On Nov. 18, 2012, Prof. Liqun Luo gave the talk of “Understanding the Brain”. It was a very fun and engaged talk. The audience was enlightened.

Our brain is the command center of our body. Do you ever wonder how it controls/affects what we do, how we feel, how we learn, etc, etc, etc? Recent technological advances have helped us understand a little how our brain works. Our local expert Liqun helped us understand how.

On June 5, 2011, “Rhapsody in Red – The Path of Western Classical Music In China” was presented by Jindong Cai, Gretchen B. Kimball, Director of Orchestral Studio and Associate Professor (performance) of Music, together with his wife Sheila Melvin. The Campbell Recital Hall was packed with the audience. It was very impressed presentation.

The following is a description of the event provided by Jindong:

“Western classical music first came to China 400 years ago. Since its arrival, it has almost always served a non-musical purpose – missionaries used it to convert, emperors to impress, intellectuals to change China, and Communists as a propaganda tool. Indeed, over the years Western music has become so closely intertwined with Chinese politics that the two are sometimes hard to separate.

We will begin this story with the arrival of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, who presented a clavichord to the Chinese emperor and began a long tradition of Western music performance and study in the Forbidden City. We will then go to the post-Opium War era when China’s first symphony orchestra was created and the first conservatory was founded in Shanghai. We will explore how music became political when China was engulfed by WWII and musicians began to use music as a tool for fighting the Japanese and spreading Marxist and Maoist propaganda.

We will also explore Soviet influence in the 1950s, the destruction of Western music in the Cultural Revolution, and the creation of the “revolutionary model operas.” We will explain how a whole new generation of Chinese musicians emerged after the Cultural Revolution, see how music and the performing arts are flourishing in China today, and finally consider how the outside world might react to the coming return of China as a global cultural power.

We will have some music performance on video/audio, but we should have some live performances as well.”