Professor Daniel Chua, FGE’s founding director, receives HKU Distinguished Research Achievement Award 2023

About Professor Daniel K. L. Chua

Professor Chua is Chair Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong and was also the inaugural Mr and Mrs Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts (2018–2023). He received his BA, MPhil and PhD in Musicology from the University of Cambridge. Before joining HKU to head the School of Humanities, he was a Fellow and the Director of Studies at St John’s College, Cambridge, and later Professor of Music Theory and Analysis at King’s College London. He was a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Yale, a Henry Fellow at Harvard, and a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge. He is the recipient of the Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal, an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He also had the honour of serving as the President of the International Musicological Society. His research ranges widely across time and space – quite literally – from cosmological concepts of music in ancient Chinese texts to NASA’s Golden Record, which is currently barrelling beyond our solar system strapped to the Voyager spacecraft. More down to earth, Professor Chua is also known for his work on Beethoven, Stravinsky and the intellectual history of Western music. Unifying his diverse interests is his relentless questioning of the fundamentals of musicological thought, breaking down barriers within his discipline in order to broaden the understanding of music in the sciences and humanities. Among his many publications, he has written five monographs: The ‘Galitzin’ Quartets of Beethoven; Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning; Beethoven and Freedom; Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music From Earth; and Joy! Music Lessons on the Good Life. As the first non-European President of the International Musicological Society (2017–2022), Professor Chua is a champion and pioneer of ‘global musicology’, a new approach that is beginning to shape music studies across the globe (naturally). At HKU, Professor Chua is an advocate for the arts and humanities as the chief means for achieving the educational goals inscribed on the shield of the University: ‘Sapientia et Virtus’ (wisdom and virtue). He believes that students should not just get an education but also get a life at university, and that the ‘extra’ in ‘extracurricular’ is not extra but essential for a student’s mental, social and moral well-being. To this end, Professor Chua has been instrumental in founding various projects at HKU, including the Cultural Management Office with its MUSE concert series, the Centre for Humanities and Medicine, Faith and Global Engagement, and Lead for Life. Professor Chua feels his time at HKU has been extremely fruitful and enjoyable, and with a shared birthday of March 16 (HKU’s Foundation Day), perhaps this harmonious partnership was destiny. He lives happily in HKU staff quarters with his wife, two teenage children, a poodle and a cockapoo.