Concerts in the Courtyard: The Chinese Landscape
The "Concerts In The Courtyard" series is held at the East Brunswick Public Library. This performance will be held INDOORS in the Meeting Rooms.
Grant funding has been provided by the Middlesex County Board of County Commissioners through a grant award from the Middlesex County Cultural and Arts Trust Fund, and through the East Brunswick Friends of the Library. This event is co-hosted by the East Brunswick Arts Commission.
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山水畫
The Chinese Landscape in Poetry, Music, and Ink.
For centuries the stunning and varied beauty of the Chinese landscape has inspired, and continues to inspire poets, painters, and musicians alike. This multi-media presentation brings together three art forms inspired by it: poetry, music, and painting. Westminster Conservatory faculty members Fang-Ting Liu (piano), and Timothy Urban (voice) in collaboration with East Brunswick musician Shaolin Liu (er-hu) and Dr. Shunzhu Wang of the Foreign Language and Literature Program of Rider University have prepared a panoply of poetry, both recited and sung, and instrumental music performed against a backdrop of projected images of historic paintings, calligraphy, and pictures of the landscape which inspired them. Featuring poems by some of China’s most renown poets of the Tang and Song Dynasties, (Su Shi, Li Bai, Wang Wei) as well as poets of the early 20th century (Xu Zhi Mo, Liu Ban Nong) and music for er-hu inspired by the remote frontiers of Western China, this program showcases how Chinese artistic culture has for centuries drawn inspiration from the natural wonders of the surrounding landscape.
Timothy Urban holds graduate degrees in both voice and recorder performance and early music performance practice as well as a Ph.D. in music theory and history. He has performed in solo and chamber recitals in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Hungary, and Brazil and is a regular performer in Westminster Conservatory faculty recitals where he has taught since 1995. He has sung with the associate chorus of New York City Opera, Syracuse Opera, and Tri-Cities operas as well as with semi-professional choirs in New York City. While on a Fulbright scholarship for study at the Kodály Institute in Hungary, he sang and recorded with Ars Nova, a choir specializing in contemporary choral music.
Dr. Urban has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in music theory, history, and ear-training at Westminster Choir College, and Seton Hall University and coordinates the undergraduate ear-training program at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
Born in Taiwan, Fang-Ting Liu (NCTM) received a Master of Music degree with distinction in Piano Performance and Piano Accompanying from Westminster Choir College of Rider University. She has been a piano faculty member at Westminster Conservatory Since 2003,
Ms. Liu’s passion for music brought her to the United States after she had completed her bachelor’s degree in piano, violin and organ at Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. In 1995, she made her debut concert as an honorable solo pianist with the Manhattan Festival Orchestra in New York City. After being awarded first prize at the Piano Competition held at Westminster Choir College, she entered the Piano Performance program and studied under Ena Bronstein Barton and German Diez (both pupils of Claudio Arrau). During this time, she also joined the Piano Accompanying and Coaching program, studying under J.J. Penna and Dalton Baldwin.
Dr. Shunzhu Wang, received his B.A. in English Language and Literature from Jiangsu Teachers’ College (Soochow University), P.R.C. and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Purdue University, U.S. A prolific writer, editor and translator, Dr. Wang has published seven books and numerous articles, in English as well as in Chinese, on various subjects such as Chinese culture and literature, American culture and literature, Asian-American literature, critical theory, western rhetoric and political corruption. His publications have appeared in America, and Taiwan, as well as mainland China. Two of his books: 当代文学批评 (Contemporary Literary Criticism), and 世纪30年代至80年代的美国文学批评 (translation of American Literary Criticism), were listed as the top recommended books in China in 2017 and 2018, he has been quoted in many academic articles and books in China and U. S.
He has also presented numerous papers at academic conferences at national and international levels, in Spain, Poland, France, China as well as US. He was invited as a keynote speaker at the “Post-modern Theory Seminar” in Suchoow University in 2005, and at the “Forum on Native Literature and Literary Criticism from a Global Perspective” in Yancheng, China in 2019.
He serves as a referee to Comparative Literary Studies(CLS), an academic journal publishes critical comparative essays on literature, cultural production, the relationship between aesthetics and political thought, and histories and philosophies of form across the world, MELUS, a well-known academic journal of The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature in the United States, published by Oxford UP, and Mosaic, an internationally known academic journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, published by University of Manitoba, Canada. is an invited guest editor for China National Knowledge Infrsatrucute (CNKI) International Publishing Center and referee for its Selected Academic Journal Translation Project（中文精品学术期刊外文版数字出版工程） and its Translation Express; He also
Dr. Wang had taught at Bennington College before coming to Rider University, where he is currently a professor of Chinese at the Department of LL&C.