Why We are Mentoring All Wrong

A line in a recent New York Times article caught my eye: “High-potential women are overmentored and undersponsored.” Intrigued, I followed the link to a Harvard Business Review feature, which mentioned a woman who felt “mentored to death.”

Yes. Nameless high-potential woman, I hear you. I'm not sure if I'm a high-potential woman, but I have grown wary of being “mentored.” It’s gotten so bad that whenever I hear about another mentoring program, I roll my eyes. Having been a minority woman in the fields of science, business and law (particularly corporate law), I’ve been in my share of mentoring programs. And I agree with the article - such programs cost time and money and have very little to show for it. In my experience, mentoring programs follow the same formula: pair me up with someone who matches me in two dimensions (usually gender, field or ethnicity), and give my mentor a small budget to take me out for meals a few times a year. It’s perfectly nice, being taken out to meals by a perfectly nice person, having perfectly nice conversations about our lives, but I can’t say I’ve benefited much beyond that. If the point of mentoring was to give me an extra boost, as a minority or woman, into the higher leadership circles of my field, it definitely hasn’t done that.   

The HBR article concurs. The upshot of the study is that women do get some of the benefits of mentoring; just not the ones that really matter to advancement: 

“They were not getting that sponsorship. They were getting mentoring. They were getting coaching. They were getting developmental advice. But they were not getting fought for and protected, and really put out there.”

The result was a correlation between mentoring and promotions for men but not for women, despite women having just as much (or even more) mentoring.

Why doesn't mentoring do as much for women's advancement? The study co-author, Herminia Ibarra, focused in on what she called the “sponsoring” function of mentoring. Basically, it’s when a mentor, usually a higher-up, uses their position to go to bat for you, to advocate for you, to protect you and defend you in the fights that matter. For some reason, many mentors - program-matched or organically grown - just don’t do that for women.  

This got me thinking about the mentors I’ve been lucky enough to have. Even in music, where advancement and promotion are not as defined, there are people putting themselves out there for me: advocating for me, recommending me for jobs, supporting my proposals for change in the face of resistant systems. These people exist, and for them I’m very grateful. 

I want to tell you about one of my first musical mentors (an unlikely one at that) and what I learned about true mentorship. The year was 2008, and I had just arrived at the Manhattan School of Music on a bit of a crazy lark: I had finished law school, accepted a full-time law firm offer -- and decided to first take a break to play piano. During the doldrums that are the 3L year, I dusted off my fingers, took a few lessons, and auditioned for piano graduate programs in New York and London. MSM gave me the most scholarship, and not knowing any better, off I went for a year of piano-cation. 

Upon arriving, I sought out performance opportunities; turns out, this is no easy task! Through the grapevine, I heard that this one professor held a performance class every Tuesday for two hours where anyone could play anything and he would give you comments. Sounded good to me!

I went to visit the class one week. It was held in a beautiful recital hall, and students who had signed up would queue up to go on stage and play through their piece for the professor, who sat in the audience. I can’t remember the exact moment I first saw David Dubal, but I remember it was a bit of a shock. Here was a man dressed famously in a head-to-toe purple velour (velvet?) suit plus a colorful scarf or old-fashioned hat, with long and quite unkempt gray hair, dark sharp eyes, and a strangely loud and reedy voice. His appearance was odd, but his comments were completely screwball. He made up nicknames for students on the spot (my favorite one was “Juliana Liebestraum” but often I was “the Han woman”). He described music in the most colorful ways I had ever heard. I recall him once describing at length a particular brand of jarred olives, to describe the briny smoothness he wanted out of a student’s sound. “This is the oracle?” I thought to myself. “What an odd dude.”

Dubal in his element. 

It took me weeks to muster up the courage to play in front of him and the other impressively talented students (I hadn’t played for so long!), but once I started, I played in his class as much as I could. And after a while, I understood not only his greatness, but his critical value to my musical development. Without overstatement, David Dubal has been one of the most important people keeping me playing the piano and helping me progress in my artistry. In that sense, he has been one of my most important musical mentors. 

