Eleventh East Meets West Virtual Concert and Forum: Feb.15, 8 pm

The Confucius Institute at Alfred University (CIAU) will present the next East Meets West Concert and Discussion at 8 pm Tuesday, Feb. 15: How Western Music Came to China, and How Chinese Music was Introduced to the Western World. The CIAU welcomes Jindong Cai, distinguished conductor, author, and educator, and his wife, Sheila Melvin, renowned writer and consultant, who will lead this discussion on the Zoom platform

Regular guests at the East Meets West series may remember Jindong Cai as the conductor for Zhou Long’s oratorio, Men of Iron and The Golden Spike, featured in the CIAU concert last June. He is the director of the US-China Music Institute, co-director of the Chinese Music Development Initiative, and professor of music and arts at Bard College. Prior to joining Bard, he was a professor of performance at Stanford University. Over his 30-year career, Cai has established himself as an active and dynamic conductor, a scholar of Western classical music in China, and a leading advocate of music from across Asia. Together with his wife, he has co-authored Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese as well as Beethoven in China: How the Great Composer Became an Icon in the People’s Republic.

Rhapsody in Red was short-listed for the Saroyan Prize in 2005, and co-author Sheila Melvin also is the author of  Beethoven in China (Penguin, 2016) and The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra: Music Connecting Worlds (Sanlian, 2019 limited edition). Ms. Melvin’s writing on the arts in Asia, primarily China, has been published in The International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The San Jose Mercury News, The Wilson Quarterly, and other publications. The author of The Little Red Book of China Business (Sourcebooks, 2008), she also is a writer for the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and has spent many years working for the US-China Business Council.

Registration for How Western Music Came to China, and How Chinese Music was Introduced to the Western World is required. Register here or scan the bar code on the poster pictured above. There will also be a registration link on the Facebook page of the Almond 20th Century Club Library.

This series is organized by CIAU and co-sponsored by the Alfred Box of Books, Almond 20th Century Club Library, the Cuba Circulating Library, the Hornell Public Library, the David A. Howe Library in Wellsville, the Wimodaughsian Library of Canisteo, the Performing Arts Division of Alfred University, and the Music Department of China University of Geosciences.