Dr Yang Jian (Visiting Scholar at the Faculty during 2013-14) writes:
The 1684 Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, Nicholas Cook was invited to give a lecture tour in China from mid-September to mid-October and was awarded Distinguished Visiting Professorships by Nanjing University of the Arts, Minzu University of China and Central Conservatory of Music. The series of lectures was mainly based on Prof. Cook’s recent book Beyond the Score: Music as Performance and explored what the study of music might look like if performance was seen as the core of music's meaning, rather than as a reproduction of meaning that already exists in the score.
Prof. Nicholas Cook was presented Distinguished Visiting Professorship by the President of Nanjing University of the Arts, Prof. Weidong Liu, an art historian and painter
Warmly welcomed, the lecture tour was hosted by Central Conservatory of Music and co-hosted by Minzu University of China and Nanjing University of the Arts. What made the event more anticipated and special was that in 1980 Prof. Cook’s own doctoral supervisor and former 1684 Professor of Music, Alexander Goehr had given a similar master class series on western modern music and composition at the Central Conservatory which strongly influenced a generation of Chinese composers including Dun Tan, Xiaogang Ye, Qigang Chen, Yi Chen and Long Zhou.