoustics of overtones, and rhythmic perception that help illuminate the origins of a work.

“It’s the key in my teaching for students to truly know how each method works, and why such methods emerged during a particular historic moment,” she said.

In her graduate composition seminar, Issues of Time and Space in New Music, students study works ranging from orchestral and electro-acoustic to improvised outdoor performances and installations. Lu works with the student composers to teach them various crafts, develop their own writing techniques and understand the fundamental principles of how music behaves in an individual space.

“Teaching composition is a very personal experience,” Lu said. “Students often bring in their own music sketches to show me, and although music is abstract, getting to know a student’s artistic intentions and processes through their sketches regularly allows them to trust me as a teacher and helps establish an honest relationship which often lasts beyond their time in college.”

The art of listening to make music

Over the last two decades, Lu has increasingly observed culturally specific sounds and embedded deep listening into her compositions. From the notification system sounds on the Paris Metro, to trash trucks in Chicago, to bicycle bells in New York, “if you open your ears and you open your eyes, you realize there’s so much culture that’s sometimes a ubiquitous sonic base,” she said.

During a course when she led students through an analysis of a 150-year-old Wagner opera and a song that conveyed doomed romantic love and anguish and agony, she found it didn’t resonate with them. This inspired Lu to compose a contemporary piece that mimicked notification sounds from mobile phones, social media platforms and the sounds of photo-selfies. To inform her composing, she recorded sounds in the Seven Stars Bakery café in Providence.

“There’s this very hectic reality of all the notifications we have to respond to, and just sitting there having a coffee, I realized how rare it is for a person to just sit there and have a coffee — not to have your phone out, not to check your laptop, not to do anything but just have a coffee,” Lu said. “So all of that came to my mind, and then I wrote that piece, and the initial idea was from that class.”

She composed the piece for an ensemble of clarinet, saxophone, electric guitar, piano, percussion and viola. Titled “Cloud Intimacy,” it premiered at the Aspekte Festival in Salzburg, Austria, and was performed at the Mostly Mozart Festival at New York’s Lincoln Center.

“Sometimes when you teach, it gives you great ideas for your whole work,” Lu said.

Lu encourages her students to weave sound and memory into their work, too, embracing the gift of new and familiar sounds as they travel from place to place. She regularly invites esteemed guest musicians and composers to her classes to engage in hands-on presentations and workshops with her students. Conversely, she said her students have broadened her knowledge of American musicals, pop songs and more.

“There’s always new material that students bring to class,” Lu said. “And then I learn so much, not only the material, but I like to understand why they are drawn to these materials and where they encounter these materials. Sometimes it tells a beautiful family story, sometimes there’s a reflection of global pop music influence, and I get to know them even more.”

 Each interaction, collaboration and experience at Brown contributes to the tapestry of Lu’s musical story. This year, one of her collaborations yielded a contribution to a new album, “At Which Point,” for which Lu wrote three movements for a 24-person choir set to the text of a poetry collection by Brown Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts Forrest Gander.

“Things like that can really only happen here at Brown,” Lu said. “I feel very fortunate every day to be part of this uniquely vibrant and diverse community.”