It’s difficult to encapsulate someone who means so much to you, but I’d like to share four features of a true mentor and how Dubal embodied them to me. 

ONE: A mentor knows the field. Cold.  
There is no doubt that Dubal is an authority when it comes to the piano. He’s written multiple books, including The Art of the Piano, an encyclopedic must-read reference about piano's performers, literature and recordings. He’s hosted radio shows about the piano for decades. He’s given lectures everywhere. The man knows the piano better than just about anyone. 

So when you perform a piece for him, he has all of the context: the composer’s trajectory, the style, the seminal recordings of the piece (he knows what year they were recorded and, uncannily, their exact timings). This context gives him a musical intuition that is not just thoughtful but utterly informed. If he says the tempo or pacing is off, or the texture too thick, or you’re not following the markings, it’s not because he doesn’t like it, but because the weight of the classical music tradition says so. 

I’ve come to trust his ears. If he hears something that can be improved, it’s worth considering. He may not always tell me how to fix it, but I trust that his comments are in good style and taste. And what is style and taste in art if not gleaned from context? 

TWO: A mentor knows the challenges you’re facing.
In those MSM years, I faced the tough reality of trying to play difficult music despite a lack of training and years of disuse. I no longer was a fearless kid, performing concerti in front of hundreds of people with nonchalance. I was an adult who was acutely aware of my shortcomings. I face-planted on stage ALL THE TIME. My hands would get sweaty and I’d slip off the keys. My heart started racing the minute I approached the stage. My memory would freak out and I couldn’t finish the piece. These trials by fire were devastating, yet I made myself do it repeatedly because I knew I had to. After one class, I crept out of the class, slumped down in a nearby hallway and quietly cried out of shame for about half an hour. 

Piano is hard. Performance is even harder. And Dubal knows it. He’ll be the first to point out how tricky a deceptively simple piece can be, or how much bravery it takes to go on stage and put your skills on display. That day I utterly crashed and burned on a Chopin scherzo and went out into the hallway to cry, he had gently advised me not to worry, that it just needed a lot more time, and that I should hole up in a practice room for a week to get it right, and that he'd send roast beef sandwiches to my room every once in a while to keep me going. When anyone (many of us) showed signs of nerves, he was gentle but realistic. I remember him saying, “playing the piano is the hardest thing there is,” and I believed him. He told stories of famous pianists who were debilitated by stage fright, including Vladimir Horowitz, whom Dubal interviewed extensively. He had plenty of advice for the challenges, often instructing us to play through our pieces multiple times to feel how the second and third chances felt less pressured. Then, he would remind us to play as if it were already a second chance, or to remember that our lives were long, and that this might just be the third performance out of hundreds. These days, I don’t get debilitating nerves anymore, but if I'm a little too jittery for my liking, I think back to those words. 

THREE: A mentor gets what you’re trying to do.
After MSM, I went to Cravath for a few years, only to (unexpectedly) return to music at Juilliard. Luckily, Dubal was there too. There, he teaches the most popular adult-division class for decades running, “The World of the Piano.” This too is a forum in which pianists can run repertoire, alongside commentary by Dubal about the music and the composer. 

I can’t stress how valuable it is for a pianist when preparing for a public performance to have adequate practice runs before the big date. Dubal’s class is one of the few reliable options I have, and to that extent it is a huge resource. He tries to accommodate everyone who needs time, welcoming alumni and students and random guests alike. 

The Juilliard class. More photos and recent article about Dubal here. 

He often introduces us and our stories to the students in the class, most of whom are working or retired adults who are all passionate about music, but not necessarily pianists themselves. One day, while describing us pianists, he was enumerating the various challenges we face today - low income and lack of jobs, long hours and low appreciation, declining audiences, poor music education in the population - and said that pianists struggle against all odds because, above all, “they just want a place to play.” In that moment, I knew it was true. We performers just want a place to share our art with people. That, above money or fame or recognition, is what keeps us going. That’s why playing for myself in my apartment after a "day job" will never satisfy me. 

