A NEW DAWN

The first school to offer US-accredited music degrees in mainland China, Juilliard’s Tianjin campus is the next step in the long history of East-West partnerships. Tom Stewart discovers how the institution is attracting students from all over the globe

Juilliard and Tianjin Juilliard students rehearse together at the Chinese campus

WEI HE

The port of Tianjin, half an hour from Beijing by high-speed train, is the Chinese capital’s gateway to global shipping and a booming megacity of 16 million people. In 2015, the railway line was extended to Binhai, an outer district of Tianjin where two decades of turbo-charged investment have transformed a vast tract of wilderness into a burgeoning financial hub.

The same year, New York’s Juilliard School announced that Binhai would become home to the Tianjin Juilliard School (TJS), the first – and so far only – Chinese institution to award a US- or European-accredited music degree. Plans for a campus in the global big-money style were drawn up by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architects behind the expansion of Juilliard’s Lincoln Center home, and TJS admitted its first students in 2019. Today, young musicians fly in from across China for its Saturday pre-college division, while TJS master’s courses (the school does not have an undergraduate class) attract players from the US and Europe as well as China and other countries in Asia.

Violinist Wei He was chair of the strings department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music before he joined the nascent TJS as its dean and artistic director. After a skeleton staff arrived in Tianjin in 2018, his first task was to recruit a faculty with a mixture of international teaching expertise and local knowledge. ‘When we asked people why they wanted to join us, there were two answers that stood out over and over,’ he says. ‘First, these teachers respected the Juilliard brand and ethos, which is what we were bringing to Tianjin. Secondly, they felt China was a place where they would be able to make a greater impact.’

The number of music colleges in China is continuing to grow – testament to the fact that the country’s classical music education system is on the rise. The nearby Tianjin Conservatory of Music is TJS’s partner institution and, before work was complete on its waterfront home, the location for its first classes. But as Wei explains, aspects of teaching expertise in China are yet to catch up. ‘Our three majors – chamber music, orchestral studies and collaborative piano – were carefully selected to complement what the Chinese system already does very well. At TJS the focus is on communication and ensemble playing. This is where we’re able to offer students the most distinctive Juilliard experience.’

Joseph Polisi spent 34 years as Juilliard’s president before becoming its chief China officer and president emeritus. He underlines the point that the school is intended to work alongside the existing Chinese system. ‘From the start of our discussions with municipal representatives from Tianjin, I made it clear we weren’t coming in as a competitor – we want to be a catalyst for new ideas in music education and performance,’ he says. ‘The Juilliard education system during the time I led the school was one that took care of the complete musician – a musician who doesn’t just play fast or loud but understands the art of music and has the sensitivity to adapt to their surroundings.’ Before Covid got in the way, the idea was for TJS students to play in hospitals, schools and care homes, both to broaden their experience of different audiences and to forge connections between the school and the wider community. ‘These encounters are extremely valuable, but existing Chinese conservatoires don’t tend to create them for their students,’ Polisi says, arguing that a musician’s worth isn’t defined by the nature of their audience but by the extent to which they are able to communicate with them.

Juilliard first announced its intention to expand into China in 2012, four years after the global financial crisis plunged the US and much of Europe into recession. In contrast, the Chinese economy continued to grow at a rate of between five and ten per cent each year, becoming the world’s second biggest in 2010. ‘We felt very strongly that global connections were only going to get stronger in the years to come, and that it was important for us to play our part,’ says Polisi. ‘Already around a third of our students came from outside the US, but we weren’t a global institution in the sense of a school with an international presence. We wanted to change that and quickly settled on Asia, and then China, as the most fertile environment.’ Juilliard also had the advantage of bringing an entirely new concept to the Chinese highereducation market. ‘We are the first institution to come into China and offer performing arts degrees,’ says Wei. ‘Everything had to be built from the ground up, so it felt like we were – and feels like we still are – creating new milestones every day.’

