[1][2] Her music instructors included Archibald T. Davison, Edward Ballantine, John Ward, and Walter Piston.

[3] She taught at Harvard continuously from 1947 beginning as a teaching assistant in Chinese language, before being promoted to instructor and lecturer.

[2] She was one of three tenured female professors in the Harvard Music Department, one of thirteen total in the entire Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

[6] She retired from Harvard in 1992, but continued to teach students individually in her home, some of whom lived with her upon their arrival from China, such as the composer Lei Liang who credits her as one of his most important mentors and musical influences.

[1][7] With her father, she edited and translated her mother's How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, the book responsible for inventing and introducing the terms stir fry and pot sticker into English.

[12] Rulan Pian was the author of Song Dynasty Musical Sources and Their Interpretation (published by Harvard University Press, 1967) which won the 1968 Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society for the most distinguished book in musicology, one of three winners dedicated to the study of non-western music.

S2CID 178760927.. Reminiscences by Thomas Bartlett, June Dreyer, Charles Hayford, Perry Link, James Pusey.