Dr. Kim Chow-Morris

Education: 
BMus (Hons.), University of Toronto
MA, York University
PhD, York University

Areas of Expertise: 

Dr. Kim Chow-Morris brings to the RTA School of Media a deep passion for music in all of its forms. Her musical knowledge spans from ancient dynastic China to classical and popular music of the present day, and she enjoys finding creative resonances with musicians across the globe. She has previously taught music performance, history and theory at the University of Toronto and York University. Dr. Kim Chow-Morris’ CDs, soundtrack recordings, and live performances have been broadcast internationally on CBC Radio, China’s CCTV, History Television, Omni TV, and Fairchild Radio, among others. She has performed for Canada’s former Prime Minister Jean Chretien and China’s Premier Wen Jiabao, and her dizi (bamboo flute) music has been played in space by astronaut Steve MacLean as part of David Mott’s piano concerto Eclipse. Chow-Morris played for ten years with the Toronto Chinese Orchestra, and led the professional Chinese chamber group the Yellow River Ensemble for over a decade. She has performed on western flute and Chinese winds (dizi, xiao, bawu, and hulusi) in China, Hong Kong, India, Canada, and the United States. Her primary instrumental teachers include western flautists Douglas Stewart (Toronto) and Anne Emond (London), and Chinese bamboo flute masters Lu Chun Ling (Shanghai) and the late Yu Xun Fa (Shanghai). She founded York University’s Chinese music program in 2000. Her current research interests include music and spirituality, theories of disjuncture, inter-subjectivity, bird song, social and stylistic hybridity in Chinese instrumental music (Jiangnan sizhu, folk traditions, Chinese guoyue orchestras, Cantonese opera, guqin), and Chinese music in diaspora. Chow-Morris’ peer-reviewed academic publications range from topics such as Taoist influence on Eastern China’s Jiangnan sizhu ensemble music, to conceptions of socio-musical hybridity in Montreal’s Chinese community, to compositional intersections of music and architecture. Most recently, she is completing a SSHRC-funded monograph on the historiography of Chinese music in Canada from the earliest days of Chinese immigration to the present. Chow-Morris has served the academic community over many years as an invited Committee Member for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Research-Creation Insight Grants in Ottawa, elected Secretary of Council, Program Committee Member and Chair of Council Nominating Committee for the international Society for Ethnomusicology, elected Board Member for the U.S.-based Association for Chinese Music Research, as well as on numerous scholarly prize committees for ACMR and SEM Niagara Chapter. She is a member of Toronto Met’s interdisciplinary SSHRC committee for which she vets grant applications submitted nationally by the university’s MA and PhD students. Dr. Kim Chow-Morris was the central author and creator of the Chang School for Continuing Education’s Certificate in Music: Global and Cultural Contexts, for which she has continued to serve as Chair of the Curriculum Committee since its inception.