Biography
Bell Yung, Professor Emeritus of Music of the University of Pittsburgh where he retired in 2012, is an ethnomusicologist specializing on China. He has also taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University, University of California at Davis, and Cornell University, and is a recipient of research awards from Guggenheim, Ford, Mellon, National Endowment of the Humanities, and others. He has published ten books, most recently, as author, translator, editor, or co-editor, are Remembering Rulan Chao Pian, Harvard’s First Female Professor of Chinese Heritage (2016, in Chinese), Uncle Ng Comes to America: Narrative Songs of Immigration and Love (2013), The Flower Princess, A Cantonese Opera (2010); Music and Cultural Rights (2009), and The Last of China’s Literati: The Music, Poetry and Life of Tsar Teh-yun (2008). Most recent of his 50+ articles are “An Audience of One: The Private Music of the Chinese Literati” (2017), “The Interaction between Past and Present in the Evolution of Qin Compositions: The case of Guanglingsan” (2017, in Chinese), “Intangible cultural heritage, cultural rights, and Cantonese Opera”(2013, in English and in Chinese), “Chinese Music: Graduate Training, Resources, and Publication [in North America]” (2013), “Voices of Hong Kong: the Reconstruction of a Performance in a Teahouse”(2009), “Historical Legacy and the Contemporary World: UNESCO and China’s Qin Music in the 21st Century”(2009).
Bell Yung’s family is from Wuxi, China; he was born in Shanghai and grew up in Hong Kong. He went to the U.S. for higher education, and received the degrees of B.Sc. in Engineering Physics from the University of California in Berkeley, Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Ph.D. in Music from Harvard University. In 2012, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree by the Chinese University of Hong Kong.