Many times, his offhand commentary about a musician’s life just rings completely true. About practicing, he once said that he has to do it everyday, otherwise he feels as if he hasn’t brushed his teeth. I have yet to find a better way to describe the compulsion I feel to practice, and the discomfort I feel when I can't. As a lifelong pianist and lover of the piano, Dubal gets us and what we’re trying to do. 

FOUR: A mentor knows what support you need, even if you don’t.
Observing Dubal in those MSM classes, I realized that his feedback was quite uneven - he’d tear into the details of the score for one student who seemed quite well prepared, but heap praise on another student who I felt had barely gotten through her piece. I realized over time that he gave each student just what they needed at that point - whether it was encouragement, a few key points, or a barrage of details. For me, on my lowest day, he could have torn my disastrous Chopin scherzo apart and handed down any number of scathing criticisms I was already heaping on myself -- but he offered roast beef sandwiches instead. I remember one girl who came in and said that she was discouraged in her piano playing, but then proceeded to play one of the most passionate renditions of a Bach prelude and fugue I have ever heard. It wasn’t perfect, but it had so much verve and rhythmic power, and here was someone who was considering quitting the piano. Dubal told her loudly enough so that everyone could hear, “LISTEN TO ME. You must keep playing. The world needs to hear this.” 

I’m not sure how he knew what we needed; he just did. After graduating MSM, I started work at the law firm. I thought that I’d find rainbows, a pot of gold, and happily ever after at the firm, but within months, I knew that wasn’t the case. It was a busy time for M&A in a busy M&A group in a busy law firm, and the first few months went by in a blur of far too many deals at the same time. 

As the most junior lawyers, we had been informed that we shouldn’t expect to go home for Christmas. So I didn’t make travel plans, and good thing, because there was a huge push for a deadline on December 23rd. I remember working late into the night with Christmas music in my office, singing along and skipping through the halls with delirium to my mid-level associate’s office. There was something sad about not being with my family for Christmas for the first time in my entire life, but I tried not to let it get to me. 

And then, out of the blue, Dubal called and left a voicemail on my phone. This is what I remember of it: “Juliana, I haven’t seen you for a while. I fear you have been consumed by some …. Work or JOB (<disgust in his voice>). Always remember that you MUST play the piano, you must ALWAYS play the piano...” I sat in my office, my office chair like a ship adrift in a paper ocean, completely unmoored. Play the piano? Me? Now?

It took another year for me to decide to return to music, perhaps for the very first time. That voicemail is one of the most meaningful and touching gestures I have ever received - from someone who believed in me when I had given up on myself, from someone who saw my passion when I hadn’t yet found it, from someone who knew the path and the darks and lights and was willing to help me through it. From someone who knew the challenges of the journey all too well, and yet knew that the struggle was a worthy reason to attempt it. 

I don’t know if these institutional mentorship programs will ever get it right, because to be a true mentor you have to have the passion for the field, the wisdom and intelligence to grasp the problems and the solutions, and rarest of all, the empathy for those rising through it to help any way you can. It’s a tall order. But if you have those things, you really can change someone’s world. I’m grateful for Dubal, and for my past and future mentors on this life path. Free meals are nice, but I’ll take a roast beef sandwich from a mentor any day. 

Chopin-approved.

Words Left Unsaid: My Remarks at Harvard Law School

Langdell Library, stalwart bastion of legal learning. Also, it's a great place to nap. Photo credit: HLS Facebook page. 

Sometimes, circumstances dictate that the words burning a hole in your heart stay there for a little while longer. Maybe you’ve just moved your firstborn into his college dorm and want to tell him what his first 18 years of life have meant to you - but, perhaps, in front of all of his new roommates, now is not the time. Or perhaps you’re at a wedding, and you know that an illness or death in the family is weighing on your friend, and you want to offer your ear for her deepest sorrows - but, perhaps, now is not the time. 

