Thousand-Mile Eyes, Wind-Following Ears: Mediation, Pedagogy, and Lu Yun’s Temples in Taiwan

Lu Yun’s Temples in Taiwan (2018), commissioned for the Kronos Quartet’s Fifty for the Future initiative, evokes the shifting sonic density of Taiwanese temple worship in two contrasting movements. When students in the Herricks High School Chamber Orchestra (New Hyde Park, NY) first encountered the piece, they struggled to perceive its sonic materials as coherent. This article tracks how, under conductor Catherine Birke’s guidance, they came to hear and perform the work as musically meaningful. Drawing on Antoine Hennions' distinction between mediation and translation, I argue that diversifying classical music repertoire requires more than strategic programming: it demands sustained pedagogical labour that transforms performers’ perceptual capacities, such that unfamiliar sonic worlds register as epistemically valuable. I trace five interlocking sites of mediation: Lu Yun’s musical formation; her conversations with Kronos violinist David Harrington, which shaped the commission’s conceptual parameters; her compositional strategies for inscribing temple soundscapes into the string quartet idiom; Birke’s methods for rendering that vocabulary accessible to students’ embodied practice; and students’ own negotiation of musical legitimacy. Building on fieldwork in Taiwan and interviews with principal figures involved, the article shows how performers’ movement between competing ideologies of sound recasts the politics of repertoire diversification.