Looking for a music teacher who not only understands the importance of a strong foundation but also adapts to the needs of her students? Meet Jon Lin Chua, your new music teacher! With her patient and understanding approach, Jon Lin will make sure you understand every concept before moving on. She is dedicated to providing a rigorous and comprehensive lesson to inculcate foundational skills that every musician needs to become excellent. And with her bilingual abilities, she can conduct lessons in both English and Mandarin, ensuring you’re comfortable and able to understand every step of the way.
Jon Lin is currently a lecturer (adjunct faculty) at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, and also the Programme Director of Music Academics, a private music school offering academic music tuition as well as lessons/classes in theory, aural skills, and composition. She has also taught in the Eastman Community Music School in Rochester, New York, where she gave private instruction in composition, advanced analysis, as well as in ear-training and sight-singing. In addition, she co-taught the introductory aural skills class with Dr. Margaret Henry, covering the rudiments of solfege and scale degrees, tonal melodic sight-singing and dictation (with simple modulation), rhythmic training (simple and compound meters), interval identification, triads identification, clef reading and transposition.
She served as instructor of theory and sight-singing for the Music Horizons programme, a programme targeted at highschoolers aspiring to major in music in college, as part of Summer@Eastman, a summer institute affiliated to the Eastman School of Music. In this programme, she taught the following classes: the advanced aural skills class, covering atonal melodic sight-singing and dictation, advanced rhythmic training (complex meters and polyrhythms), four-part harmonic dictation with modulations, chromatic harmony, clef reading and transposition; the intermediate aural skills class, covering solfege and scale degrees, tonal melodic sight-singing and dictation, intermediate rhythmic training (simple and compound meters), interval identification, and identification of basic triads; the introductory counterpoint class, covering species counterpoint writing in two parts; and the introductory theory class, covering note reading, key signatures, simple and compound meters, scales and modes, intervals, triads, and basic chord functions.
Jon Lin is currently the composer-in-residence of the Ding Yi Music Company (Singapore). In 2021, she was commissioned to compose a piece in honour of the 100th year anniversary of the Eastman School of Music, her alma mater, featuring the award-winning American mezzo soprano Katherine Ciesinski as well as American violinist Renée Jolles, a concertmaster of the world-renowned, Grammy Award-winning, conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Recent composition awards also include the Outstanding Works Award on the 2021 Dunhuang Award, and the First Prize (large ensemble category) as well as the Young Singaporean Composer award on the 3rd Singapore International Composition Competition for Chinese Chamber Music, “Composium 2018,” organised by the Ding Yi Music Company (Singapore).
Jon Lin is currently also a Doctoral Researcher in music composition at the University of Birmingham, and also studied at the Eastman School of Music, where she graduated with highest distinction as a double major in composition and music theory, and also a recipient of numerous scholarships, including the prestigious Presser Scholar Award and the National Arts Council of Singapore Arts Scholarship. She also received composition awards such as the Wayne Brewster Barlow Award, Louis Lane Award, and the Bernard Rogers Memorial Prize. Jon Lin is a member of the national honour music society Pi Kappa Lambda in the United States, the current treasurer of the Composers Society of Singapore (CSS), as well as a committee member of the Composers and Authors Society of Singapore (COMPASS) Writer Members Consultative Committee.
As composer, she has also worked with groups such as the Toronto Chinese Orchestra as the former composer-in-residence, MusicaNova Orchestra (Phoenix AZ) as the orchestra’s composition fellow for the 2015-2016 season, the Little Giant Chinese Chamber Ensemble (Taiwan), the Ju Percussion Group (Taiwan), 3PeopleMusic (Taiwan), EL Music Group (Seoul), the Southeastern Ensemble for Today’s and Tomorrow’s Sounds (Singapore), the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, Ding Yi Music Company (Singapore), the Studio C Ensemble (international), The Philharmonic Winds (Singapore), Orchestra Collective (Singapore), 成都天资国乐 (Chengdu, Sichuan), the Guitar Ensemble of the National University of Singapore, and has had works performed in festivals such as the 4th SoundBridge Contemporary Music Festival (KL, Malaysia, 2019), the 2019 China-ASEAN New Music Festival (Nanning, Guangxi, 2019), ACL-Korea “Seoul Asia Waves” International Conference and Festival (Seoul, 2019), the inaugural Dot The Line New Music Festival (Seoul, 2019), the 35th Asian Composers League Conference and Festival (Taipei, 2018), 18th Biennial Festival of New Music organized by the Florida State University College of Music (Tallahassee FL, 2017), the Women in Music Festival (Rochester NY, 2017 & 2014), and the National University of Singapore Arts Festival (Singapore, 2012).
Jon Lin was also invited to present her paper A Collapse of Musical Categories?: A Closer Look at Ethnic Chinese Music within the Chinese Conservatory Tradition Today at the Composition in Asia International Symposium and Festival held in the University of Florida (2015). Her recent research interests include analytical approaches to timbre-based works, as well as the music of Helmut Lachenmann. Apart from her accomplishments in music, Jon Lin also has a B.A. (Hons) in philosophy from the National University of Singapore.
In addition to her work in engaging with pre-college level education in music theory and aural skills, she has also developed a set of pedagogical exercises in advanced rhythmic training covering complex tuplets, polyrhythms, and irrational meters, for professional musicians who want to challenge themselves and venture into more rhythmically complex contemporary repertoire. These exercises were published in the Eastman School of Music Honors Track Aural Musicianship Training Anthology (from Fall 2016 onwards), compiled by Prof. Matthew Curlee.