It might be the only US or European music college to have opened a school in China, but Juilliard is far from alone in taking an open-arms response to the country’s surging economy. Since the last decades of the 20th century, when China began opening up to international markets, there has been a growing recognition among Western universities that the huge numbers of international students arriving from China reflect a wider desire for a ‘Western’ university education. As early as 2004, the UK’s University of Nottingham built a campus in Ningbo; and in 2012, New York University Shanghai was launched. However, the focus of these and others like them is on subjects traditionally associated with greater earning power, such as engineering, maths and economics, leaving a gap in the market for arts-oriented courses. In 2009, Beijing’s Tsinghua University and the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany, announced that their music and design students would be able to spend time studying at each other’s institutions, though this partnership is no longer active. Similarly, although London’s Royal College of Music and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music established a ‘joint institute’ in 2017, the project appears to be on hold and its plans to offer co-awarded degrees abandoned.

Shanghai Quartet violist Honggang Li works with Tianjin Juilliard students

SHENGYI VISUAL

‘WE WANT TO BE A CATALYST FOR NEW IDEAS IN MUSIC EDUCATION AND PERFORMANCE’

More typical of relationships between US and European music colleges and their Chinese counterparts today are those of the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) in Manchester with Hangzhou’s Zhejiang Conservatory of Music and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) with the Xinghai Conservatory of Music in Guangzhou. Both take the form of a ‘memorandum of understanding’ designed to facilitate exchange without committing either partner to ongoing responsibilities. ‘Our tutors travel to Zheijang to give masterclasses, off the back of which some Chinese students come to study with us during the third year of their undergraduate course,’ explains RNCM international business development officer Ellie Yan. ‘Coming to Manchester for a semester gives them a taste of what it would be like to study in the UK, which some of them might go on to do as a postgraduate.’

Beyond direct opportunities for students, both the RNCM and the RCS emphasise the benefits for teachers visiting from their Chinese partner institutions. ‘Our continuing professional development programme allows teachers from Zheijang to expand their knowledge and experience, and then to take those best practices back with them to China,’ says Yan, while the RCS cites sharing ‘teaching excellence’ as a principal benefit of the relationship with its partner in Guangzhou.

Over half a million Chinese citizens are enrolled at higher-education institutions in the US and UK alone, and it is an accepted fact that huge numbers of students travel from China to study in the West. But, as Wei explains, TJS is tempting some of these back to China – something he argues is testament to the quality of education on offer. ‘One third of our students are Chinese citizens who have never studied abroad and another third come from countries other than China, but the rest are Chinese people with degrees from top US and European conservatoires. For the first time, these individuals are coming back to China not just to work, but to continue their studies.’ Wei recalls his own studies at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1990s when, he says, most of his fellow international students came from Japan ‘These days, Japanese students are more likely to stay in Japan, or they get their first degrees in Germany or the UK and return to Japan as postgraduates,’ he says, explaining that he expects Chinese students to follow suit as the country’s teaching infrastructure develops.

The majority of TJS’s ‘international’ students are from other Asian states, but there are a number who were born in the US. Why travel halfway across the world when Juilliard’s New York campus is on your doorstep? ‘I was born in China but moved to the US to study,’ says TJS double bass tutor DaXun Zhang. ‘Sure, I learnt a lot about music, but it was the experience of being so far from home that helped me to grow as a person, and I’ve carried it with me for the rest of my life. There’s no reason an American student shouldn’t also get to experience that.’

Shanghai Quartet cellist Nicholas Tzavaras coaches the Mila Quartet

Polisi agrees: ‘If they’re interested in seeing the world, they should go to Tianjin to study. They could learn Mandarin there, too, so they’ll be able to enter the ever-growing jobs market in China.’ According to Wei, China is home to more than 70 state-funded orchestras, just over half the number in Germany, but has far greater (relatively speaking) opportunities for younger players. ‘There is less competition here than there is in the West, and orchestral development programmes like Berlin’s Karajan Academy or the New World Symphony in Florida just don’t exist,’ he says. ‘In contrast, a TJS graduate is going to be very well prepared for that audition.’

