Performance Information
Artistic Vision
Melody of China Musician Bios
A Brief History of Shaolin
Kung Fu and Ballet
Shaolin Martial Arts
Shaolin Philosophy and
Chan Buddhism
Seven Shaolin Temple Stories
The Temple in Modern Times
Early Buddhist Art in China
Sources
Rehearsal Video

Melody of China Musician Bios

Miguel Frasconi (Composer)

Miguel Frasconi has been active as a composer and performer of new exploratory world music for more than twenty years. He has worked with many of new music's most respected innovators, including John Cage, Jon Hassell, Trichy Sankaran, and James Tenney. From 1977-86 he was a founding member of The Glass Orchestra, the internationally acclaimed ensemble featuring all glass instruments. Over the last few years, he has been composer and music director for many cutting-edge performances, including Larry Reed's film-like shadow play In Xanadu, Sten Rudstrøm's multi-media extravaganza Theater of Cruelty, and Remy Charlip's Harlequin, the children's musical recently performed with 600 singing and dancing children. He has created over two dozen dance scores and received a 1997 Isadora Duncan Dance Award for his work with Alonzo King's LINES Ballet. Frasconi also performs regularly with the Paul Dresher Ensemble, the Tibetan songwriter Techung, and his own Galapagos Project, and has performed in a concert in India for the Dalai Lama.

Hong Wang  (Musical Director, Musician)
Hong Wang is the Artistic Director of Melody of China, Inc. a San Francisco-based Chinese musical ensemble. In addition to performing internationally on a variety of instruments—for the premiere of LINES Ballet’s Shaolin piece, he plays erhu, banhu, zhonghu (Chinese fiddles), morin khuur (horse head cello), bawu, xiao, dizi (bamboo flutes), xun (clay flute) and drum—Hong Wang is also a music educator and composer. He graduated from Nanjing Normal University's Music Department, where he specialized in the erhu, oboe, and composition. He has performed in Meredith Monk's opera Atlas, and for the world premiere of Tan Dun’s 2000 Today in Shanghai, with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra; as a soloist, he has performed at Waldbühne in Berlin 2000 with the Berlin Philharmonic, as well as with the San Francisco Symphony for several Chinese New Year concerts (2004, 2006, and 2007). Hong Wang has also collaborated with jazz musicians Max Roach and David Murray, and with Anthony Brown's Asian American Orchestra.  
 
Shenshen Zhang (Musician)
Shenshen Zhang, a pipa soloist, earned her bachelor's degree in Performance and her master's degree in Musicology. She has performed on the pipa (Chinese lute) in many venues in China, as well as in Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Shenshen Zhang has held solo recitals in China (2003) and in Half Moon Bay, California (2007); she has also performed with Japanese samisen soloist Masahiro Nitta (2007), with the Xiamen Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra (2001), with the Silk Strings Quartet (1999-2005),  and at the Xieman Opera House (1992-2005).   This is her debut with Melody of China.

Wanpeng Guo (Musician)
The former principal sheng (Chinese mouth organ) player of the Central National Orchestra of China, Wangpeng Guo was honored as a First-Class Performer by Cultural Department of the People's Republic of China in 1997.  As a member of the Central National Orchestra, Wanpeng Guo toured throughout the United States, including performances with world-renowned cellist YoYo Ma at Carnegie Hall in New York, at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, and at the Music Center in Los Angeles.  In 1997 and 1998, he was principle sheng player of the Asian Orchestra, a ensemble formed by national master instrumentalists from China, Japan, and Korea. In 1999, Wanpeng Guo performed with the Central National Orchestra in Austria, Germany and Denmark. Since 2003, as a member of Melody of China, he has participated in many festivals in the US; he also been a soloist in the Chinese New Year Concert with the San Francisco Symphony.