Dean, Bard College Conservatory of Music

The world-renowned artist and UNESCO Global Goodwill Ambassador Tan Dun, has made an indelible mark on the world’s music scene with a creative repertoire that spans the boundaries of classical music, multimedia performance, and Eastern and Western traditions. A winner of today’s most prestigious honors including the Grammy Award, Oscar/Academy Award, Grawemeyer Award, Bach Prize, Shostakovich Award, and most recently Italy’s Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement, Tan Dun’s music has been played throughout the world by leading orchestras, opera houses, international festivals, and on radio and television. In 2019, Tan Dun was appointed dean of the Bard College Conservatory of Music. As dean, Tan Dun will further demonstrate music’s extraordinary ability to transform lives and guide the Conservatory in fulfilling its mission of understanding music’s connection to history, art, culture, and society. Read more at http://tandun.com

Bao Yuankai is an award-winning composer and music educator. He graduated from Beijing Central Conservatory of Music in 1967. He started his teaching career at Tianjin Conservatory of Music in 1973, and chaired the Institute of Arts of Xiamen University from 2005 to 2015. Bao has been engaged in music teaching for more than 40 years, and many of his students have gone on to become famous composers and educators in their own right.

In Professor Bao’s composition, he presents Chinese traditional musical culture with western composition skills. His works have been staged both in China and internationally and his recordings have been released by such publishers as DG, EMI，PHILIPS, DECCA and HUGO. .

Born in Beijing in 1957, Julian Yu studied composition at China’s Central Conservatory of Music, where he later taught, and at the Tokyo College of Music with Joji Yuasa and Schin-Ichiro Ikebe. Later he was a Composition Fellow at Tanglewood, where he studied with Hans Werner Henze and Oliver Knussen and was highly praised by Leonard Bernstein. He migrated to Australia in 1985.

Important commissions include Ensemble InterContemporain, the 2000 BBC Proms, and the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. In 2011 he was Theme Composer at the Suntory Hall Summer Festival in Tokyo.

Awards for composition include the 1988 Koussevitzky Tanglewood Composition Prize; the inaugural and consecutive Paul Lowin Orchestral Prizes of 1991 and 1994; and the Albert H. Maggs Composition Awards of 1988 and 2015.

His work, mostly for orchestra, is frequently performed in Australia and internationally. A free-lance composer, he is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Melbourne.

One of the most active young composers of China, Li Shaosheng is dedicated to using his music to introduce a different China to the world, one that comes from a special perspective.

Recognized as the world’s premier pipa virtuoso, Wu Man is a soloist, educator and composer who gives her lute-like instrument—which has a history of more than 2,000 years in China—a new role in both traditional and contemporary music. Wu Man has premiered hundreds of new works for the pipa, while spearheading multimedia projects to both preserve and create global awareness of China’s ancient musical traditions. Projects she has initiated have resulted in the pipa finding a place in new solo and quartet works, concertos, opera, chamber, electronic, and jazz music as well as in theater productions, film, dance, and collaborations with visual artists. Read more at wumanpipa.org

Wu Man is artistic advisor to the US-China Music Institute, offering master classes in Chinese music and improvisation at the Bard College Conservatory of Music.

Artistic Director, China Now Music Festival

Conductor Jindong Cai is director of the US-China Music Institute, professor of music and arts at Bard College, and associate conductor of The Orchestra Now. Over his 30-year career in the United States, Cai has established himself as an active and dynamic conductor, scholar of Western classical music in China, and leading advocate of music from across Asia. Cai founded the US-China Music Institute at the Bard Conservatory in 2017 and created the Institute’s the annual China Now Music Festival in the following year. In its first two seasons, China Now presented new works by some of the most important Chinese composers of our time, with concerts performed at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Bard’s Fisher Center, and Stanford University.

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