Posts

Finished my final semester duty today with some undergraduate auditions and will be leaving for Oxford in a few days to spend two months at the Bodleian Libraries. Time away is always good for research and writing, so I am looking forward to it. I have started writing on Substack (which means I will probably…

The last two weeks took me to Chicago for the SCSM annual meeting, Atlanta for a guest lecture at Emory University, and Boston for the H.C. Robbins Landon 100 conference. I don’t think I have had this much fun on a trip in a while 😊 I learned a great deal of new things and met awesome…

My uncle just passed away and I am going to his funeral tomorrow in Guangzhou with my family. He was a great father, son, husband, and uncle, but somehow I remember him as the great oldest brother of my dad the most. Their brotherhood stood the test of time, distance, and intergenerational trauma. Filial piety, xiao,…

2025 was probably one of my most travelled years: Shanghai and Beijing for student recruitment (though things in Beijing were cancelled in the end, but in Shanghai I had the experience of visiting the Municipal Educational Examinations Authority); Washington D.C. for a research trip, combined with a short visit to Los Angeles to see my sister…

The movie Parasite (2019) was brought up in yesterday’s class as we were exploring the Finnish composer Kalevi Aho’s Symphony No.7, “Insect Symphony” (1988). I have unsubscribed from Netflix for more than a year (but I have stayed somewhat informed about the potentially addictive by relying on second-hand sources), but Parasite on its own is worth streaming. The first…

In research classes sometimes students wonder about the differences between music analysis and music interpretation. A seemingly simple question that welcomes a range of (simple) answers: one might say, for example, music analysis focuses on the music’s intrinsic elements and structures while music interpretation examines the subjective understanding and experience of music; or, music analysis…