Colin Huehns was brought up in north-west London and attended the RAM Intermediate School in the early 1980s where he studied violin with Emanuel Hurwitz. His first experience in music from outside the Western Classical tradition came a few years later whilst an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge, when he wrote a dissertation on the music of Hunza Valley and Gilgit, Pakistan, an interest which culminated in a PhD thesis awarded by Cambridge University for Music in Northern Pakistan in 1992.
In between his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Cambridge he studied Composition for one year at the Royal Academy of Music, and has remained active as a composer ever since, most notably with performances of an opera The Soul of Ch’ien-nu leaves her Body. This interest in Chinese culture culminated in 1996 with leaving Cambridge on the completion of a British Academy Research Fellowship to spend three years as a foreign student at the Xi’an Music Conservatoire, China, where he learnt to play the erhu with the distinguished virtuoso Jin Wei and also studied Chinese.
Since returning to the UK, he has taught at the Academy since 1999, including Aural Classes and courses in Techniques and Analysis, and has also taught an Elective in Chinese music and culture which includes students learning to play the erhu and the yangqin. As well as continuing to play the viol, viola, violin, rebec and Medieval fiddle. his main teaching, research, performance and composition interests now centre on his Chinese instruments, which include some forty different members of the erhu, yangqin and Mongolian horsehead fiddle families.
In nine years of the teaching Academy students to play Chinese music, about a hundred have learnt erhu and yangqin, and the best has achieved a standard of Grade 9 after four years of playing. His own performances have included recitals in Munich, Leeds, Cambridge and Edinburgh, but he is particularly proud of having recorded two CDs of erhu music written especially for him, including pieces by Academy professors Ruth Byrchmore and Timothy Bowers. He has researched and published extensively into the history of the instruments of the erhu family, and is currently reading original versions of Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasty Chinese novels, scouring them for mentions of the erhu and what this tells us of the role and repertoire of the instrument.