This Saturday, Oct. 29th, Spirit of Nature, a group of the world’s top performers of traditional Chinese instruments, will present “Music from China” along with Chinese Music Ensemble from 8 pm to 9:30 pm at the Concert Hall.
It is not the first time for Carleton students to have such great opportunity to learn from master musicians from the globe. Gao Hong, the director of Carleton Chinese Music Ensemble and a world-renowned master of Pipa herself, shares that it has always been her goal as an educator to provide students with a broad range of high-quality learning opportunities. With internationally-renowned artists on campus, students have these rare opportunities to learn the essence of traditional Chinese music from listening to the best Chinese music of its kind to attending one-on-one master sessions, from grabbing convo lunch with masters to rehearsing and performing together with them. Gao hopes these engagements with world class artists will motivate students to learn more about Chinese music.
Jin Lee, a senior Music major from South Korea, joined the ensemble in his sophomore year. He found the Guoyue music played in the ensemble different yet still quite similar to what he grew up listening to and loving — the sound of traditional Korean instruments. Back in high school, he played violin in a fusion group using traditional Korean instruments like the haeheum, gayageum, and daegum with western string instruments, which was a lot like the Chinese music ensemble. According to Lee, it is rare for an American college to have a fantastic virtuoso musician like Gao leading such a large scale ensemble. He has been taking advantage of this great opportunity as a way to expand his musical horizons and play music that is outside of the western classical tradition.
“I feel like we’ve always had a great mix of beginners and advanced players in the ensemble. Everybody in the ensemble is always so nice, so playing in the ensemble has always been fun and great. Gao has a really infectious enthusiasm as well as being a fantastic musician and great warm human being, which makes every rehearsal fun. Sometimes Gao forgets that there are non-Chinese speaking people in the ensemble (just me and Emma who plays cello this term) and she will speak Chinese to me before realizing her mistake which is quite funny.”
Lee also shares that Gao made him conduct the ensemble a few years ago and it has always been fun to conduct, even when he does not know the music that well: “I don’t know what I’m doing because Gao leads the rehearsals so well.” As a learning conductor, he has been particularly grateful for this great opportunity, which prepped him for conducting a professional orchestra in a previous summer.
Amanda Yue Jin, a junior Political Science major from China, came into the ensemble with some knowledge of traditional Chinese music but not so much about the ensemble scene of it. She echoes the fun experience and enjoys the diversity of music pieces performed by the ensemble. According to her, it is extremely hard as a student even to get to see and listen to any master performance back in China, not to mention having the luck to interact with these masters in person through lectures, music lessons, rehearsals, and on-stage performance.
Lee also speaks highly of the opportunity at Carleton: “It is amazing that we have these great artists come to Carleton. It happened last year with the Shanghai Quartet coming to Carleton to give us a masterclass. One of the greatest things about being a music major at Carleton has been meeting with and hearing these great musicians here. Hearing master musicians up close is an inspirational thing and something that I think is essential to anyone aspiring to become a musician or have a career in music related circles. It’s great that we have had so many amazing musicians visit Carleton in recent years, and a lot of them were through Gao, with the Chinese music ensemble or world music ensemble.”
The Chinese music ensemble has been formative to both Lee and Jin. To learn more about traditional Chinese music, do not miss the opportunity to listen to the collaboration between master musicians and Carleton students.