It began with a dizi, the traditional Chinese small bamboo flute with a tone both piercing and plaintive, capable of sliding effortlessly between virtuosic runs and tender fragile whispers.

Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, 37-year-old composer Niccolo Athens, a faculty member at The Tianjin Juilliard School, vividly recalls the first time he heard dizi music played at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. It felt like discovering a new musical universe, he said.

"It was fluent, sophisticated, and completely unfamiliar to me," Athens said of hearing a piece for three dizi composed by Guo Wenjing. "It combined modern compositional techniques with a deep understanding of the instruments."

A graduate of Cornell University in New York, Athens was awarded a Fulbright grant, and spent an academic year in residence at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing in 2014, beginning a China journey that would also include Shanghai and Tianjin.

In 2019, he was appointed to the inaugural faculty of The Tianjin Juilliard School.

As the first overseas branch of the renowned New York Juilliard School, the Tianjin campus broke ground in 2017 and offers a US-accredited master's degree from the prestigious school. The Tianjin school's graduate program opened in the fall of 2020 with the first intake of students.