Albert Louis Faurot (福路, 1914-90) was an Oberlin graduate who came to China in 1936 to teach music at Foochow College; he later taught at Foochow Christian University, the National Fujian Academy of Music, and Hwa Nan College. During the...
moreAlbert Louis Faurot (福路, 1914-90) was an Oberlin graduate who came to China in 1936 to teach music at Foochow College; he later taught at Foochow Christian University, the National Fujian Academy of Music, and Hwa Nan College. During the Sino-Japanese War period Faurot established himself not only as a teacher, but as a choral conductor, opera producer, and piano recitalist. Fluent in Mandarin, and noted as a translator of Tang poetry, Faurot was part of an era of inter-and multi-cultural détente, and numbered among his acquaintances the composers Huang Tzu (黄自, 1904-39) and Zhao Yuanren (趙元任, 1892-1982). He arranged nationalistic 'school songs', and many Chinese folksongs, integrating them in his programs with Western standards and new compositions by both Western and Chinese composers. With his students, he was evacuated to Shaowu and Yingtai during the Japanese occupation of Fuzhou during the Second World War, and for six years carried on teaching and concertizing in an abandoned temple, with a piano and 1,500 78rpm records as his teaching materials.
Like all foreign teachers in China, his career was upended in 1950 with the outbreak of the Korean War, and he joined a diaspora of displaced academics and artists seeking to re-establish themselves elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region. Eventually settling in the Philippines (at Silliman University in Dumaguete in 1952), Faurot returned to China in the improving political climate of the late 1970s and 1980s. There, he gave lectures on and recitals of contemporary music, including what were probably the first performances in China of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos I (1972) for amplified piano. This paper looks at the earlier years of this missionary-musician, whose life was dedicated to transcultural dialog.
