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Yip Wai-hong, giant of music education in Hong Kong, dies aged 94
- ‘We’ll miss him dearly,’ conductor daughter Yip Wing-sie says of her father, founder of two orchestras and the Hong Kong Children’s Choir
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Yip Wai-hong, a towering figure in music education in Hong Kong since the 1960s and whose name is synonymous with the development of the city’s children’s choirs, has died at the age of 94.
Born in 1930 in mainland China, Yip moved with his parents to Hong Kong after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, but returned there to study music at Yenching University in Beijing and the Central Conservatory of Music in Tianjin, from where he graduated in music theory and composition in 1955.
In 1957, he was caught up in the Chinese Communist Party’s “Anti-Rightist Campaign” and sent to a labour camp for “re-education”, a period he said later had brought him to the brink of despair and affirmed his Christian faith.
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In 1961, he and his pianist wife, Choi Ching-yee – the couple met as students – were allowed to return to Hong Kong together with their second daughter Wing-sie, who would grow up to be a prominent conductor and remains music director emeritus of the Hong Kong Sinfonietta.
Once in Hong Kong, Yip found work as one of the first teachers in the fledgling music school at Hong Kong Baptist College, which became a university in 1994 and where he taught for nearly three decades until his retirement in 1992.
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