The often insurmountable barriers to travel created by Covid-19 have posed serious difficulties for TJS, an institution conceived as an expression of classical music’s global power. Complex visa requirements, strict limits on passenger numbers and compulsory three-week stays in hotel quarantine have made travel in and out of China more or less impossible for all but the most determined.

It was the strictest imaginable domestic travel restrictions, however, that set TJS’s first chamber music fellows – the Mila Quartet – on their path to joining the institution. After six years (2013–19) at the Manhattan School of Music, first violinist Ke Karl Zhu returned to China to take up a position with the orchestra of Beijing’s Central Conservatory, where he had been a school student. ‘Covid hit six months after I got back,’ says Zhu, who was then unable to be reunited with family in his native Wuhan. Stuck in Beijing with no playing work, Zhu formed a quartet with three friends and applied for the TJS fellowship only a few months later. ‘We’ve had coaching from the Shanghai Quartet alongside our individual lessons, and the school has loaned us a quartet of new instruments as well as organising an agency to arrange concerts around China.’ he says. ‘The experience has been amazing.’

‘They’re a wonderful quartet but when they auditioned they had only been together for six months,’ says Wei. ‘A young quartet in Europe or the States just wouldn’t get the same opportunities, but we’ve seen just how much being able to play in these amazing spaces and meet so many different people has pushed their standards beyond anything we could have expected.’

An aerial view of the Tianjin Juilliard School campus

CAMPUS PHOTO ZHANG CHAO. MILA PHOTO SHENGYI VISUAL

Students perform in the school’s first annual ‘Festival Connect’ in February 2021

PHOTOS SHENGYI VISUAL.

‘GIVEN THE FOCUS ON BIG SYMPHONIC PERFORMANCES, IT ISN’T SURPRISING THAT CHINA IS HOME TO ONLY A HANDFUL OF PROFESSIONAL CHAMBER GROUPS. BUT AUDIENCES HERE ARE HUNGRY FOR NEW EXPERIENCES AND REPERTOIRE’

Wei admits that some people don’t understand the need for TJS’s chamber music course as the market in China is relatively undeveloped in comparison with the orchestral scene. ‘Given the focus there has been on big symphonic and operatic performances, and on building the huge concert halls required to house them, it isn’t surprising that China is home to only a handful of professional chamber groups,’ he says. ‘However, audiences here are hungry for new experiences and repertoire they haven’t heard before.’ Considering that chamber performances at TJS can command audiences of some 800 people, it’s no surprise that Zhu is optimistic about the prospects of a young quartet in China today. ‘People here love chamber music very much, even if a lot of the repertoire is not well known,’ he says. ‘They don’t have the same preconceptions as audiences in the West, so it’s exciting for us to introduce things to them for the first time.’

China may be an exhilarating place to be a young classical musician, but the ‘golden period’ of its relationship with the West has been plunged into the deep freeze thanks to a trade war with the US, new laws curtailing individual freedoms in the former British colony of Hong Kong, the ‘re-education’ of Uighur Muslims in concentration camps and a swathe of other human rights abuses.

Without mentioning these directly, Polisi concedes that the mood has shifted. ‘Our partners in China have been with us one hundred per cent of the way. We’ve been treated with respect and a sense of growing together, but political issues over the years have perhaps led other US and European institutions to step back a little. That said, one has to take the long view – there’s a reason Chinese history is measured in thousands of years, not hundreds.’ Ironically, Tianjin was the location of a recent summit aimed at normalising US–China relations after a long period of growing mistrust. Although those talks were widely reported to have failed, the amounts of money and numbers of students involved make an about-turn in the demand for Western higher-education institutions an unlikely prospect. But perhaps Juilliard’s success in Tianjin shows that the future lies not outside China, but within it.