XuComplete Biography
Pianist Qi Xu from Shenzhen, was hailed in his concert tour by the German press as “a storyteller and wild rider” (Rheinische Post), stands in “between drama and charm” (Derwesten).
Born in 1994, raised in Shenzhen, Qi enrolled in the Shenzhen Art school at the age of 10 under the supervision of Prof. ZhaoYi Dan. In 2009, Qi was accepted by the Juilliard School (Pre-College division) and the Curtis Institute of Music. He attended the Juilliard School and followed Dr. Yoheved Kaplinsky, the chairwoman of the piano department at Juilliard. Meanwhile, he attended high school at the Professional Performing Arts School (PPAS) in New York. In 2012, Qi Xu was accepted to Columbia University (CC’16) as a John Jay Scholar where he read mathematics. He continued to study piano with Dr. Kaplinsky under the Columbia-Juilliard Exchange Program. In 2014, Qi was selected as a Columbia-Oxbridge Scholar to further his mathematics study in the mathematical tripos program for his junior year at Robinson College, Cambridge University. Meanwhile, he studied piano privately with Prof. Christopher Elton who was the former head of the keyboard department of the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 2015, Qi was admitted to the Columbia-Juilliard joint program in which he entered his Master of Music study at Juilliard in his senior year of college, continuing his study with Dr. Kaplinsky. In 2017, furthering his education, Qi was admitted to the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) program as a C.V. Starr fellow. As a doctoral candidate, Qi continued his piano study with Dr. Kaplinsky and Dr. Matti Raekallio. Upon DMA graduation in 2022, Qi joined the Harbin Conservatory of Music (HRBCM) as a full-time piano faculty member. In 2023, in addition to HRBCM duties, Qi was appointed a music theory faculty member of the Tianjin Juilliard school, thus returning to the Juilliard family.
Qi endeavors to embrace and appreciate the world by pursuing a multi-faceted identity: concert-pianist, artist-scholar, inter-disciplinary researcher, and finally, intellectual adventurer who travels through the fascinating complexity of our universe.
As a concert-pianist, Qi has performed as a soloist all around the world, including North America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. In 2008, Qi won prizes at all four international and national piano competitions he participated, including 1st Prize in the 9th Krainev International Piano Competition (Junior Group) held in Ukraine, and 2nd prize in the 11th Ettlingen International Youth Piano Competition held in Germany, where he was the youngest participant in the senior category (age up to 20). In April 2010, Qi was invited by Television Spain to record a program “Young Soloist” produced by Eurodelta Music which was broadcast sixteen times internationally. In the summer of the same year, Qi was invited as the youngest pianist to participate in Pianofest of the Hamptons. In 2011, Qi won the first prize and the orchestra prize in the 11th Morocco International Piano Competition, where he was the youngest winner in the history of the competition up until this point. During the summer of 2011, Qi participated in the Aspen Music Festival receiving full scholarships. In November of the same year, Qi was invited by WQXR radio station to perform in its “Beethoven Piano Sonata Marathon” program. Qi made his first debut album “Qi Xu plays Beethoven, Liszt and Stravinsky” in November 2013 during his concert tour in Europe, featuring Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 109, Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan, and Stravinsky’s Petrushka. In 2016, Qi is invited as a solo piano fellow to the Music Academy of the West, Santa Barbara. In 2017, Qi makes his debut in Alice Tully Hall. Qi is invited as a featured pianist in the 2020 season of the Focus Festival, performing chamber music by celebrated women composers such as Zhuang Liu and Ruth Crawford Seeger.
Aside from performing, as an artist-scholar, Qi devotes his passion to teaching and scholarly research. Since 2015, Qi has been holding the writing tutor position in the Juilliard School, assisting students in liberal arts and English writing. Additionally, since 2019, Qi has served as a teaching fellow in various courses (theory, history, and music appreciation), conducting weekly undergraduate classes. With respect to piano pedagogy, Qi combines his expertise as a working musician and experience in private teaching, enabling him to serve as the ambassador of the HDG teaching series developed by Prof. Zhaoyi Dan: a theoretical and pedagogical reformulation of beginner-level piano learning, focusing on learning enjoyment, efficiency, and injury prevention.
In 2022, Qi Xu graduated from the Juilliard DMA program with his dissertation “The Musical Arrow of Time - The Role of Temporal Asymmetry in Music and Its Organicist Implications” advised by Dr. Philip Lasser: a 285-page monograph addressing the role of temporal asymmetry (i.e. the arrow of time) in music and its effects on music perception, formal structure, and music aesthetics. In April 2022, Qi attended the ACMI conference hosted at Kansas University, an acronym celebrating the contribution and awareness of Asian musicians in the field of classical music.
Believing in the power of giving back to the community and music as community service, Qi uses his spare time and skills to improve his surroundings. Qi is the co-founder of “Zhaoyin” (meaning: sound of the dawn), a student-run non-profit organization based on the idea of music as community service. As a member of Zhaoyin, Qi had an active role in multiple creative performances as an organizer and performer targeting the general public during the Covid era, as part of the pandemic stress buster effort. In 2023, Qi returned to his hometown, Shenzhen, during the summer and gave an experimental presentation at Nanshan Library: based on an inter-disciplinary theme focusing on the interweaving relationship between music, food, and poetry, Qi embarked on a multi-modal intellectual adventure with the audience. Aside from music, since 2019, he has been taking charge of the library project of digitizing Juilliard’s recording archives, making more than 500 CDs available online to the entire school community. Meanwhile, Qi is a consultant for the “Juilliard Imagination” exhibition, assisting in content curation and UX design. On a larger scope, as an ardent member of the open-source community, Qi actively contributes to various open-source projects.