Zhang Yifei's Notebooks: Contributions to Transnational Music Teaching

The paper discusses the main issues of a reflection carried out in the framework of the recent reorganization of the Second cycle degree in Drama, Art, and Music Studies (University of Bologna), held by teachers of musicological and ethnomusicological disciplines, toghether with students and teaching tutors, in order to examine the need to undertake different approaches to multidisciplinary teaching involving the overall structure of a degree course that has registered in recent years a large participation of foreign students, mostly from the Far East, and especially from China. The authors take into account at least two different order or problems: 1) the need to make the specific musical lexicon suitable even for non-specialized students, without lowering the level of the didactic proposals for students of the musical curriculum; 2) the strategy to relate with international students, mostly from the Far East, who generally possess excellent technical-musical skills (deriving them from their previous training in academies of music or conservatories), that encounter several linguistic problems, often linked to an idea of studying and learning, and of the human sciences in general, that is significantly different from ours. The paper starts from a sociologial and ethnographic survey on the learning techniques of international students, starting from the gathering and analysis of the Chinese students’ notebooks