By Stephanie Powell
The Juilliard School has announced it will open a campus in China, the Tianjin Juilliard School, in 2018. The campus, which will be Juilliard’s first campus outside of its historic New York grounds, will be the first performing-arts institution in China to offer a US-accredited master’s degree. “I believe that maintaining Juilliard’s prominence in the global performing-arts landscape will depend on a robust series of programs to engage with a wide range of learners in different parts of the world,” Joseph W. Polisi, Juilliard’s president, said in a statement.
The Tianjin Juilliard School, which will have an estimated 200 students, will offer a range of classes and lessons for all ages and skill levels. Its master of music degree program will offer studies in orchestral performance, chamber-music performance, and collaborative piano. “We did a careful study of what [programs] were currently being offered in China, what we saw ourselves, where we felt needs were, and we spoke to many educators and professional musicians and these three areas we concluded would be useful,” Polisi says over the phone from his New York office.
Advertisement
“It’s an idea I’ve felt has come of time—it’s the right time for Juilliard and it’s the right time for China,” he says, admitting he’s always thought there was great potential in the arts in China. “On the Juilliard side, we have made a strategic commitment to have much more global activity; we’ve always been an international school—we’ve had teachers and students from all over the world—but we haven’t been a global school in the sense that we’ve been pretty New York–centric. Our efforts will now be not only, of course, in New York, but will be having an impact around the world.”
The school will also offer a pre-college program, an instrumental training program, adult education, and public performances and exhibits. “We see a continuous flow of Juilliard New York faculty who will provide seminars, workshops, recitals, that sort of thing,” he says. Juilliard will also begin bringing members of its staff to China for master classes and performances at the Tianjin Conservatory of Music to focus on development work before the campus’ opening.
“Fundamentally the program we want to offer in China, we want it to be an authentic Juilliard experience,” he says, “and we want the level of excellence and the level of activities to be very close to what one might experience in New York, obviously with a different emphasis, so we’re starting small and we’re starting very focused to see how it evolves.”
For more information, visit juilliard.edu.