BPP Music and Fine Arts

Formally created in 2007, the Montreal based BPP Music and Fine Arts was founded by two long-time committed educators in instrumental music, composition and theory, and music technology.

Kevin Austin, professor (Fine Arts, Concordia University), composer, teacher, theorist / writer, producer, arts administrator. His life has been one of connecting sounds together. To do this he has used traditional and electroacoustic compositions and sounds. Kevin Austin has been teaching and writing educational materials for more than 30 years. He brings this long history of teaching and course design into this integrated pre-university level multi-cultural school of music and sound.

Chih-Lin Chou, the artistic director of Canadian Association of Oriental Fine Arts (CAoFA) and Gu-Zheng Ensemble of Montreal (GZEM), is a Chinese-Canadian virtuoso of the gu-zheng, the 21-string Chinese zither. Since 2003 she has been working to present traditional and contemporary music to a mixed, but largely Chinese-Canadian audience in a concert environment. She has wished to find venues and ways of promoting a greater awareness of Chinese culture and the instrument, the gu-zheng, and this activity has found its fruits through her dedication to teaching, public performance, recording, commissioning of new pieces, and the on-going project of Oriented Towards Sound (OTS) concert series. To encourage the local development of Chinese music and to raise the professional quality of performance in and around Montreal, she has been working with the Central Conservatory of Music (Beijing), Chinese Instrumental Performance Grade Examination. Chih-Lin has incorporated the Central Conservatory Performance Grade Examinations into her teaching, and is the regional coordinator for these annual examinations.