The Performer vs. the Academic

I usually receive surprised glances when I describe what my course load was like as an undergraduate piano performance major at the Peabody Conservatory: along with the typical music theory and musicology courses required of any conservatory student, I also took Economic theory, Political Philosophy, Russian Language Immersion, and Mathematics. This eclectic course load was the result of my desire to make the most out of Peabody’s connection with the Johns Hopkins University. When I look back, some of my most fulfilling college experiences came from those chalk-dusted and crowded lecture halls; the courses opened my mind to topics and ideas that I had never thought about before, revealing the world to be much more colorful, complex, and layered than I could ever have imagined. While each course was different in the nature of its contents, I took out of them all a genuine love and fascination for scholarship. Upon returning to the practice room, my new-found knowledge inspired me as a performer in different ways from any Peabody course.

It has been almost ten (!!!) years since I first began my studies at Peabody, but the nature of my undergraduate experiences continue to define me as a musician and artist today. Over the years, I tried to figure out a way to combine music with the other subjects that I was interested in, hoping to turn my wide range of interests into something concrete. My equal passion for performance and scholarship led me to write a doctoral dissertation in performance that was interdisciplinary in nature: George Gershwin’s Concerto in F and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: An Interdisciplinary Analysis in Search of the Lost Generation.

Whenever I speak to people from non-performance academic departments, they see me as a performer, but when I speak to my performance friends, they see me more as an academic. I used to think that it was important to know exactly which “side” I wanted to be on: did I want to put the majority of my focus into my performance career, or was I actually more interested in a career dedicated to research and musical analysis? (Was I secretly a musicologist?) On one hand, I had gone the “typical” performance route: entering piano competitions ever since I was in elementary school, studying at a major conservatory, spending my summers at music festivals in Europe taking masterclasses with professors from all over the world, blah blah blah... On the other hand, I hated the “tunnel vision” that I developed after spending so much time in the practice room. I preferred to spend my time at the library reading and learning about evolutionary anthropology, economic theory, and foreign policy, and I loved speaking to PhD students about their areas of research. When I graduated from my masters in piano performance, I knew that I needed to pursue a doctorate in order to satisfy the researcher and writer within me. (At one point, I seriously considered pursuing a PhD in Economics, but that’s another story!)

So, performer or academic? These days, I don’t feel a particular need to make a distinction anymore, although it would make my interests and career goals a whole lot easier to explain. The more I study and read, the more I realize that no subject is in its own categorical box, but instead, that study of difference disciplines can add depth and dimension to the understanding of others. This does not only apply to music performance - my sister just took a course at the Johns Hopkins University about the philosophy of gender, and the course content required an intricate understanding of the mathematical language. Back when I took economics and economic theory courses, my professors loved borrowing concepts from physics to describe the concepts found in economics, and I found that to be so cool!

As for me, I am particularly interested in the relationship between music and literature. For example, Dmitri Shostakovich loved the short stories of Anton Chekhov, and even remarked that many of them were written in sonata form. In comparing Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard to Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony, one can find so many characteristic and analytical similarities between the two artists, especially in how they approach formal structures. An understanding of Tchaikovsky’s musical forms could benefit literary scholars studying Chekhov, as this can only result in an even deeper appreciation of Chekhov’s masterful short stories and plays, and vice-versa. There are many more pairings of writers and composers in which this could apply: Gershwin and Fitzgerald (my dissertation topic!), Franck and Proust, Scriabin and Pasternak (Pasternak actually studied composition with Scriabin before he decided to become a writer!)…

I hope to use this blog as a space to share with my readers my love for both music and literature, and the fascinating results that happen when they are analyzed side by side. I hope that my analysis projects can convince you that there does not have to be a fine line between an academic and a performer, but rather, that the two disciplines can further enhance each other. Am I a performer or an academic? I guess I strive to become a musician of both masterful technique and intellectual credentials, each side complementing the other.

Welcome to my blog!