On April 1 - April 11, 2005, the Tour Group of the Capital University Community Music School took a trip to China. The following pages contain a journal I kept while on that trip, reproduced verbatim as accurately as I could in the transfer from handwriting to HTML (although I must admit to fixing some spelling mistakes). Be warned that I wrote down things as I thought of them, often juxtaposing unrelated ideas that I just wanted to get down before I forgot them, or adding things out of order after I remembered them. One formatting difference here is that I have skipped a line wherever I started a new sentence at the left margin in the original journal. Text in bold is commentary that I added while typing this up.
The Tour Group comprises nearly all violin students from ages 10 to 18, the exceptions (for the 2004-2005 season) being one cello student, one parent playing miscellanous percussion, and one piano accompanist (for the rare occasions on this trip where a piano was available). Daniel and Richard are both in the group. Technically, Maryanne isn't, but she and several younger siblings of other Tour Group members played for part of each concert. Merf is the piano accompanist.
But first some background. The reason we went to China and not, say, Disney World, is the Leonard family. Rick and Ruth Leonard used to live in central Ohio (where we are) and have two sons, Neil and Thomas. Neil used to be in the Tour Group, and in fact he and Ruth were along for the group's trip to Arizona & New Mexico in 2003 (which was my first outing with the Tour Group (but the second for the rest of the family)). Not long after that, though, the Leonards moved to Xin Xiang, China, to teach English at a university there. This prompted, Doug Locke, Director of the Tour Group, to begin looking for a way out to Xin Xiang to visit the Leonards and share some music with Chinese string students there.
A big part of the planning for this trip was the connection between the Tour Group and the Da He Music School, where Neil and Thomas are continuing their violin studies. Facilitated by the Leonards, Doug and the director of Da He agreed on a set of Chinese pieces that the Tour Group students would learn. Also, Doug commissioned a new work from Catherine McMichael, named Friendship Journey, that the Da He and Tour Group students would both learn so they could play it together in China. Friendship Journey incorporates parts of both the Chinese and US national anthems, along with original melodies. (Shameless commercial plug: You can get a CD containing all the music the Tour Group played in their concerts for this school year (except, unfortunately, the excellent Deer in the Headlights, their encore) by contacting Doug Locke (dlocke at-sign capital.edu).)
It would be hard to overstate the contribution of the Leonards to the success of this trip. They arranged several concerts in Xin Xiang, arranged for us to tour the Da He Music School, arranged for us to tour the school where their sons now attend, arranged for families from that school to take us home for lunch one day in small groups, and in general provided for us to have an experience that was away from the touristy places and more representative of the real China.