Hopeful Harmony: Celebrating China's Ethnocultural Diversity Through Music, featuring Fei Tong, violin and Jessica Ray King, speaker
Biographies:
Dr. Fei Tong enjoys a versatile career as a performer, pedagogue, and scholar. She has performed throughout Asia, North America, and Europe and has appeared as a soloist with Harbin Symphony Orchestra (China), the University of Georgia Symphony Orchestra, and the ARCO Chamber Orchestra. Tong has also given concerts at prestigious venues including Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Royal Albert Hall, the Beijing National Library Performing Arts Center, and the National Center for the Performing Arts in China. In 2015, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China invited her to perform for John Kerry, the U.S. Secretary of State, on his visit to China.
Currently, she is a senior visiting scholar under the tutelage of Mikhail Kopelman as a recipient of the Chinese National Award Scholarship at Eastman School of Music. She also holds the position of lecturer in violin at Ludong University in Shandong, China. Career highlights include numerous competition prizes, summer festival appearances, leadership roles, and collaborations with distinguished artists. As the first-prize winner of the Concerto Competition at the University of Georgia (UGA), she performed the Wieniawski Violin Concerto No.1 in F-Sharp Minor with conductor Jean Gómez. In addition, Tong has won top prizes in the Alexander & Buono International String Competition, the North International Music Competition, and the Concert Artists International Virtuoso Competition. Summer festival appearances have taken Tong to venues such as the Josef Gingold Chamber Music Festival, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, the Musica Mundi Chamber Festival, and the Ascent International Chamber Music Festival. She served as concertmaster of the China Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, the University of Georgia Symphony Orchestra, and the InterHarmony Festival Orchestra.
As an avid chamber musician, she has collaborated with distinguished musicians such as Andrés Cárdenes, Milan Milisavljević, Rafael Figueroa, David Holland, and members of Time for Three. As a pedagogue, she is a Nationally Certified Teacher of Music (NCTM) through MTNA. In recent years, her students have been named prize winners at the New York Golden Classical Music Awards Competition, the American Protégé International Music Talent Competition, the Zhongsin International Music Competition, and the National Youth Violin Concerto Competition.
Tong received her Doctoral of Musical Arts degree in violin performance from the University of Georgia in 2021, where she studied with Levon Ambartsumian and held a teaching assistantship position. While at the University of Georgia, she was inducted into Pi Kappa Lambda, a national music honor society for her outstanding doctoral work. Previously a graduate of the China Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China, she studied with Hui Jin, and Yang Wu, the concertmaster of the China Philharmonic Orchestra, and performed in master classes for Ivry Gitlis, Boris Kuschnir, Paul Roczek, Andrés Cárdenes, Guy Braunstein, Robert Chen, and Bin Huang.
Jessica Ray King is an artist-scholar of diverse tastes and talents. Her research focuses on women in Western classical music and heavy metal; recent projects explore the aesthetics of violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and bimbocore artist SceneQueen. Apart from her PhD studies at WashU, she serves as an Adjunct Instructor at Webster University’s Community Music School, Health and Wellness Department Editor for the American Viola Society Journal, and maintains an active performing schedule as a soloist, guest chamber artist, and with her quartet, the Bayesian Quartet.
Recent performance highlights include her participation as a festival artist in the summers of 2024 and 2023 at the I Suoni di Sillene Festival Musical in Chianciano Terme, Italy. In October 2024 she performed Deniz Çağlarcan’s prizewinning work “Void for Viola and Fixed Electronics” at Indiana State University’s Contemporary Music Festival. Further highlights include publications in the peer-reviewed American Viola Society Journal (2020, 2017), presentations and performances at AVS Conferences including “This is Not a Toy: Components of High Level Viola Playing” (2018) and “I Will Sing: Viola, Voice, and Poetry” (2022), performing as a festival artist at Saarburg International Music Festival in Germany (2017), and an Opera & Conductor’s Orchestra Fellowship at the Miami Music Festival (2016). While in Miami she performed in the orchestra for Act III of Die Walkürie with world-class opera stars soprano Christine Goerke and bass-baritone Alan Held at the New World Center.
King obtained her M.M. in Viola Performance as renowned viola pedagogue David Holland's graduate assistant at Central Michigan University and earned her B.A. in Music as a student of Christine Rutledge and B.A. in English with Honors from the University of Iowa. Outside of music she enjoys cooking, traveling, swimming, hiking, dramatic poetry reading, excessive coffee drinking, and training/participating in dog agility with her border collie, Ronan Ginsburg Dissents.