Playlist: Liu Kai, Central Conservatory of Music Professor on Teaching Marginalized Students

It would be an understatement to call Liu Kai an elite musician. The 34-year-old piano prodigy frequently performs at the Houhai-adjacent East Shore Live Jazz Café, is a lecturer at, and alumnus of, the Central Conservatory of Music, has taught piano to students at the Berklee College of Music, and most impressively of all, is the first Chinese scholar to be accepted in the world-renowned Jacques Dalcroze Method Diplôme superior program in Geneva, Switzerland. And yet, Liu hasn’t let any of that go to his head, dedicating much of his professional life to teaching music lessons to marginalized Chinese students at BN Vocational School in Wangjing. Below, Liu lists which songs he uses to help open his students up to a new world of music.

“Heal the World” - Michael Jackson
I taught my students this song for a charity concert performance. Its themes of goodwill suited the event perfectly and I also liked it because it’s rhythmically challenging and because the lyrics are difficult to sing. I implored my students to learn the lyrics and understand the story behind this song. They all grew to have a deep affection for it, practicing every day, even when I wasn’t there. When they performed it, they were accompanied by my band, which was something they had never experienced before. It was a very powerful and unforgettable experience for all of us.

“小河淌水/Little Stream is Flowing”
This is a traditional Yunnan folk song. Its lyrics tell a love story of a boy and a girl who live in the mountains. I begin my lessons by performing songs for students, and when I played it for them they fell in love with it immediately. They each tried to sing with a beautiful voice and tried to imagine what the mountains described in the song looked like.

I enjoyed working with at this vocational school so much that I extended my volunteering period and eventually wrote a curriculum. Chinese folk songs became a strong component of that curriculum because I felt they helped the students delve into their nation’s identity, and they even learned geography through a folk music lens.

“相信爱/Believe in Love” - Na Ying
This is a widely known Chinese pop song by Na Ying [best known for her role as a judge on The Voice of China]. I think it was meaningful for the students because the lyrics emphasized the importance of believing in love, and how love can help us join together and work out our differences.

“Vois Sur Ton Chemin” - The Chorus OST [2004]
The music in this movie is so great that it became an international hit. I screened it for my class and then I taught them this song. It was fun to work on French pronunciation together but more challenging still was the fact that this is a polyphonic song with two parts, and the students learned to sing it with a stable voice. I was extremely satisfied with the result – in fact, it was one of my proudest moments as a teacher because my class learned to sing it fluently, which was a huge sign of progress for them.

If you’d like to get involved or make a donation to the BN Vocational School, click here.

This article first appeared in the Jan/Feb 2018 issue of the Beijinger.
Read the issue via Issuu online here, or access it as a PDF here.

More stories by this author here.
Email: kylemullin@truerun.com
Twitter: @MulKyle
Instagram: mullin.kyle

Photos: Uni You