Rejecting virtuosity
An artistic coming-of-age tale
When I was in fourth grade, my parents decided to have me audition for the pre-college program at Juilliard. Everyone around me considered me a promising young pianist, and my parents wondered if I could rank among the very best. So they had me record a pre-screening audition, where I had to play pieces in specified categories. They then sent in the audition by mail, hoping for the best.
Well, I failed. Indeed, someone personally had to tell that to my parents. Apparently my recording had gotten misplaced, so my parents had to call the folks in charge, who then managed to find the recording and began to listen to it with my parents on the phone. They then told my parents that I did not make the cut.
I remember crying when my parents told me this. I was only vaguely motivated to prepare the audition, as the required pieces did not particularly inspire me. But of course it still hurt that I was rejected, especially since it was only the pre-screening stage. My parents tried their best to console me, and we moved on. They never had me audition again, for Juilliard or for any other pre-college music program.
When I was in eighth grade, I participated in the Princeton Festival’s piano competition. I was one of three finalists in my age bracket, and I was proud. I rarely did competitions and eschewed competitiveness as a value, but I was excited and hoped that I would win.
In this competition, everyone in my age bracket had to choose one piece to perform from a list of three pieces. I and one other finalist both chose the first of Felix Mendelssohn’s Three Fantasies, Op. 16. I very much enjoyed this piece, as it felt to me as if it told a story. Indeed, I imagined a story that guided my interpretation of the piece.
During the finals round, all three of us finalists performed our pieces. The youth who chose the same piece as me played it in a very different manner from how I played it. His gaze went towards the sky — a common behavior among young Chinese American pianists seemingly trying to imitate Lang Lang — and his facial expressions were full of what seemed to me an excessively contrived melodrama. The music he was creating failed to captivate me and instead made both me and my piano teacher very uncomfortable. To us, his interpretation made utterly no sense.
Yet he won the competition. The judges explained their criteria: they valued technical mastery over expressive power. My performance was elegant but inconsistent. His was awkward but impeccable. Since it was difficult (if not impossible) to argue based on objective measures who had the most artistic interpretation, the judges chose to pick out the technical flaws, like they would if they were judging gymnastics.
I was infuriated. I didn’t necessarily expect to win the competition, but I didn’t expect to lose to him. On the other hand, I knew that my playing tended to have technical inconsistencies that were particularly magnified under the pressure of public performance. It appeared to me that to win competitions, one had to have nerves of steel. I was a sensitive and moody Romantic. And I didn’t know if I wanted to overcome that at all.
After that experience, I did attempt a few other solo piano competitions, but I never won. I couldn’t get myself to care enough about technical perfection in order to successfully pursue it and consistently perform it. It wasn’t that virtuosity was completely out of reach, as I’m sure that if I had the right psychological coaching early on, I would have developed the practice habits and mental skills to achieve at the highest levels. But I wasn’t meant for it.
Juilliard did not choose me. Neither did the judges of numerous piano competitions. But I can choose a unique artistic path for myself that suits my own values and gifts-to-give. And I don’t have to confine myself to classical piano performance, as many young musicians in the siloed world of the music conservatory are encouraged to do. I can explore my creativity in all the ways that I feel called to and decide for myself the level of technical mastery that is sufficient for my endeavors.
Instead of virtuosity, I pursue virtue: the mastery of the art of human.