Piano
To be honest, when I was little, I did not learn the piano because I truly “liked” it. At that time, there was no real distinction between “liking” and “disliking”—I could not yet understand what kind of experience the dopamine rush brought by an activity of entertainment actually was, nor did I understand what genuine happiness meant. But when my dad asked me whether I liked the piano, out of obedience—an obedience to parental expectations—I answered: yes, I like it.
Before I had truly come into contact with the piano (I was only three), my musical education was based on a system called Orff Schulwerk approach. Through a series of bodily movements, it expresses different musical concepts such as tempo, dynamics, and pitch; I consider this a kind of miniature of the Montessori method in music education. In any case, it was beneficial to my musical perception.
Interestingly, the teacher of that music class (surname Mao, whom I usually called Mrs. Mao) became my piano teacher after half a year or so. After finishing Orff, I would go to Mrs. Mao’s home, open John Thompson’s Easiest Piano Course, and, under guidance, connect the notes one by one. I only remember that playing the melodies from pieces I wanted to learn brought me great joy; the rest of the details are no longer verifiable.
One thing in this process is worth mentioning: during my first year of piano study, my dad always required me to sing the score out loud, at least the melody. Why I had, or whose idea it was, I do not know. But interestingly, this did improve my familiarity with any piece of music and also gave me absolute pitch. This has proven extremely useful in the a cappella choir I have joined now—not only for identifying pitches, but for singing them as well.
Before elementary school, through my mother’s introduction, I went to study with an academically trained teacher. This was a Russian/Chinese-style piano education—emphasizing fundamentals and ignoring interest. The scores included Thompson’s Modern Piano Course, and, like many piano children, were supplemented with Bach’s Little Preludes and Two-Part Inventions, Czerny 599, Hanon, and basic Scales and Arpeggios. But for several years, I never again practiced a single piece of my own choosing. Indeed, the fundamentals improved. By the upper grades of elementary school I began studying Beyer and Basic Piano Course, and I passed the Shanghai Conservatory Grade 4 and Grade 6 exams (but never took another Shanghai Conservatory exam afterward). Yet in an environment where “whatever the teacher says, I play,” resistance slowly emerged. This was the first—and only—time I ever felt that I did not want to practice the piano.
Thus began a dark period—the weekly quota of three hours of practice was divided into four 45-minute sessions, and every time I had to sit on the piano bench for that long. It was truly torturous:
more torturous than staring into space. Looking back now, the reason was precisely that not a single assigned task was something I liked, nor something I understood. At my age then, I could not possibly comprehend how practicing scales, arpeggios, and Czerny 599 would help me play more advanced pieces in the future, and no one explained it to me. My dad could not understand either, but he would still press me down onto the piano bench according to the teacher’s rules. He even scolded and beat me at times because I tried every possible way to avoid practicing—quite normal, really. What is even more absurd is that every time he sensed I was trying to escape practice, he would ask me at the end of his anger: You do like playing the piano, right? And I—out of stubbornness, and also mental fragility, unable to control my need to meet expectations—would still answer: I like it…
But what I liked was being able to play my own pieces, to play beautiful melodies, to express emotion,to move others through sound. I don’t think every child, at the very beginning of piano study, truly likes Bach’s seemingly illogical, mentally demanding two-part inventions, do they? Or the scales and arpeggios that take fifteen minutes each time?
Overall, my foundation was weak. It was so in childhood, and it remains so now. Because I truly disliked—and could not adapt to—that system.
Two small incidents also occurred during this period. Children trained under the ABRSM system all know the importance of sight-reading. But clearly, the older generation of teachers under the Russian system did not share this view. I once sight-read half of a small piece from Thompson Book 2 that interested me for the teacher; she immediately asked: Did you practice hands separately? How can you play with both if you haven’t done it separately? At that moment, my passion froze.
The other incident concerns one of the very few pieces I loved during that time. In Basic Piano Course 3, there is a piece by Merkl called Butterfly (not Schumann’s piece of the same name though). It was probably the first piece in which I used the pedal: the D-major arpeggios were truly enchanting. At the time, I played it for a vocal teacher who was very close to my mom outside of class. She praised it, saying: this is the best version I’ve ever heard. The technique isn’t there, but the emotion is.
