This past weekend, the Middlebury College Summer Language Schools celebrated their centennial with a huge dance (see Kendall’s post), fireworks, a lot of speakers and panels, and many more events, including a performance in Mead Chapel by Abigail Washburn and Wu Fei. Abby is an alum of the Chinese Summer School, arriving in 1998, and is now one of the few foreign music artists who regularly tours China. The Chapel was packed with Chinese-speakers and non-speakers alike to hear a combination of folk and bluegrass sounds, banjo and Chinese string instrument guzheng (古筝), and English and Chinese. It was an interesting combination hearing the twangy sounds of both seemingly different instruments, but they worked so well together. The following afternoon, the two musicians hosted a Q&A workshop entirely in Chinese, which I got to attend. Both women told personal stories and words of encouragement, and then sang some songs one line at a time so we could repeat and learn to sing along. (Insert what would be a video I took, if it were not apparently too large to upload–hopefully sometime soon!)