When Chairperson of the Music Department Dr Chan Hing-yan visited the University of York in June 2013 to guest lecture there, and to see his former MPhil student Daniel Lo, he was immediately faced with two questions from teachers there. “First they asked me ‘are all your students this good?’ And then, ‘please can you recommend more to come here?’” he says.

This reaction is indicative of the Music Department’s ‘small but high impact’ programme, whose graduates are repeatedly winning prizes for composition as well as scholarships to some of the best academic institutions around the world.

In addition to Daniel Lo, alumni and students have been making a splash around the world for composition and musicology, while within HKU, the Department has produced four laureates of the prestigious Li Ka Shing Prizes since its inception in 1991, and two have been won by Dr Yang Yuanzheng – one for his MPhil thesis and the other for his PhD thesis. “That is quite an achievement, it is also unique,” says Dr Chan. Dr Yang is now an Assistant Professor in the Department.

Dr Chan puts the success down to three main reasons: quality of the staff, research excellence and a recruitment policy that has given rise to a diverse and unconventional student body. Things haven’t always been this good. In what he terms the ‘dark days’ of the early 2000s there were just four teachers – including Dr Chan – to run the Department together with the postgraduate programme. Now there are seven. “In terms of academic staff,” says Dr Chan, “the relationship among colleagues and in terms of the individual profiles of each teacher – that is individual research profile and international standing – this is the best moment I have ever experienced.”

Postgraduate research is another area of pride. Says Dr Giorgio Biancorosso, Postgraduate Coordinator of the Department: “There’s a tradition of doing research in our Department that has been there since its establishment in 1982, and is partly down to one of the Department’s Founders, Nicholas Cook, who is now Head of the Music Department at Cambridge. In the past five to ten years the Department has gained a consistent reputation for postgraduate study, both locally and regionally – which is in line with HKU’s general shift to a more research-based culture.

Clear agenda

“We are a more cohesive department now, with a good distribution of expertise across the fields, a clear agenda on what needs to be done, both in terms of recruitment and what to teach – what is valuable to the young men and women who come and study with us.”

The international composition of the faculty is diverse both in terms of nationality – Hong Kong, Mainland China, Korea, Italy, Malaysia, UK, and strong connections with Australia and the US – and in terms of coverage and expertise – Professor Daniel Chua, who is also Head of Humanities, is a Beethoven scholar; Dr Biancorosso covers film, opera and aesthetics of Western art music; Dr Youn Kim, a theorist from Korea, does history of music theory in the late 19ᵗʰ century to the early 20ᵗʰ century; Dr Yang Yuanzheng covers cultural identity in Chinese and Japanese music… the list goes on.

And if the faculty are diversified, the student body is even more so. Attracting an international range of students has been a deliberate part of the recruitment programme, formulated by Dr Biancorosso.

“We have been careful to cultivate the Department’s reputation, with frequent attendance at overseas conferences and now the sheer diversity of the student body suggests that HKU Music has real pull abroad,” he says. “Current MPhil and PhD students hail from Hong Kong, Xi’an, Taiwan, England, Spain, Japan, the US and Korea.

“Music’s postgraduate programme is among the most international in HKU and in Hong Kong. This is unusual, particularly for a small department, and it speaks strongly for our ability to attract top-quality students from all parts of the world.”

“This Department is unconventional compared with other music departments in the region,” adds Dr Chan, “and we attract very unconventional students because we don’t just look at their musical achievement when we admit them, we look at the person too. Postgraduate education is not about being a good student, it’s about being original.”

“Given that we are too small to compete with the biggest universities in the US and England, I think the key to our success is that we have been very good at creating a different kind of environment which speaks to the interests of the contemporary student,” concludes Dr Biancorosso. “It isn’t always easy to teach because we combine composers and musicologists – very different animals – but that is one of our strengths, to have both practitioners and scholars. It adds a lot of flavour to the learning environment.” ■

Dr Chan Hing-yan (left) and his former MPhil student Daniel Lo (right), who is now pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of York.