Being a pluralist, I believe my fundamental job as an educator is to prepare students to land and succeed anywhere on the globe: Cultural agility is key in this world. As a music historian, I lead students on expeditions to recover lost or forgotten music (especially that suppressed by modern institutions, eurocentrism, etc.) and to forget our own musical egocentrism. This quest has led me back and forth across the world, between modern China (where I taught at The Chinese University of Hong Kong as a professor) and renaissance Italy (where I’m a fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti). One collaborative project my students and I collectively produced, for example, exhibits for the first time how Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit missionaries’ musical transliteration of Ming Dynasty Chinese might be more accurate than sinologists previously assumed. We also designed the first (I believe) full course on Beethoven in China. When Covid19 struck, I spent the first summer studying the Old Uyghur-Mongolian-Manchu script online with a professor from Inner Mongolia University (China). I’m curious: What do you want to learn next?
I studied music theory, viola, music-in-education, and contemporary improvisation at the New England Conservatory, and then musicology and Arabic at Princeton University. While I was in Hong Kong, I was fortunate to study the guqin (“ancient zither”) with a local master of the instrument, Dr. Tse Chunyan. I am eager to work with peoples of all backgrounds.
"He is actually more about providing a kind of liberation of thinking; we can try anything" (“他其实更多的是提供一种思维的解放,我们什么都可以去尝试")—Jia Guoping (贾国平, Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing)
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