Percussion Professor at The Yehudi Menuhin School Qingdao  

Professor and Doctoral Supervisor of Percussion, Central Conservatory of Music  

As a leading figure in Chinese percussion education, Professor Zhang Jingli has built a complete artistic ecosystem through her multifaceted roles. She is not only the founder of the Jianli Percussion Ensemble but also serves as the Music Director of the China International Percussion Art Festival, establishing cultural exchange platforms across Asia, Europe, the Americas, and other regions. She has been a jury member for international competitions such as Italy’s PAS, South Korea’s Jeju International Percussion Competition, and the St. Petersburg International Music Competition. As a solo percussionist, she has collaborated with over fifty professional orchestras and performed in more than thirty countries across four continents. With exceptional artistry, she has conducted over a hundred cross-cultural dialogues, weaving the millennial echoes of gongs and bells with the modern rhythms of Western instruments such as the marimba into a unique cultural language. Her artistic practice not only expands the expressive dimensions of percussion music but also establishes a modern percussion school with Chinese characteristics.  

As a doctoral supervisor in the Central Conservatory’s Department of Orchestral Instruments, Professor Zhang has spent three decades building a bridge for artistic dialogue between the East and the West. With outstanding artistic accomplishment and forward-thinking vision, she uses percussion as a medium to narrate Chinese musical culture on the global stage, composing a contemporary chapter for Chinese percussion music and integrating Chinese musical aesthetics into the world’s artistic evaluation system.  

Artistic innovation is Zhang Jingli’s most distinctive trait. At the closing ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Paralympics, she created a thirteen-timpani ensemble to structure the spatial and temporal dimensions of the “flame extinction” ritual, carving an innovative mark for percussion in Olympic history. In 2023, with groundbreaking artistic vision, she staged a cliffside concert featuring seventy large marimbas as the main instruments, leading a 260-member percussion ensemble—the world’s largest of its kind. The massive marimba formation blended natural acoustics with human creation, pioneering a new paradigm of environmental music. This fusion of traditional percussion heritage with contemporary artistic expression redefines the boundaries of percussion art.  

Academically, Zhang Jingli has developed an educational system that integrates Chinese and Western traditions. With dual academic backgrounds from the Central Conservatory of Music and European art universities, she has cultivated a new generation of performers who possess both international perspectives and deep local roots. To date, her students have won over a hundred awards in dozens of international competitions. These young artists, bearing the “Made in China” artistic identity, are establishing a new global coordinate system for Chinese percussion education, signaling a historic leap from technical export to aesthetic export by the Chinese percussion school.