Empowerly

Student profile

Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

Shockingly, as an aspiring classical pianist, I’ve spent the majority of my time practicing piano without a piano. 

Yes, you read that right. And no, I’m not insane. 

Rather than prancing my fingers around meaninglessly on the sea of black and white piano keys, I’m often found practicing at my hardest in the “TALKING-PROHIBITED” zone of the library, where a piano is never present. This ancient, foolproof method of practicing that dates back to the era of the great Sergei Rachmaninoff requires merely three things: a pair of comfy headphones, a mini twelve-pack of Crayola colored pencils for my scrutinized music annotations, and a whimsically vivid imagination that helps piece together the puzzling thoughts of two-to-three hundred year old dead composers. Whenever I practiced like this, I was always cool, calm and collected; there was nada in this world that could stop me.  

Or so I thought. 

It was the final day before the ultimate performance. Droplets of rain gently tapped against the tinted hotel windows while tears of frustration trickled down my cheeks. The sullen desk lamp glared at my opened physics textbook with its harsh yellow light. To my right, an unfinished kinematics problem frowned, frustrated with my neglect; to my left, a plastic cup shining the curvy Hilton logo reminded me that the coffee inside would soon turn cold. 

At the center of it all lay copies of Mozart’s D-minor Fantasia filled with colorful annotations; in its midst lay a virtual storm of my stressed frustration. To my own surprise, my hands forcefully crumpled up the musical sheets, drowning the Crayola-colored sea of dotted composition notes drowning the waste bin. Almost instinctively, a frisson of inspiration sparked throughout my body, inviting me to vibrantly explore something I’d robotically programmed into my brain.

With the score now gone, my mind wandered off the path of scrutinizing every small detail within the score; rather, I was tossed into a musical playground where the only power I possessed was… 

Playing. 

And that’s exactly what I did the very next day. The transfer of attention away from the music helped me emulate what I truly wanted to express inside, as opposed to devout imitation of another pianist’s expression. During the scariest and boldest 300 seconds of my life, I began to enjoy the ocean depths of unfamiliar territory, blueprinting my musical identity as I dived deeper and deeper. As I finished, sudden realization dawned upon me: there was no defined boundary when interpreting music. The music doesn’t make us  beautiful or magical—we make the music beautiful and magical. As the last triad chord rang soulfully around the corners of the arts center, I blurred the roaring of the crowd; what mattered the most was my newly-found expression of musical articulation and the feeling of successfully adding my thoughts, my experiences, my personal musical monologue into something I love.  

Nowadays, I still occasionally practice in the dimly lit room of the “TALKING-PROHIBITED” zone of the library, with my headphones on and my twelve faithful colored pencils next to me. Since then, I’ve been applying outlandish practice methods I would have never even considered before—when I practice without my piano today, I regularly draw out scenes according to the music I feel, I connect musical phrasings and various sections of my pieces to characters in literary works I’ve read, and I physically act out the parts I feel confused about. Without any shame, I’ve even gone so far as to singing the dynamic and tempo markings out loud, to both my ear and parents’ dismay. The process of practicing, and nurturing, and expressing my emotions for music has transformed my wistful past of ordinary thinking where I simply repeated someone else’s interpretation to a fluid, endless conversation where I look forward in adding my personal chit-chats to the heap of musical discussion. Instead of forcefully planning out who, where, and what I desire, my life has become synonymous to that precious D-minor Mozart Fantasia—it has granted me the power to fully embrace the endless yet refreshing spirit of becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable.