A History of Teaching Western Music History at the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing, China

The history of teaching Western Music history at the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM) in Beijing, China is most easily reviewed by a survey of the music history textbooks used at the Conservatory. At its founding in 1950, the CCOM used a textbook created by a Soviet musicologist which focused on Marxist ideas of history, such as historical materialism. Since then, successive generations of Chinese musicologists have written their own textbooks and brought their own historical perspectives to writing Western music history. Chinese scholars have also availed themselves of the best musicological scholarship in translation. The paper concludes with a comparison between the two-semester undergraduate survey courses taught at the CCOM and the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.