6-Day Student Music Tour: Beijing Ensembles and Peking Opera

Arrival — Welcome to Beijing
Upon landing at Beijing Capital International Airport (PEK), your dedicated guide will greet you in the arrivals area just outside the luggage claim, holding a sign that clearly displays your name. A private vehicle will transfer you to your hotel, and your guide will assist with check-in and offer a brief orientation. After your long flight, take a well-deserved rest and relax.

Evening — Flexible Evening
The evening is yours to enjoy at your leisure as you settle in after your journey.

Accommodation
Your guide assists with check-in at your hotel in Beijing.

Morning — three instruments, one scale
The studio holds a set of instruments and a teacher for each section. The guzheng is the oldest of the three families on the table: a zither of about twenty-one strings stretched over a long soundboard, tuned pentatonically, plucked with the right hand while the left presses the strings for pitch bends and vibrato. The pipa is a four-stringed lute played upright, with a percussive right-hand technique that produces the dense, rapid figures people associate with Chinese court music. The erhu has only two strings, no fingerboard, and a small python-skin soundbox; between them they cover the range from solo melody to accompaniment.

Late morning — first technique
Everyone rotates through all three before choosing one for the week's work. On the guzheng you learn the plucking hand position and get a clean tone out of a single string, which takes longer than it sounds. On the pipa it is the tremolo and the wrist. On the erhu the first task is simply producing a note without the bow scraping, then playing the same note a fourth higher by moving a finger a centimetre. Notation is jianpu - numbered notation in which the numbers are scale degrees and the dots above or below set the octave - which most visitors find easier than staff notation for a pentatonic scale.

Lunch
A set lunch near the studio. The afternoon session starts at two, so there is time for a short walk in the lanes around the teaching rooms.

Afternoon — a piece, by ear and by number
The afternoon is spent on one short piece: about sixteen bars, taught phrase by phrase, first by ear and then from jianpu. The teacher picks something recognisable - a folk tune or the melody everyone in China can hum - and slows it down until the group can play it in unison. Ensemble skills are introduced here rather than later: counting in, watching the leader's hand, and the discipline of playing quietly enough to hear the instrument next to you. Nobody is asked to perform alone on the first day.

Evening — listening session and dinner
Before dinner the teachers play for the group: a guzheng piece, an erhu solo, and a pipa passage from a classical suite, with an explanation of what to listen for and where the techniques came from. Dinner follows nearby, and the evening is free. Instruments stay at the studio, so nobody has to carry a case through Beijing.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Beijing.

Morning — the rehearsal hall
A rehearsal room with a piano, a mirrored wall and a set of percussion instruments is the base for the day. The morning runs in sections: the melodic instruments work intonation against the piano, the percussion works the counting, and the group spends a full hour on the two things that make an amateur ensemble audible rather than merely accurate - breathing together at the start of a phrase and holding the tempo steady through the difficult bar. The conductor for the programme is a local teacher arranged through our music partner; the specific school and teacher are confirmed before the group departs.

Late morning — the programme takes shape
By late morning the group is working on the full programme rather than fragments: one Chinese piece, one Western piece, and something short in which local students can join the melody. Tempos are fixed, dynamics are marked into the parts, and every participant is given a named cue to enter on. This is the unglamorous part of ensemble playing and it is where a programme is actually won.

Lunch
Lunch near the rehearsal hall, taken with the teachers so that questions about technique and repertoire continue at the table.

Afternoon — joint rehearsal with students
In the afternoon you travel to a music school campus, arranged through our local education partner, and rehearse together with its students. The exchange works best when both sides play: the local students open with a short piece of their own, the group answers, and then everyone plays the shared numbers together with doubled parts. Language is not much of a problem in a rehearsal - tuning is tuning and counting is counting, and the participants who can say eight bars of introductions in Chinese do better than the ones who cannot. Instruments and parts for the joint section are provided by the partner school; participants bring their own reeds, sticks or mouthpieces if they have them.

Evening — run-through and dinner
Back at the rehearsal hall, a full run-through of the programme without stopping, followed by notes and dinner. The evening is deliberately not a performance - the first audience comes tomorrow, and the group should meet the programme once more before it does.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Beijing.

Morning — the four types and the painted face
Jingju, usually translated as Peking opera, arrived in Beijing in 1790 when four troupes from Anhui were brought south-to-north for an imperial birthday and simply stayed; it was added to UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2010. Everything in it is codified. There are four role types - sheng, the male roles; dan, the female roles; jing, the painted faces; and chou, the clowns - and within each type the costume, gait, gesture and singing style are fixed by tradition rather than chosen by the performer. The morning session begins with the faces. The colour is the character: red for loyalty, black for blunt honesty, white for cunning, gold and silver for gods and demons, and the patterns around the eyes tell you what the man does for a living.

Late morning — water sleeves and the walk
The practical work is physical. The shuixiu - the long white silk extensions of the sleeve - are used to express what the face is not allowed to show: grief, refusal, hesitation, flight. You learn the basic throws, the wrist snap that sends the silk out and the pull that brings it back, and then the entrance walk of a dan role, which is done on the ball of the foot with the body level and the eyes fixed forward. Participants are uniformly bad at this, which is the point; the correction the teacher gives is the same one the professionals get.

Lunch
A restaurant near the studio, with northern dishes and a clear soup - light food, because the afternoon has singing in it.

