RUNDOWN:
17:45    Registration
18:00    Opening Remarks
18:15    Panel Discussion 1: Cultural Harmony in Musical Diversity: Exploring Cross-Cultural Narratives Through Music.
18:55    Break
19:00    Panel Discussion 2: Demonstration & Sharing from Wu Man and Musicians on their music paths
19:45    Closing Remarks
20:00    End

ASHK Members Ticket: HKD 100
Non-Members Ticket: HKD 120

Asia Society Hong Kong Center (ASHK) is pleased to host Wu Man, a prominent musician in pipa, and Fairouz Nishanova, Director of the Aga Khan Music Programme, to discuss cultural harmony in musical diversity, in conversation with S. Alice Mong, the President of Asia Society Hong Kong Center. Additionally, Wu Man and the musicians will share insights into their musical paths and provide demonstrations.

Wu Man belongs to a rare group of musicians who have redefined the role of their instruments, in her case, the pipa, a pear-shaped, four-stringed Chinese lute with a rich history spanning centuries. She is celebrated as one of the most prominent instrumentalists of traditional Chinese music, as well as a composer and educator. She has premiered hundreds of new works for the pipa, and has performed in recital and with major orchestras around the world. She is a frequent collaborator with ensembles such as the Kronos and Shanghai Quartets and The Knights, and is a founding member of the Silkroad Ensemble. She has appeared in more than 40 recordings throughout her career, including the Silkroad Ensemble’s Grammy Award-winning recording Sing Me Home, featuring her composition “Green (Vincent’s Tune).” She is also a featured artist in the 2015 Emmy Award-winning documentary The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble.

Born in Hangzhou, China, Wu Man studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where she became the first recipient of a master's degree in pipa. At age 13, she was recognized as a child prodigy and a national role model for young pipa players. Ms. Wu is a recipient of the 2023 National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), one of the United States’ most prestigious honors in folk and traditional arts. In 2023 she was additionally honored with the Asia Society’s Asia Arts Game Changers Award, an annual award presented in New York City honoring artists and arts professionals for their significant contributions to contemporary art. She is a Visiting Professor at her alma mater the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and a Distinguished Professor at the Zhejiang and the Xi'an Conservatories. In 2021 she received an honorary Doctorate of Music from the New England Conservatory of Music. She has also served as Artistic Director of the Xi’an Silk Road Music Festival at the Xi'an Conservatory.

Fairouz Nishanova is a cultural development specialist with a lifelong love of performing arts, music and dance that embraces the many styles and traditions of the lands where she has lived, worked, and travelled. Born in Sri Lanka to Uzbek parents, she grew up in Amman, Jordan and studied economics, history and international relations at Moscow State University and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Ms Nishanova began her career at the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation and continued at the United Nations’s Economic Commission for Europe. She joined the Aga Khan Development Network in 2000 has served as Director of the Aga Khan Music Programme at the Geneva-based Trust for Culture since 2005.

The Aga Khan Music Programme is an interregional music and arts education program with worldwide performance, outreach, mentoring, and artistic production activities. The Initiative designs and implements a country-specific set of activities for each country into which it invests and works to promote revitalisation of cultural heritage both as a source of livelihood for musicians and as a means to strengthen pluralism in nations where it is challenged by social, political, and economic constraints. Besides running AKMP, Ms. Nishanova is closely involved in AKDN’s inter-agency activities on social and cultural development.

Sanubar Sanubar is not only a well-known singer in Xinjiang, but also a renowned Uyghur musician active on the international music scene. In recent years, Sanubar has been active internationally, releasing albums in Italy, and touring in Europe and America as a featured musician, gaining more recognition through collaborations with the famous Chinese pipa player, Wu Man.

Sanubar Tursun was born into a musical family in Yili, Xinjiang. From a young age, she learned Muqam, folk songs, and played the dutar and yangqin under her father's guidance. She graduated from Xinjiang Arts University majoring in yangqin. In 1993, she won the third prize in the yangqin category at the "National Ethnic Instrumental Music Invitational Competition" in Nanjing. In 2003, she was invited to participate in the West Singing Competition at the Zhongshan Park Music Hall in Beijing as a folk singer. Between 1992 and 2013, she released 10 albums, composed over 100 songs, and published a collection of her compositions.

