Juilliard tunes in by moving to Tianjin

Joseph Polisi, president of the Juilliard School in New York, on a recent visit to Tianjin.[Photo by Zhang Wei/China Daily]

A major classical music institution, the Juilliard School, makes inroads by opening an overseas campus in Tianjin. Chen Nan reports.

The Chinese had not experienced live performances of such songs as Beethoven's Symphony No 3 when the established New York-based performing arts conservatory, the Juilliard School, played in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in 1987.

"China was a very different place then," the school's president, Joseph Polisi, recalls.

"I've always been fascinated by China, even as a college student."

He studied Chinese history and Chinese contemporary politics.

Over two decades later, Polisi, who has been the president of the Juilliard School since 1984, is bringing a new vision to China－opening a music school in Tianjin.

"It will be our first campus outside New York, which will replicate the Juilliard values. It's an important part of our global strategy," Polisi says.

The new school is expect to open in 2018 in a facility designed by the US architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the same company responsible for the 2006-09 expansion of Juilliard's New York home at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

The school will offer US-accredited master's degrees in orchestral performance, chamber music performance and collaborative piano. In addition, the school will offer an instrumental-training program, adult education and public performances. More than 1,000 students will attend the courses.

It will be a partnership with Tianjin Conservatory of Music, the Tianjin Binhai New Area CBD Administrative Commission and the Tianjin Innovative Finance Investment Company.

"Tianjin provided us with the opportunity to create our own program with our own standards. When you really get there, you can see that things are really happening and will get better," he says.

The Juilliard was introduced to its partners in Tianjin in 2011, and the school's leaders have since visited the city and Beijing over 25 times for meetings and research.

The cooperation was announced by Polisi when China's first lady, Peng Liyuan, visited the Juilliard School in New York on Sept 28, during a weeklong visit to the United States by Peng and her husband, Chinese President Xi Jinping.

"She worked with one of our students, who sang a Chinese folk song in Chinese," recalls Polisi.