Modern Popular Music Education

Music conservatories and private performing art schools not only train professionals, but also offer a number of training courses to the general public. The privately established Beijing Midi School of Music established in 1993 offers a number of courses in pop and rock performance, including jazz. State-owned conservatories also offer interdisciplinary programs such as art management and electronic audio engineering. Some conservatories have joined forces to establish private music schools. The Central Conservatory in Beijing, The Shanghai Conservatory, and the Xinghai Conservatory in Guangzhou, for example, jointly founded the Guangzhou School of Piano Stars. The aforementioned Beijing Midi School of Music focuses on modern music genres as rock, jazz and blues. Its mission is “to promote an artistic and humanistic theory of modern music while offering classes in advanced musical techniques.” The School's Dean Zhang Fan says that when the school was established, education in modern music was virtually non-existent and that nobody really knew how to teach modern music education or what precisely should be taught. When he became dean of the school, the first thing he did was to select and translate modern music teaching materials from abroad. Zhang and his assistants spent almost two years translating and editing teaching materials for guitar, bass, drums and other instruments. Modern music education is by no means confined to The Beijing Midi School. The popular music department at the Shenyang Conservatory of Music in northeast China’s Liaoning Province, for example, began teaching programs of pop, jazz and karaoke singing in the mid 1990s.