A master player of the zheng and a veteran practitioner of the qin, having studied with master Lin Youren and Gong Yi, Haiqiong Deng has pursued creative endeavors to promote Chinese musical culture in North America through performance, research, and teaching. In 2023, Deng was chosen by the American Composers Forum to release an album of contemporary pieces on Innova Records. She received the 2017 Florida Heritage Award and was 2018 Florida State University College of Music Research Fellow. Deng’s groundbreaking inter/cross-cultural musical expressions include an album with Indian guru Nalini Vinayak, and compositions inspired by Indonesian gamelan and African kora. She has lectured on Chinese music and culture at Dartmouth College, Emory University, and UCLA. Deng directed the Florida State University Chinese Music Ensemble for 18 years. She received her BM in zheng performance from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and from Florida State University an MA in arts administration, MA in ethnomusicology, and PhD in musicology.

With the largest recorded repertoire for the guqin, John Thompson has recorded more than 280 melodies from 15th- through 17th- century guqin tablature, and his website complements each one with musicological, historical, and philosophical commentary. After a college degree in Western musicology and graduate studies in ethnomusicology, Thompson began to study the modern guqin tradition with Sun Yü-Ch’in in Taiwan. Moving to Hong Kong to consult with Tong Kin-Woon, he gained a reputation for fidelity, fluency, and feeling in his performances. In 1992, the National Union of Chinese Musicians invited him to Beijing for a seminar on reconstructing music from the earliest surviving guqin handbook (1425 CE). He was artistic consultant to the Festival of Asian Arts in Hong Kong, and published seven CDs of his musical reconstructions and four books of transcriptions. He continues to perform, teach, research, and create

new music for the guqin. In 2019, veteran Hong Kong film director Lau Shing-hon made a documentary about this work.