San-Lou Wei is a Taiwanese percussionist and composer whose work spans orchestral music, opera, solo performance, and contemporary chamber music. She has performed with Taiwan’s National Symphony Orchestra on three occasions and has served as principal timpanist with Queen City Opera. She appeared as a concerto soloist with the CCM Wind Symphony and performed as a timpanist at Carnegie Hall in 30 Years of Stephen Flaherty. Her performance work has brought her into both large ensembles and smaller projects devoted to percussion repertoire.

Wei has received recognition in several performance competitions. She was a finalist in the Lowell Concerto Competition and the Frances Walton Competition, and a semifinalist in the Great Plains International Marimba Competition. These distinctions sit alongside her work as an orchestral musician and concerto soloist. In chamber music, she works closely with other performers to coordinate instruments, movement, and timing, particularly in pieces that require several percussionists to share a stage and an extensive setup.

Collaboration with composers is an important part of Wei’s performance work. She regularly works with composers on new percussion music, exploring instrumental sounds, testing techniques, and discussing how musical ideas can be communicated in a score. In rehearsal, she considers the practical demands of instrument changes, setup, and coordination with other performers. Working directly with composers allows her to contribute a performer’s perspective while a piece is being prepared. Those exchanges also inform how she writes music for percussion herself.

Wei’s percussion trio Moon Blocks: A Divination Ritual received the Grand Prize in the 2025 Percussive Arts Society Composition Competition. The approximately eleven-minute piece draws on 擲筊, a divination ritual practiced in Taiwan. A person poses a question and casts two moon-shaped wooden blocks; the way they land is interpreted as an answer. Wei uses the ritual’s gestures and possible outcomes to organize the work’s three movements. The trio incorporates timpani pedal glissandi, reversed cymbal sounds, gongs, singing bowl, and wooden boards. Its sounds and physical actions bring elements of the ritual into a concert setting.

As a member of the Percussive Arts Society Composition Committee, Wei contributes to educational resources for composers writing for percussion. Her work includes instrument demonstrations and guidance on notation. In this role, she draws on her experience both preparing new scores for performance and writing music for other percussionists.

Wei’s interest in percussion repertoire also extends to research. Her current project examines Yvonne Desportes’s La Foire aux Croûtes, a collection of twelve pieces for piano and percussion. She is comparing handwritten and engraved editions and studying the complete work, which has received limited attention in performance. She plans to perform and record the full collection so that other musicians and listeners can encounter it.

Wei received her Bachelor of Music from the University of Taipei and her Master of Music from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.