Longfei Li

NYC-based composer and educator Longfei Li (b. 1988) is the cofounder and artistic director of Path New Music. His compositions have been performed worldwide in North America, Asia, and Europe. He has worked with many highly regarded new music ensembles such as Loadbang, Longleash, and the Nimbus Ensemble. Notable works include the new media chamber opera Simulacrum, Catalyz for orchestra, Aurora for piano trio, and Passacaglia for one percussionist and electronics. In 2020, his Noisses.. for one cellist won first prize in the International Music Competition of the Academia Musica Wien. In 2016, his piano and electronic piece Ripples won Samadis’ International Composition Competition and his Legacy Quartet was awarded the Manhattan Prize.  A participant in the 2017 Loretto Project, LI has attended numerous other new music festivals, such as the 2018 highSCORE Festival. This past summer he attended the virtual 2020 St. Petersburg International New Music Festival “reMusik.org” and was scheduled to participate in the 2020 Vienna Summer Music Festival, postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic.

Mr. Li has written numerous musicological treatises, including “Music in the Concentration Camp and Prisoner Camp During World War II,” “Education in Contemporary Music Composition,” and “Alban Berg’s Two Settings of the Same Poem.” His 2017 article “Interpreting Music from Lei Liang’s Miller Theater Portrait Concert,” originally published in the Journal of the Xinghai Conservatory of Music, was included in the book Asking Through Composition: Music and Musicological Treatises by Lei Liang, published by Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

Longfei Li received his Bachelor of Music degree in composition and compositional techniques from the China Central Conservatory of Music with Professors Jianping Tang, Guoping Jia, and Lida Zhang, and his Master of Music degree at California State University, Northridge in Romanian composer Liviu Marinescu’s studio. Currently, he is pursuing his Doctor of Musical Arts degree at Manhattan School of Music under the guidance of German composer Reiko Füting, where he is also teaching musicianship and theory.

Manhattan School of Music Precollege faculty since 2021.