In this episode, I talk about how Chopin’s Op. 10 No. 1 changed my attitude at two different times in my life: learning piano during my middle school years and completing this last year(ish) of my chemistry PhD.
I chose Chopin’s Op. 10 No. 1 as the intro/outro/trailer background music because it has deep personal significance to me. Hearing it changed my life twice: first, as a middle schooler learning piano, and now as a chemistry PhD candidate, with about 1(ish) year left before graduation.
I started learning piano piano when I was around five years old. As a piano student, sometimes I was diligent and I practiced really hard and sometimes I was not so diligent and I would skip my piano practice because I wanted to do other things. I wanted to read, I wanted to play, I wanted to watch anime.
But sometimes I skipped practicing because it kind of felt pointless. I would practice really hard sometimes, and then when I go to my lesson, my piano teacher would say, Did you even practice this week? And this kind of signaled to me that even though I practice really hard, I would still make mistakes and I would never be perfect.
There were many stretches of times when I thought, I’ll never be good at piano and I really wanted to quit. But I really felt guilty about this because my parents had invested so much time and money and effort into driving us to our piano lessons and it just seemed like a waste.
So I stayed in it even though my heart wasn’t really there. Around this time, I was probably 12 or 13 somewhere in middle school and I think my piano teacher noticed this. But she suggested that I watch this piano competition called the Van Cliburn. During the preliminary round, a pianist named Nobuyuki Tsuji performed in the preliminary round with the Chopin Etudes Op. 10, comprising of 12 individual pieces.
To play the entire set of etudes at once is like the musical equivalent of doing a marathon. It’s about thirty five minutes of continuous music and it’s about 50 pages of piano music. And at the time, I didn’t really know much about music theory or history as much as I do now. But when I heard him play the opening, that chord and then the just like majestic arpeggios that cascaded down the piano and back up. When I heard him play, I got chills and I knew that he was going to go really far. What surprised me even more was that I found out he was blind and that he had to learn music from braille scores and if there wasn’t a braille score available, he learned it by ear.
So on one hand, it was very inspiring to hear his rendition of the Chopin etudes. On the other hand, I felt really ashamed of my own inadequacy and my poor work ethic. Because here I was fully abled seeing, hearing, and I was not putting as much effort as I could have. Whereas somebody like Tsuji didn’t have his sight and only relied on hearing to to play the music. But ultimately hearing the Chopin etudes, it inspired me and motivated me to continue.
And now I’m hearing it at the time of my life where I feel like I kind of need that push again. I have been going through periods of self isolation, self doubt, just like generally withdrawing myself from being seen. Because going through the struggles of the past year or so, I didn’t really want to make that visible to other people. I didn’t want people to see how difficult that was. Because it feels hard to show up, and in a sense, like showing up in this podcast or on social media, in one way or another, it’s kind of setting an example. And that’s just like the nature of putting yourself out there.
But now that I’ve had some time to reflect on these experiences, and especially now that I only have about a year left in my PhD, give or take, I really want to set the intention to document this journey with the time I have left.
That’s the reason why I included Chopin’s Op. 10 as the intro and outro to the podcast as well as the trailer. Listening to it reminds me that, yes, this is a hard journey, but ultimately, you know, it’s because I still want to do it. I want to see it to the end, so I have to keep going, even when things get a bit difficult, even when I go through challenges in the research, even when things don’t work out for a week or two, or longer, honestly. That’s really the power of music.
Listen to Nobuyuki Tsuji’s 2009 Van Cliburn performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vshKjti_lTU
Intro/Outro Background Music Credit: Op. 10 No. 1, composed by Frederic Chopin, performed by Chiara Bertoglio, piano (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0)
Brittany Trinh 