Strike up the bands

When Alexander Brose and He Wei first came to Tianjin in 2017 to prepare for the opening of the Tianjin Juilliard School－the first overseas campus of the New York-based performing arts conservatory－only four people were there and the building of the new school was still on paper.

Today, they have not only developed the Tianjin Juilliard School in numbers, with over 70 staff members, over 40 faculty members and about 130 students, but are also building the school culture gradually.

Even as the pandemic raged outside China, the school welcomed its inaugural graduate students and pre-college students in September.

"We were told at the end of this summer that we were, at least at that time, the only college in China to receive permission to bring in new international graduate students this year," says Brose, executive director and CEO of the Tianjin Juilliard School.

"It's very difficult to bring them back to China with travel restrictions caused by the pandemic.

"Countless people in both the United States and China, including those at the Juilliard School in New York and our partners here, have been working for as many as 10 years to make this day a reality," Brose says.

"It's a difficult period for Sino-US relations. We have received support from our partners in China, which never changed. We've already served as a cultural bridge between the two countries and we will continue to do so in the coming years."

Located along the Haihe River and a short high-speed train ride from Beijing, the building of the Tianjin school was designed by Diller Scofidio+ Renfro, the same firm responsible for the 2009 expansion of Juilliard's iconic New York home.

Founded in 1905 and located at Lincoln Center in New York City, the Juilliard School is a world leader in performing arts education.

The Tianjin school project started in 2015. While accompanying President Xi Jinping on a State visit to the US, his wife Peng Liyuan visited the Juilliard School in New York.

Thirty-nine students from 11 countries and regions joined the Tianjin campus' inaugural graduate studies program, which offers three collaborative majors in orchestral studies, chamber music and collaborative piano.

Alla Sorokoletova is one of the graduate students on the Tianjin campus. She plays the flute and majors in orchestral studies.

The flutist, who is from Uzbekistan, graduated from the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan in 2010 with a bachelor of arts degree in flute performance and received her master of arts in the same subject from Lynn University (a private Florida college) in 2017.

She says she couldn't get her visa to China because of the travel restrictions. The overseas office in Tianjin got in touch with her and helped.

"It was an incredible story that I could finally come to study here," says Sorokoletova. "The degrees and high-quality instruments were not available to me in my home country. It's my hope to someday be able to share the knowledge and experience I gain from my studies abroad in my home city and finally become a great performer and teacher."

Wang Ziyi learned about the Tianjin school two years ago and is one of the graduate students with a major in collaborative piano. The program places extra emphasis on opera-coaching.

"I performed with students from the opera department of Cleveland Institute of Music when I studied there as a soloist. It was an interesting experience to collaborate with the singers. It brings a different kind of joy when I perform with singers, compared to being a soloist," says Wang, who started to play the piano at the age of 5.

"The three majors in the graduate program at Tianjin Juilliard School are all collaborative. It is critical for musicians to collaborate, which enables them to listen to each other and share music," says He Wei, the school's artistic director and dean.

He was born in Chengdu, Southwest China's Sichuan province, and trained at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music before going to the US to study at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1991.

The Tianjin school also hosts a pre-college program, modeled on Juilliard New York's century-old pre-college program, with the Tianjin school's inaugural class launched on Sept 7, 2019. This September, nearly 90 pre-college students aged 8 to 18 came to study at the Tianjin campus every Saturday from around the country, such as Shanghai, Beijing, Xining in Northwest China's Qinghai province, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

"The students have demonstrated unusual commitment throughout the whole process despite some enormous challenges caused by the pandemic. These students look for adventure and they are self-assured and confident enough to embrace the unknown," He says.

According to Brose, once the pandemic is over, the Tianjin school will become a new hub for performing arts, with shows－about 100 concerts a year－by students, faculty members and guest performers opening to the public.

The Shanghai Quartet, a well-known chamber ensemble founded in 1983, will give a recital on Dec 16 at the Tianjin Juilliard School, performing the works of Beethoven.

The quartet, consisting of first violinist Weigang Li, second violinist Angelo Xiang Yu, violist Honggang Li and cellist Nicholas Tzavaras, joined the Tianjin Juilliard School this fall as resident faculty members.