Hello All,

I’ve decided to make a new, musically oriented blog to document my practice hours at the piano. I’ll (try to) have daily updates on the number of minutes played, material practiced, and so on and so forth, as well as include thoughts about my daily experiences if I have time.

So, a little background information:

I started playing the piano at age 6, continued studies for about one and a half years, and quit playing around the age of 8. Quitting wasn’t my choice really; my mother had simply decided to stop bringing me to my weekly lessons. Like most other eight year olds, I lacked the maturity or foresight to understand that stopping my piano studies would seriously hinder my musical development.

Anyways, when I was eleven I started playing the viola for my school orchestra. I think I would have rather picked the violin, but my sister told me the intense competition involved would get me nowhere. Since I had complete trust in my sister, I followed her advice. Looking back at the relative success I achieved with the viola, I think I could have probably done even better with the violin. I played viola for almost a decade, putting it aside when I turned 21. Over those ten years, I had short stints with about five different teachers. The first was a local Chinese man, Gang Hou. I credit him with opening up my sound, allowing me to play with the bold clarity that I used to outperform most of my peers. I placed fifth in my first regional competition, and then fourth the next year, and by the end of middle school I was looking forward to competing at the statewide level. Unfortunately, he had to move away and I got a substitute teacher for the next two or three years, and the results were dismal: 9th at my first high school regional, then 11th the next year. In my first statewide audition I didn’t even make it: 89th out of 120 who tried out: the cutoff was 40th. The year after that, I didn’t compete. Furthermore when my father was laid-off from his job as an engineer the financial strains on the family forced me to quit lessons for a while.

In my junior year of high school, I sought out a teacher from the University of Houston, Prof. Larry Wheeler. He had a pretty impressive resume – he went to Julliard, and sent the most students out of the teachers from the Houston area to State, many of whom won the chair of principal violist. I improved rapidly under his tutelage, and I entered competition again in my last year of high school: at my auditions I made 2nd at regionals, 39th at statewide competition. So these results put me somewhere in the top 3% of high school musicians, or something like that. Looking back on these events, however, I don’t see anything special in what I’ve done. I would perhaps consider only the top five or so violists as “stellar,” but the year I spent with Wheeler showed to me that I could improve tremendously under the right conditions.

According to my father I had spent way too much time playing viola and, seeing that it was my senior year, decided that I should’ve focused on “reality” in his eyes – applying for college, getting a job, making money, getting a wife, and raising “his” grandchildren. I actually only practiced about 4-5 hours a week, which at the time, probably made up less than 10% of my free time. He simply doesn’t understand. I know some professional musicians who perhaps spent about 12 hours a day as students preparing for their careers. According to my teacher, I practiced not nearly enough: 10.5 hours weekly was the minimum he wanted.

Thus, because I was spending way too much time on the viola, my dad decided to cut off the funding for my lessons in my senior year of high school so I could focus on my college applications. There wasn’t a good reason, really. My grades were high enough so that I could gain acceptance at the University of Texas automatically, so there was no need to fret about my application. I would just have to spend the 5 hours required to write the essay, get my transcript in, and wait for the automatic acceptance letter to arrive via electric mail that same evening. I would then just have to coast the rest of my senior year, go to college at UT, and then start life with my normal job.

Nevertheless, I ended up applying to 9 different schools. I was always pressured to get good grades and strive for the top, and so I did. I was probably a stereotypical Asian-American overachiever. Honestly, I don’t think it’s out of anyone’s reach, really. So Ivy League schools were all the rage at that time, and still are today, and everyone wanted to get into one. I got accepted to one of them – Cornell. But I decided that whatever I was going to learn there would be the same as what I would learn at UT, so I just opted for the latter.

At UT I took lessons from a starving artist, Michalis Koutsoupides. He has a doctorate now, and I think he works for a restaurant somewhere in Kansas. I would have to say that a musical doctorate yields one of the lowest pay to effort ratios in the United States. Anyway the lessons were free since I was already past 16 hours of coursework at my school, so that was a plus. In retrospect, he was actually a pretty good teacher, though not as good as Wheeler. He was pretty picky, which was good, but not nearly enough. The traditional teachers, in my opinion, are the best. These are the kind who would hold a yardstick in their hand, and whack you with it whenever you make the slightest mistake. Wheeler didn’t have a yardstick, but he was known to make students cry. I cried once, but when a peer of mine said she cried at every single lesson during her four years under his tutelage, I decided my short stint with him wasn’t bad at all. So even though Dr. Koutsoupides wasn’t as tough as Wheeler, I managed to improve fairly quickly with him. When he left UT, I went to a professor at Texas State, which required me to take a trip of about 3 hours each week for lessons. Dr. Ames Asbell seemed to be the best viola teacher you could reasonably find in the Austin area – she regularly sent kids to state and recently sent her best student to the Eastman School, a pretty impressive result. The commute was just awful though, which required riding the bus for about an hour and a half, and walking a couple miles with my viola. The condition of my viola deteriorated, and I got my first B in college during my sophomore year, which was just devastating. So I quit those lessons, hence no more commute, and my grades went back up just like my parents wanted.

I had a pretty fun time playing viola in college with the opera, the university orchestra, and a quartet/quintet with my friends. In the opera we played the Marriage of Figaro, which was probably my favorite performance. I remember that it was a few hours long, outside in weather that was about 50 degrees or so, but it was very fun. As for the orchestra, we got to play a lot of worthwhile pieces and I got to sit principal for a few of those concerts, which allowed me to develop my performing skills. Overall, it was a good experience.

However, it turns out that I probably won’t get this opportunity ever again, since good orchestras offer so few openings. So, the other option would be to play solo repertoire, but that would require an accompanist, and furthermore there just isn’t a lot of good viola solo repertoire in existence. The majority of viola music consists of modern music, which frankly, I think sounds weird and unpleasant to the ear.

So for the rest of my musical life, I’ve decided to devote the rest of my musical life to piano. I’ll most likely not have a teacher for about a year and a half until I start my career and start earning some money. In the meantime I’ll try my luck at teaching myself. Since it’s been about 11 or twelve years since I last played piano I’ve forgotten all most all of the music. The muscle memory, however, remains, and I found that I’m able to remember most of the basic motions. Regrettably, I never learned how to use the pedals, but I can probably get a friend to show me the basics. So far, I’ve studied the piano seriously for about two months, practicing the basic scales, Hanon, and the First Lessons in Bach.