Things took a turn in seventh grade. On the one hand, my dad and I found a course on the “Dedao” app—The History of Western Music (and The History of Western Art)—taught by popular science writer Yan Bojun (only when looking up Yan’s background did I learn that he was also a Brown alumnus…). Under Yan’s explanations, I gained a general understanding of the historical context and trajectory of Western classical music, and became familiar with composers and performers. On the other hand, in the music section on the seventh floor of Shanghai Book City, I discovered the six-volume collection of music criticism by veteran critic Xin Fengnian, and after reading them carefully, I developed my own aesthetic taste. And finally, I reunited with Mrs. Mao.
It was Mrs. Mao’s teaching that allowed me to reorganize technique, theory, and pieces. After a brief period of training with the technical series Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, I entered preparation for ABRSM Grade 5—which left me with Grade 7–8–level music theory to this day, and allowed me at the time to begin understanding harmonic progressions and many Italian terms I had previously failed to grasp. But the biggest difference was this: I could choose my own pieces. In 220 World-Famous Piano Pieces, I finally had the chance to try works that I loved listening to and that were technically worth attempting—Humoresque, The Swan, and other familiar yet foundational masterpieces. With the support of classical music history, I also realized for the first time that each piece carried its own meaning.
My understanding of the piano and classical music suddenly improved by an entire dimension: I knew what I was playing, and I knew what I wanted to play. I also understood why I needed to do those fundamental exercises, especially when I realized that technical details in difficult pieces required targeted practice.
From 2018 until the 2020 pandemic was when I practiced the piano most diligently. On the one hand, I was preparing for ABRSM Grade 8 (though I ultimately could not take the exam due to lockdowns); on the other hand, I began pursuing pieces I truly loved. In classical music, this ranged from large quantities of Chopin to Beethoven to Rachmaninoff’s preludes; outside the classical realm, from Croatian Rhapsody to Pirates of the Caribbean, and finally to my first completed piece by transcribed by pianist Animenz, Only My Railgun. Perhaps because I found joy in the music—and in completing a piece—I never again left the piano bench out of boredom with tedious exercises; every session lasted at least an hour and a half.
After that, things went more and more smoothly. At the beginning of sophomore year, sudden academic pressure made it impossible for me to continue traveling across Shanghai to Xuhui for weekly lessons, so the classes were suspended indefinitely. But practice never stopped. In intermittent practice, I completed Chopin Ballade No. 1 in freshman year, refreshed several old pieces in sophomore year, and in senior year—through qualitative change brought by quantitative accumulation—experienced a dramatic evolution in sight-reading awareness, learning three pieces by Animenz and Der Erlkönig in one go. At first, I was timid about exploring on my own without a teacher’s guidance; but after listening to many recordings and discovering that different interpretations of the same piece each had their own merits, I felt reassured—while technique may have a single correct answer, expression does not.
The progress of an amateur piano student who still retains passion and possesses basic ability is always slow but steady. Except for the three months of application season, the piano has never left my life.
I even believe that playing the piano is one of the two most important factors keeping my emotions stable (the other is badminton): under immense internal pressure, only by transforming mania into fervor, and fervor into romance, can I pull myself out of life’s mire. That corner of the house where the YAMAHA piano stands feels like an isolated land apart from the world—a place without anxiety (though perhaps tinged with melancholy).
Being an amateur with a limited repertoire (compared to professionals who prepare dozens or hundreds of pieces) has its unique advantages. Because the repertoire advances slowly and there is no pressure to prepare multiple works at once, one often engages with only a single piece over a long period. The result is that each piece corresponds roughly to a short episode of life, and behind every work lies a story. My first encounter with Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23, was in eighth grade, influenced by The Pianist. The story of the Jewish pianist playing the Ballade in a war-ravaged wooden shack for a Nazi officer was both fantastical and romantic. What I did not expect was that it would reappear at the finale of Your Lie in April at the end of ninth grade (it was during the pandemic that I got into anime through this series)—the unspoken confession of the young pianist and the death of the violinist girl were tragically beautiful. (The violin’s entry midway through the piece was especially plangent!) Amid reflections on friendship, hostility, love, and loss, these most fundamental (transcendental?) concepts, as well as my own confusion about the future and relationships in my freshman year, I finished this piece. (Of course, three years later, after finding such a balance in life, my interpretation subtly changed.)
