The qin and the zheng sing elegantly, and the gardens are filled with peaches and plums. A meaningful guzheng and guqin concert, "The First Maoya Teacher and Student Concert", was successfully concluded at the Edo-Tokyo Museum Concert Hall.

Tokyo University of Music, with a history of 115 years, has officially established a master's program for Chinese guzheng and guqin performance since 2020, and a doctoral program will be added in 2022. This is the first time that two representative national musical instruments of our country have entered the formal independent professional curriculum of Japanese higher music institutes.

Among them, there are many music scholars and performers, and the first person to be appointed as the instructor of the master-doctoral double course is Mao Ya, a famous Chinese guzheng performer and music scholar.

Mao Ya graduated from the Central Conservatory of Music in her early years, and later obtained a doctorate from Tokyo University of the Arts and stayed there to teach. Later, she was invited as a visiting researcher at Columbia University in the United States. For a long time, she has actively contributed to the academic exchanges between China and Japan, as well as the overseas dissemination of Chinese zheng music.

At the "First Mao Ya Teacher-Student Concert", Mao Ya led the first batch of guzheng and guqin graduate students from Tokyo University of Music, Chen Min, Cai Bowen, Wang Huili, Yuan Manling, Ye Tingting, Huang Tong, Li Kongyang and others (two of them). Due to the epidemic, he was stranded overseas and could not be present), and instead of using any accompaniment musical instruments, only the guzheng and guqin were used to present an auditory feast to the audience. From traditional to modern, and even improvisation and electro-acoustic, the performers fully demonstrated the charm of two representative national musical instruments in my country with the help of colorful performance styles.

At the concert site, guests gathered and the seats were full. Such a grand occasion was especially commendable during the new crown epidemic.


Among the guests present, there are many famous Japanese music scholars, music critics, composers and performers from universities or research institutions such as Tokyo University of Music, Tokyo University of the Arts, Topo Gakuen, Oberlin University, and Beizhong Research Institute; There are also representatives of Chinese folk art groups active in the Japanese art world, well-known Chinese artists in Japan, and international friends in Japan; there are also two Japanese folk musical instrument manufacturers SEION Co., Ltd. The representative of Qingyin and Guangan Co., Ltd.

The music critics and scholars present were immersed in the moving performances. They had great expectations for the newly opened multicultural music research field of Tokyo University of Music, and said, "This is a new attempt in the field of music research education. , which not only means a huge challenge, but also has far-reaching significance.

Although today's concert only shows a small part of the majors, I can already see the first step of success in it. As a colleague in the field of music research and education, I feel very gratified. This is a full-fledged concert. I hope more Japanese friends will come to listen to it. Japanese students majoring in music should learn more about some attractive national musical instruments like the guzheng. "