Zhang Yifei’s Notebooks: Contributions to Transnational Music Teaching

The aim of this paper is the presentation of reflections on the main issues that arose in the reorganization of the Second Cycle of Drama, Art and Music (University of Bologna), which is conducted by teachers of musicological and ethnomusicological disciplines together with students, in order to examine the need to employ different approaches to multidisciplinary teaching in graduate studies. Graduate studies have recorded a significant number of foreign students in recent years, mostly from the Far East, and especially from China, which represents a challenge for multidisciplinary teaching of musicology and ethnomusicology due to the differences between the language cultures. The authors recognize two levels of problems in the implementation of study programs and the organization of teaching: 1) the need to make a specific music lexicon suitable even for non-specialized students without lowering the level of didactic proposals for music curriculum students; 2) the strategy of relations with international students, mostly from the Far East, who generally possess excellent technical musical skills (resulting from the previous schooling at music academies or conservatories), who encounter several language problems, which are often related to the idea of studying and learning human sciences in general (in the case of students of the Far Eastern origin, the culture of learning and the perception of the methodology of teaching humanities differs significantly from the European approach to the same issue). The paper is based on sociological and ethnographic research on foreign students’ learning techniques and reflects on the analysis of collected notes of Chinese students as particular examples of the addressed problems in the perception and adoption of the musicological and ethnomusicological content taught in drama, art and music studies.