Ballade No. 2 accompanied my study of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Between shifts of F-major and minor, the liquidized tenderness of the major key and the catastrophic roar of cascading octave descents in the minor key resemble the lacerations Dostoevsky constructs—marital, moral, religious, existential—
an interwoven opposition between Christlike perfect beauty (the beauty of heaven) and the absurd, hideous beauty of hell (the beauty of Sodom). Even more wonderfully, the structure of Ballade No. 2 aligns almost one-to-one with Karamazov—prologue, quarrel, reflection, murder, trial, epilogue… Each performance feels like psychologically reliving the entire novel’s inner journey. The columnar chord progression before the finale tolls like a funeral bell; Gothic decadence and feverish bloodflow mingle. That binary opposition of love and conflict, white-lit sanctity and fire-laced darkness, mercy and justice…
Then there are pieces like Pirates of the Caribbean, a reflection of my fondness for showing-off; Butter-Fly, an attempt to recreate the “best emotional version” before technical breakthroughs; and A Cruel Angel’s Thesis, a lament-in-sublime during my desolate application-season-dilemma.
So if you were to ask me now whether I like playing the piano: I do.
III & 1/2. Der Erlkönig
My rendezvous with Erlkönig was also my rendezvous with classical music. At least, it was a long thread running through my study of piano and classical music.
I first learned of this piece when I was in second grade. At the time, my dad set me up with a closed-system tablet, containing only piano scores for practice and a small number of apps strictly related to music, such as sight-singing and ear training. Erlkönig stood out conspicuously within that neither-large-nor-small library. Although as a narrow-minded beginner focused on grade exams, I knew nothing at all about classical music, I was nevertheless seized by the unbroken stream of triplets and the highly charged, tension-filled melody. Almost every day after finishing my practice, I would open the digital score and listen once to the demonstration recording (only later did I realize just how atrocious that recording actually was).
My next encounter with Erlkönig came in seventh grade. After taking Yan Bojun’s general-education course on classical music, I gradually began to understand who was who, and who had written what. Following that line of thought back to several years earlier, I learned how Goethe, who wrote the poem Erlkönig, was a genius; how Schubert, who composed the original vocal setting, was equally brilliant; and how Liszt, who transcribed it for piano, was downright terrifying. At the same time, I began frequently visiting sheet-music stores, both online and offline, in the hope of finding any trace of it (but without success—none of the major publishers carried Liszt’s S.558; only Peters had a vocal score of Schubert’s version… and I also realized that the song exists in high, middle, and low keys, namely G, F, and E). In the end, I found a very old edition on IMSLP, a utopia for music score searching. I tried playing it, but gave up after three attempts—the very first few notes in the left hand were already beyond my control. I convinced myself that I would never be able to resonate with it again.
By sheer coincidence, we encountered each other again in ninth grade.That year, the theme of the USAD competition was “Death and Dying,” and to my surprise, this piece appeared in the music section (the Schubert version). Only then did I come to understand the story behind the piece: the Erlking (a disease spirit?) first lures, then forcibly snatches the sick child from his father, who is riding home, and takes the child’s life. Through the materials, I came to understand the meaning of the text word by word, as well as which character each melodic line represents. I also learned that “Der Erlkönig” is a variant of the German term for “Elf King.” This theoretical understanding later proved extremely helpful in refining and adjusting the texture of my interpretation. Around that time, I also finally started watching Bilibili, where much of the content I consumed was music-related, which led me to performances by Kissin and Yuja Wang that influenced me deeply.
I tried again for a week during the summer after tenth grade, without success.
It was not until sometime after I graduated from high school, when I was sitting at the piano bench wondering, “What piece should I work on next?”, that I realized I had not started a new classical work in nearly two years. With the sudden surge of academic pressure in the last two years of high school and far fewer opportunities to return to piano lessons, I could no longer expect to handle a classical piece properly without a teacher’s or theoretical guidance—very often, only insiders know how a piece is meant to be treated. Yet playing pop culture music exclusively left me with a sense that I was somehow in debt. In the end, I chose Erlkönig partly because it was the only score that had remained on my music stand all along, and partly because, toward the end of twelfth grade, I experienced a breakthrough in sight-reading: I began to understand harmonic motion and could feel out chords through hand shapes rather than reading every single note. That gave me confidence.
When I began practicing it seriously, I ran straight into every difficulty I had once feared: cramp-like patterns of exertion, thirteenth-interval chords, octave passages with finger substitutions ascending upward… The issue of physical power was resolved through the strength foundation I had built from playing badminton (no joke— wrist curls with barbell was remarkably effective); the thirteenth chords were conquered through practicing Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 48 No. 1; and the ascending octaves with finger substitutions closely resembled the final coda of Chopin’s Ballade No.1. It all felt very much like Steve Jobs’s idea of “connecting the dots.”
This was the first classical piece I had taught myself entirely without guidance. Every time I play it, it feels as though I return to the child I once was, sitting blankly at the piano bench, staring at a tablet, listening to the demonstration recording.
The awe has never diminished.