Juilliard gives honorary Ph.D. to Peng

Peng Liyuan, wife of President Xi Jinping and a wellknown soprano, received an honorary doctorate from the Juilliard School at China Conservatory of Music in Beijing on Dec 6, according to the conservatory’s website.

Juilliard President Joseph W. Polisi, who conferred the honorary degree on Peng, delivered a speech at the ceremony, saying that it was not only in recognition of Peng’s accomplishments as an artist but also for her contribution to cultural exchanges between China and the United States.

Peng, an alumna of the conservatory, said at the ceremony on Wednesday: “This is an honor not only for myself, but also for Chinese folk music. It exemplifies the increasingly closer cultural exchanges between China and the United States. I hope cooperation between art schools and organizations of the two countries will be deepened in the future.”

A traditional Chinese music orchestra from the conservatory and a string quartet from the Juilliard School performed during the ceremony.

Peng began promoting exchanges between the Juilliard School and China when she visited the school in New York on Sept 28, 2015, while accompanying Xi on his state visit to the US.

“Peng worked with one of our students, who sang a Chinese folk song in Chinese. … She is a musician and a music educator. It was a magical and unique moment to have the first lady with us,” Polisi said in an earlier interview with China Daily.

During Peng’s visit, Polisi announced that the school would launch its first overseas campus in China, the Tianjin Juilliard School, which is scheduled to open in September 2019.

The Tianjin Juilliard School will offer US-accredited fulltime master’s degrees in orchestral performance, chamber music performance and concert piano performance. It will also offer parttime programs for pre-college students, adult education and public performances.

In June, Polisi was in Tianjin for the school’s groundbreaking ceremony in the Tianjin Binhai New Area.

The Juilliard School, founded in New York in 1905, has trained some of the world’s great artists, such as Van Cliburn, Renee Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma.

The Juilliard School has enrolled students from China since the 1920s. Thirty percent of its students in New York are from outside the US, and Chinese are the largest single group of its overseas students. It has about 70 Chinese students, most of whom are in the music division.