The Central Conservatory of Music left a piece of itself behind in Tianjin in 1958: the faculty and students who stayed founded a new school on the old campus, first called Hebei Conservatory of Music and renamed a year later. That school, today’s Tianjin Conservatory of Music, has trained music, dance, drama and film talent for 65 years, with Miao Tianrui, a distinguished music educator and theorist, as its founding president.
Approved in 1980 as one of China’s first degree-granting conservatories, the school now offers three first-level master’s programs, in art theory, music and dance, and drama and film, plus a professional MFA program. Music and dance, along with drama and film, are municipal key disciplines, and music and dance has been selected for Tianjin’s top-tier discipline cultivation plan. Among its 12 undergraduate majors, four hold national first-class program status, music performance, musicology, composition and choreography, while musicology and music performance are national characteristic programs.
The conservatory occupies two campuses, north and south, with about 3,200 full-time students, of whom some 550 are postgraduates, taught by a faculty of over 440. Its alumni span generations of Chinese music, from the composers Shi Guangnan and Alateng Aole and the musicologist Tian Qing to the singers Tengger and Qubi Awu, and recent recruitment has brought the tenor Wang Hongwei to Tianjin on a full-time basis alongside a roster of celebrated composers, conductors and singers serving as master’s supervisors.
Practice is built into the curriculum. Five youth ensembles, a traditional orchestra, symphony orchestra, choir, drama troupe and dance company, keep students on stage, and research runs from a key national social science project on the performance system of Chinese national opera to an original opera about Yue Fei, the famed Song-dynasty general, which has been staged and toured. A revived production of the opera Heart to Heart won the outstanding production award at the China Opera Festival.
International ties put the conservatory in rare company. With The Juilliard School of New York it established the Tianjin Juilliard Research Institute, which enrolled its first graduate students in September 2020 and held its first graduation in May 2022, and the associated Tianjin Juilliard School campus opened in October 2021. Beyond Juilliard, long-running partnerships link the school to the Moscow and St. Petersburg conservatories, the Hanover University of Music, and conservatories in Naples and Copenhagen, among dozens of institutions.
Six decades after the Central Conservatory departed, the school that stayed in Tianjin counts the Juilliard School as a partner and numbers its alumni among China’s leading musicians. The part of an institution left behind in 1958 has long since made the city its own stage.
Data Source: TJCM Official Website (as of 2023)