From 2011 to 2016, she held solo concerts in London, Paris, Venice, Edinburgh, Boston, Toronto, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, Singapore, and other places. In 2017, as a special guest singer, Sanubar joined the national tour of "Borderlands: Wu Man and the Silk Road Masters Concert", performing in various venues across China, introducing traditional music from Xinjiang and receiving enthusiastic welcome from audiences nationwide.

Basel Rajoub is a composer and saxophonist who has honed both a distinctive sound and an original musical language for the saxophone inspired by the rich melodic and rhythmic vocabulary of the Middle East. Born in Aleppo, Syria, Rajoub graduated from the Damascus High Institute of Music, where he majored in trumpet. Later, he taught himself to play the saxophone and began composing for the various ensembles in which he has performed. His compositions draw on the characteristic microtonal intervals of Middle Eastern music to illuminate a panoramic emotional world that extends from prayer to dance. A resident of Geneva, Switzerland, Rajoub serves as Artistic Director of the Oriental Orchestra at Haute école de musique Genève.

Sirojiddin Juraev grew up in the bilingual Tajik-Uzbek cultural milieu of northern Tajikistan, where he learned to play the two-stringed dutar at a young age and subsequently, the tanbur and sato. His music education blended two paths: traditional master-disciple oral transmission and conservatory-style studies rooted in music notation and theory. Juraev began composing while still a student. “One day I played a melody that had just come into my head, as if I’d heard it in a dream,” Juraev recalled. “I asked my teacher whether he had heard that melody before, and he said no, he was hearing it for the first time. Later I made up other melodies and people really liked them.They told me that I was a composer.”

Feras Charestan has devoted his musical career to the art of the qanun and developed a unique performance style on this ancient and ubiquitous instrument of the Middle East and Mediterranean Basin. Born in Al-Hasakeh, in the northeast of Syria, Charestan studied qanun at the High Institute of Music in Damascus and quickly became a sought-after soloist with symphony orchestras as well as a member of popular bands and contemporary music ensembles. It was only after relocating to Stockholm, Sweden, that Charestan began composing his own music, which blends Middle Eastern melodic modes and genres with elements of a European sensibility in a musical style that is very much his own.

Abbos Kosimov was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, into a musical family. A disciple of the honored Uzbek doira player Tuychi Inogomov and winner of the Competition  of Percussion Instruments of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, Kosimov established his own doira school in 1994 and his ensemble, Abbos, in 1998. Kosimov performs interna- tionally with Zakir Hussain and Randy Gloss’s percussion group Hand’s OnSemble and recorded with Stevie Wonder. Kosimov has composed many works for his Abbos Ensemble and, after joining AKMM, began to expand his compositional oeuvre to other combinations of instruments. “Nowruz,” the title track of the present album, is his first composition for AKMM.

Jasser Haj Youssef was born in Monastir, Tunisia and studied both classical European music and classical Arabic music (maqām) from an early age. His first instrument was the violin. Later he began playing the Baroque viola d’amore, which has sympathetic string that are not bowed, but create a rich, resonant sound. Haj Youssef’s professional career has merged his interests and talents in the improvisatory art of maqām, classical chamber and orchestral music, jazz, and world music. He currently resides in Paris, where he is active as a performer, composer, teacher, and jury member for international competitions. He has composed works for the Paris Chamber Orchestra, the early music group Les Musiciens du Louvre, and many others.

S. Alice Mong (Moderator) is President of Asia Society Hong Kong Center (ASHK), an independent non-governmental educational organization established in 1990. Ms. Mong previously served as the Executive Director of ASHK from August 2012 until 2024, and as a consultant to ASHK in preparation for the February 2012 opening of its permanent home at the Former Explosives Magazine in Admiralty.  Prior to ASHK, Ms. Mong worked in New York for almost a decade in the non-profit sector in senior management positions. She was the Director of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) from 2009 to 2011, overseeing the expansion project of the 30-year-old organization. She stepped down as Museum Director in July 2011 after successfully transforming the museum from a New York Chinatown institution into a leading national museum dedicated to preserving and presenting the history, heritage, culture and diverse experiences of people of Chinese descent in the United States. Ms. Mong also served as the Executive Director for the Committee of 100 in the United States, a Chinese-American non-profit membership organization founded by architect I.M. Pei and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. She began her career at the Ohio Department of Development in Ohio, and later became Managing Director of the Ohio Office of East and Southeast Asia in Hong Kong. Ms. Mong worked for Hang Lung Property Group from 1995 to 2002. She serves as a Member of the Board of Directors of The Ohio State University Alumni Association.

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