Teaching and Research Profile
Professor I-to Loh has been described as Asia’s foremost church musician and ethnomusicologist. His main focus during his many years of work in Taiwan and numerous Asian seminaries has been to develop and cultivate contextual music and a contextual liturgy for Taiwan and Asia. Through an intense study of ethnomusicology, his guiding principle has been that in Asian churches “modernization” does not equal “Westernization”. Instead he has worked to develop deeply contextual music, and has published over 100 hymn compositions and anthems.
Apart from numerous Mandarin articles on the contextualization of music and worship, he was general editor of Sound the Bamboo: CCA Hymnal 2000, containing 315 Asian hymns from 22 countries in 45 languages. He is also general editor of Let the Asian Church Rejoice, containing 135 hymns in 22 languages, published in Singapore by Methodist School of Music and Trinity Theological College, 2015. He is also the editor of Seng-si 2009, The Official Hymnal of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, containing 650 hymns, fifty percent Western, twenty-five percent Taiwanese, and twenty-five percent from the Third World.
Selected Publications
(general ed.) Let the Asian Church Rejoice, Methodist School of Music and Trinity Theological College, 2015.
“Music, East Asia,” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception 7, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, 2013.
“Ways of Contextualizing Church Music: Some Asian Examples,” in The Ethnodoxology Handbook, ICE, 2013, ed. Bill Harris et al.
“Sound the Bamboo: CCA Hymnal”, in Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology, ed. J. R. Watson, 2013.
“Taiwan [Hymns]” in Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology, ed. J. R.Watson, 2013.
In Search for Asian Sounds and Symbols in Worship. Edited and introduced by Michael N. C. Poon. Singapore: Trinity Theological College, CSCA Christianity in Southeast Asia Series, 2012.
Hymnal Companion to Sound the Bamboo: Asian hymns in Their Cultural and Liturgical Context. GIA Publications, Chicago, 2011.
(ed.) Seng-si, The Official Hymnal of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, 2009.
Teach Us to Praise [Chinese]. Tainan: Taiwan Church Press (TCP), 1991; rev. ed. 2002.
(general ed.), Sound the Bamboo: CCA Hymnal 2000.
Contact
E-Mail: itoloh@gmail.com
