Oct 30
Chinese Ensemble Concert with Guest Dr. Mei Han: Gao Hong, director
Th
e Carleton Chinese Music Ensemble performs on traditional bowed strings, plucked strings, winds and percussion instruments. Their repertoire includes Chinese classical, folk, percussion, minority, and contemporary music.
After 18 months of rehearsing and performing via Zoom, the Chinese Music Ensemble finally will perform live with guest artist Dr. Mei Han, a master Zheng (Chinese zither) performer. Dr. Han will perform Zheng solos, duets with Gao Hong, and pieces with the students from the Ensemble. The Chinese Ensemble will also perform two world premiere pieces that were composed specially for the Ensemble by two award-winning composers from Beijing and Shanghai.
Dr. Mei Han is the founding director of the Center for Chinese Music and Culture and an Associate Professor at School of Music at Middle Tennessee State University. She has founded/directed four Chinese ensembles for North American higher education institutions. She has been invited as a keynote speaker at conferences internationally and nationally including the Ukrainian National Tchaikovsky Academy of Music, Tsinghua University and Valparaiso University. Her recording of Traditional and Contemporary Chinese Music (2016) with Red Chamber, a Chinese pluck string ensemble that she leads, was nominated for the Best World Music album (Asia-Pacific) by Songlines Magazine (England). She was an artist-in-residence at the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada (2017), and visiting scholar at Salford University in England (2019). She is also a primary subject of Michael Heffley’s book chapter “Improvising Mythoi and Difference Emerging in the Asian/Woman in North America,” in Sound Changes: Improvisation and Transcultural Difference (eds. Daniel Fischlin and Eric Porter) published by University of Michigan Press (2021).