Afternoon — an excerpt, sung
Singing in jingju is not melodic in the Western sense: the two main tune families, xipi and erhuang, are frameworks with fixed cadences and enormous room for individual phrasing. Working in small groups by role type, the class learns one short excerpt - usually a few lines of recitative and one aria - with the teacher correcting pitch, the placement of the voice and, above all, the pronunciation of the syllables. Nobody is expected to sing well. Everyone is expected to sing, and to understand by doing it why a jingju aria moves the way it does.

Evening — a performance on a small stage
In the evening you attend a performance arranged through a local opera organisation, with the venue confirmed before departure. Smaller stages are better than the big tourist shows for a first encounter: you can see the footwork, hear an unmiked voice, and watch the percussion section - drum, clappers and gongs - hold the whole thing together. Your guide explains the plot before curtain up so that the conventions do not have to be decoded in real time.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Beijing.

Morning — blend before volume
The first session is sectional. Sopranos and altos work in one room, tenors and basses in another, with a local conductor and a pianist. The work is on vowel shape, entries and the two habits that most amateur choirs have to unlearn: singing louder when uncertain, and breathing in the middle of a phrase because a neighbour did. The repertoire for the programme is mixed on purpose - one Chinese piece, one Western piece, and one arrangement of a folk song that both groups will sing together - and each voice part is given a marked score with the conductor's breathing plan written in.

Late morning — repertoire and context
The second block puts the Chinese items in context. A great deal of the Chinese choral repertoire in circulation was written for political or film use in the twentieth century: the Yellow River Cantata was composed in 1939 by Xian Xinghai and rewritten in 1969 as a piano concerto, and it is now standard for choirs of every kind. Folk material travels even further - the Jiangsu tune Mo Li Hua, known in English as Jasmine Flower, has been arranged hundreds of times, and it was quoted in the 2008 Beijing Olympic ceremonies. Learning how a tune moved from a province to a national symbol is part of learning the piece.

Lunch
Lunch with the conductor and accompanist, usually in a canteen or a nearby restaurant, with the afternoon's combined rehearsal timings agreed over the table.

Afternoon — combined rehearsal
In the afternoon a local choir joins the group in a larger hall, arranged through our music partner; the specific choir is confirmed before departure. The joint items are rehearsed first, with the two choirs alternating and then merged, then the whole programme is run in order. This is the point at which a choir programme either works or does not: pitch does not drift when everyone has learned to listen to a section that is not their own, and the conductor will usually spend more time on standing order and spacing than on notes.

Evening — the concert
The joint concert is held in a community theatre or school auditorium, arranged with the local partner. Both choirs perform separately and then together, and the closing item is the arrangement everyone rehearsed that afternoon. The audience is mostly local - families, students, members of both choirs - which is exactly the audience a first joint performance should have. A short reception afterwards gives the singers the part of the day that actually matters.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Beijing.

Morning — rehearsal
The final day at the partner school is built around something both sides make together rather than something the visitors perform. Mixed groups rehearse two or three items for an hour and a half: a song learned in both languages, a short comic scene written by the pupils themselves, an instrumental piece, a calligraphy wall where every participant writes one line, or a set of games that the visiting group teaches and the partner group then teaches back. Nothing is judged, and the standard is deliberately low - the point is that both groups are on stage at the same time, which changes the dynamic from exhibition to collaboration. Teachers supervise throughout, and no rehearsal is recorded without permission.

Late morning — the performance and the certificates
The performance is given in the school hall to pupils and teachers, usually with a short speech from each head teacher and an exchange of tokens carried home from each country. Certificates are issued by the two schools to their own pupils and to the visiting group through the coordinator, and they record participation rather than achievement. Photographs are taken only from the back of the hall and only where the school has confirmed that every pupil in the frame has consent on file; parents and guardians receive their own copies through the school, and nothing is published on any personal account.

Lunch
A last canteen lunch with the partners, followed by the exchange of letters and small gifts through the school office rather than hand to hand, so that contact stays on an institutional footing.

Afternoon — the teachers' review, and reflection
While their pupils finish the day, the two teaching teams sit down and review it: what the visiting group got from the lessons, what the partner school found useful, what should be changed next time, and what the visitors did not understand. This meeting is the reason the exchange can be run again rather than being a one-off, and it is also where the awkward questions get asked - about preparation, language, behaviour, and whether the visit was as useful for the host pupils as for the guests. The participants then write a short reflection of their own with their teachers, covering what they expected, what surprised them and what they would do differently, and these are kept by the group's own school.

Cultural Insight — making an exchange reciprocal
School exchanges fail in a predictable way: the visiting side performs, the host side hosts, and nobody learns much. The structures that prevent it are unglamorous - pair every visitor, teach both groups something together, keep contact institutional, and ask the host school to state what it wants before the visit is fixed. Where a relationship continues beyond a single trip, it usually does so through joint work: a shared project, a language partnership with real classes attached, or a return visit in the other direction, which is the version worth aiming at.

Safeguarding and consent
The day is supervised under a two-adult rule by the group's own teachers and the partner school's staff, with written parental consent held for every participant under 18. No participant is alone with a local adult or pupil, no private contact details are exchanged, no cash is given or accepted, and no image of a minor is taken, stored or published without the consent of a parent or guardian and the school.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Beijing.