The National Conservatory of 1927

Shanghai, 1927, where China's first higher music school put composition, voice and piano into a degree.

A timetable can turn one kind of music into a profession and another into raw material.

Time and place

Shanghai, November 1927. Xiao Youmei founded the National Conservatory with Cai Yuanpei's support; in 1929 it was renamed the National College of Music, moved several times, and employed Chinese, Russian and Italian musicians.

What happened

The National Conservatory opened in Shanghai in November 1927 with Xiao Youmei running it. It had departments for theory and composition, voice, piano and orchestral instruments, and taught through fixed programmes, sight-singing and harmony classes. Huang Zi returned to teach in 1929 and brought European composition teaching into the classroom. In 1934 the student He Luting won a competition organised by Alexander Tcherepnin with his piano piece Buffalo Boy's Flute.

What changed

Music teaching moved from apprenticeship in piano shops to a modern institution with programmes, diplomas and timetables. Composition became a subject that could be taught, requiring harmony, counterpoint, form and orchestration, and then applying those tools to Chinese melody. A catalogue of art songs, piano pieces and music for Chinese orchestras began to accumulate. The school also imported a set of standards, intonation, tone and reading speed, running alongside the oral standards of amateur music societies. The two systems coexisted for decades and never quite respected each other. Students learned not only to play but to fit a folk tune to piano accompaniment, an exercise that became the basic method of the Chinese art song.

Listen for the turn

Begin with Schubert's Der Lindenbaum, where piano triplets and a vocal line establish the first art-song relationship the school taught. Then Kangding Love Song, a short pentatonic tune with a falling phrase ending, the material students rewrote. Finally the north-western huaer, high in range and free in its lengthening, which bel canto training tends to smooth away. Together they show Chinese music education after 1927 setting standards between two kinds of voice, one to be trained and one to be collected.

Related

This turn connects 巴黎音乐学院建立, 中国音乐史分期 and 音乐教育史.

Sources

• 《中国音乐词典》编辑部编，中国音乐词典（人民音乐出版社）— 院系与年代核对，未引用
• Grove Music Online, entry "China, People's Republic of" — conservatory history checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.