About
Xiaoya Lu is a PhD student at the University of Chicago, who is particularly interested in Chinese music history (especially in the Ming-Qing dynasty), Chinese traditional music genre, and oral performance. Her undergraduate work “The Research on Wu Qi’s Chinese folk song collection Yue Feng Xu Jiu in Qing Dynasty” (presented at the 2024 CHINOPERL International Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, in conjunction with the 2024 AAS Annual Meeting), analyzed the sentence patterns and artistic technique of the folk songs in the book Yue Feng Xu Jiu, while also making a melodic inference on the ethnic minority folk songs of the Guangxi region in the late Qing.
As a music performer, Xiaoya is a violinist and Chinese Guqin (a seven-stringed plucked instrument similar to the zither) player. With a background in intellectual property law, Xiaoya is also interested in the intersection of digital music apps, popular music transmission, and antitrust issues.
Her recent conference presentations and papers include “The Lament of Guqin: The Aesthetic Analysis of Sadness in Chinese Guqin Music”, at the 2023 68th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM).“Construction of dual outsider identity and interpretation of the music of Chinese Guqin from a cross-cultural perspective: Take《The lore of Chinese lute》 as an example” at the 2022 6th biennial conference of the Regional Association for East Asia of the International Musicological Society (IMSEA).