Music Department Events

Mei Han (Ph. D.) is an Ethnomusicologist and a zheng (Chinese zither) virtuoso. Born and raised in China during the Cultural Revolution, she became a professional musician at the age of 16. Evolution, transformation, and reinvention have been essential themes in her life. In this lecture, Dr. Han discusses challenges as an immigrant woman artist navigating the stereotypes of gender, race, and musical culture. Dr. Han demonstrates the use of creativity and improvisation as valuable methods to bridge social and cultural barriers.

Dr. Mei Han will also join the Chinese Music Ensemble to perform solos and with our students in concert on October 30th at 3:00pm.

Outside the Wall
In her presentation, Dr. Han discusses challenges as an immigrant woman artist learning to navigate the stereotypes of gender, race, and musical culture, and ultimately discovering an individual creative voice in cross-cultural music making. Through embracing change, Dr. Han demonstrates the use of creative thinking and the language of improvisation as valuable methods to bridge social and cultural barriers. Dr. Han is a leading educator of Chinese music in North America.

Dr. 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).

Anyone attending a campus event must wear a mask, and is expected to either be fully vaccinated, or to have received a negative COVID test within 72 hours of attending an event on campus.