Kii-Ming Lo was born on November 4, 1954 in Keelung, Taiwan. After initial studies of textile technology at Fu Jen Catholic University, which she completed with a bachelor's degree, she went to Germany in order to study musicology. From 1980 to 1988 she studied musicology, sinology and ethnology at Heidelberg University. She received her doctorate in 1989 under the supervision of Ludwig Finscher with the dissertation »Turandot« auf der Opernbühne, which since then has become a reference book on the subject . From 1989 to 2002 she taught as professor of musicology at Fu-Jen Catholic University / Taipei; in 1999 she was made "full professor of musicology". From 2002 until her retirement in 2020, she taught as professor of musicology at the Music Department of the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei.
Musicology
Kii-Ming Lo’s research and teaching activities at NTNU brought about a gradual professionalization of the discipline of musicology in Taiwan under the influence of the German musicological tradition. For more than a decade after her appointment as professor, she remained the only musicologist from Taiwan who actively participated in the congresses of the International Musicological Society. Since 1999 Kii-Ming Lo has organized several international musicological symposia, often in collaboration with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra in Taipei. Especially the international congresses on Giacomo Puccini and Richard Wagner. Her areas of research include the opera history of the 19th and 20th centuries in Europe, especially the "Turandot" operas by Giacomo Puccini and Ferruccio Busoni, the interrelation between music and literature, especially the history of the opera libretto in Germany with special attention to the 20th century German »Literaturoper«, the history of opera film with a special focus on Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, the interrelation between Asia and Europe in the European music theater and contemporary music in Taiwan.
Publications
Books
1996 »Turandot« auf der Opernbühne, Frankfurt/Bern/New York,.
1998 Puccini’s »Turandot« – Tong hua, xi ju, ge ju, Taipei 1998,.
1998 Feminine Spirituality in Theatre, Opera and Dance, Taipei 1998,.
2005 Gu jin xiang sheng yin yue meng: Shu xie Pan Hwang-Long , Taipei 2006,.
2006 Hua ge na – Zhi huan – Bai lu te, , Taipei 2006,.
2010 Shao nian mo hao ─ Ma le de shi yi chuan yuan , Taipei 2010,.
2011 »Da di zhi ge« ─ Ma le de ren shi xin shen , Taipei 2011,.
2014 Ai zhi si ─ Wagner's »Tristan und Isolde« , Taipei 2014,.
2014 Zou yi ge shi ji de ying yue lu: Liao Nian-Fu zhuan , Taipei 2014,.
2017 Hua ge na yen jiou: Shen hua, Shi wen, Yue pu, Wu tai , Taipei 2017,.
Scholarly articles in English
1991 In Search for a Chinese Melody — Tracing the Source of Weber's »Musik zu Turandot«, op. 37, in: Tradition and its Future in Music. Report of SIMS 1990 Osaka, edd. Tokumaru Yosihiko, Ohmiya Makoto, Kanazawa Masakata, Yamaguti Osamu, Tukitani Tuneko, Takamatsu Akiko & Shimosako Mari, Tokyo/Osaka 1991, 511-521.
1993 New Documents on the Encounter of European and Chinese Music, in: Report of IMS 1992 Madrid, published as Separata de la Revista de Musicología, Volumen 16, 1993, No 4, pp. 1896-1911.
1997 Giacomo Puccini’s »Turandot« in two Acts — The Draft of the first Version of the Libretto, in: Giacomo Puccini. L’uomo, il musicista, il panorama europeo. Proceedings of the International Congress, Lucca 25-29 November 1994, ed. by Gabriella Biagi Ravenni & Carolyn Gianturo., Lucca 1997, 239-258.
1999 Some Functions of Music in Chinese Classical Literature, in: Walter Bernhart, Steven Paul Scher, Werner Wolf, Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Word and Music Studies at Graz, 1997, Amsterdam 1999, 221- 235.
2007 Elements of East Asian Music as Exoticism in Twentieth-Century European Opera: The Case of Isang Yun, in: Paolo Amalfitano & Loretta Innocenti, L'Oriente. Storia di una figura nelle arti occidentali , 2 vols., Roma 2007, vol. 2, 487-500.
2019 Staging Wagner after Chereau: The Search for Continous Innovation at Bayreuth Festival, 1986–1993, in: Marco Brighenti/Marco Targa, Mettere in scena Wagner. Opera e regia fra Ottocento e contemporaneità, Lucca 2019, 175-188.
