Students from Bard College Conservatory of Music's Chinese National Instrumental Music Performance Major Successfully Hold Folk Music Ensemble Concert at CCOM

With music schools around the world effectively adopting western teaching systems to teach western classical music, in December 2017 the Central Conservatory of Music and the Bard College Conservatory of Music in the United States, a college with a history of 157 years, signed the Chinese Music Development Plan agreement to create the US-China Music Institute.

With a mission of cultivating “a new generation of folk music talents”, this project integrates traditional Chinese instrumental music performance and traditional Chinese music foundation and theory courses into the general liberal arts college education in the US, in order to lay a solid foundation for students' all-round development and become a key force for promoting Chinese folk music in the future.
In 2020, due to COVID-19, nine Chinese students seeking to do the China National Instrumental Music Performance major at the Bard College Conservatory of Music could not go to the US to study. Our conservatory overcame the difficulties of closed campus management, and received all nine students to continue their studies at our college. This fully reflects our conservatory's spirit of inclusiveness, openness and cooperation, and it has been highly praised and appreciated by the US side. It has also greatly helped the sound development of the US-China Music Institute in the US and helped Chinese folk music to take root there.

On May 21, 2021, under the guidance of Professor Chen Tao of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, eight Bard College students who majored in Chinese National Instrumental Music Performance cooperated with students from our Department of Folk Music to successfully hold a Folk Music Ensemble Concert, which showed the fruits of the students’ learning during the epidemic period.

The US-China Music Institute has established an innovative high-end platform for the development and exchange of Chinese music in the US. The dual major course of Chinese National Instrumental Music Performance is the first Chinese national instrumental music performance degree program in a foreign professional music college. This is an important initiative in terms of Chinese culture going global. It is of pioneering significance for the development of Chinese national music and marks an improvement in the status of Chinese national musical instruments and Chinese national music.

Photo: International Exchange Office
Text: Wang Liuxi