I had this experience last weekend when I was invited to perform and speak at Harvard Law School’s Bicentennial celebration. HLS had set aside two days to celebrate the contribution of the HLS community in the arts, and I had been invited to represent some aspect of that contribution. The organizers requested that I both perform and talk about my time at HLS and how it influenced my life. I had 15 minutes total. 

I spent days wrestling with how to summarize my personal journey of the last 10 years into just a few moments. Also, with the smattering of classical piano’s greatest hits I had chosen, these remarks also had to serve as an effective transition between a Percy Grainger transcription and a Scriabin Etude… After much hemming and hawing in my head, I came up with the statement at bottom, which I clocked at about 5 minutes. 

Of course, I ended up skipping most of it. As is sometimes the case, you show up at a performance to see that it is not at all what you had imagined. Hundreds of law school students, staff, and faculty swarmed the performance area, lured and kept there by free food and drink (a genius move on the organizers’ part). Other performance acts on the program included hip-hop artists, rappers, drag queens, and parody singers. My time on the schedule was now listed at 11 minutes. They introduced me as “Juliana Han and the Faculty Fiddlers,” which I had never heard before, and ushered me on stage abruptly after an A/V hiccup stalled an introductory video about who I was. 

On stage, with the glare of spotlights and law’s brightest minds on me, I decided that, perhaps, now was not the time. I gave an abbreviated version of the remarks, more casual, more focused on the benefits of my legal training. And I was grateful for the opportunity to be there at all, and to share a tiny sliver of my art and what gives my life meaning. 

Someday, there will be more time for the remaining words.

I'm not usually big on mottos, mission statements, or slogans, but I really like this one. The world needs more questioning, reasoning, and action. Photo credit: Hopewell Partners. 

[P. Grainger: Free Settings of Favorite Melodies. Fauré: Après un rêve.]

Hi, my name is Juliana Han and I am a proud graduate of this law school and very honored to be here for this celebration. About 10 years ago, I was a student at this fine institution. 5 years ago, I was a corporate associate at the law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore, working on high-profile mergers and acquisitions. Today, I am finishing my doctorate at Juilliard and building a career as a concert pianist. As someone recently asked me, how did it go so wrong?? 

Well, it’s hard to go wrong attending HLS. As most of you here already know, legal training can serve you well in LIFE generally. Being a lawyer means knowing how the world works. My musician friends often come to me with problems, like when a friend spent her life savings on a violin she didn’t actually want, or when someone’s bathtub broke and her landlord wouldn’t respond, or when a colleague had a question about his immigration status. As a BigLaw lawyer, I could say to them: I’m sorry, did you have two public companies you wanted to merge? No? Hm. 

Kidding aside, I draw upon my legal background constantly in the arts, particularly in leadership roles, such as in my position as director of the Piedmont Chamber Music Festival. And the deeper I get into the arts world, the more I realize that the sort of legal training I have is exactly what the field needs more of. Questioning and structuring and changing the status quo are not skills that necessarily come naturally to musicians, but they are trained into the sort of person, like you, who goes into the legal profession. 

But why be a pianist? Why not be an arts lawyer, or an arts advocate, or a patron of the arts? While I value all of these roles, for myself and for others, the key difference is in the practice we choose for our lives. By practice I mean something you do every day with a directed intention of becoming better at it than you were yesterday. Over the years, I have found that having a practice gives my life greater purpose. If the practice of law is what gets you up in the morning, excited to become a better lawyer than you were yesterday, then you are in the right place. Today, I spend my time in the practice of music, which, like the practice of law, requires long hours of intense work. The difference for me is that the subjects of my practice are some of the world’s best music. These days, I jump out of bed to go practice, to spend hours crafting a piece of music to its most profound extent. The first piece I played for you, a setting of Gabriel Fauré’s song, Après un rêve, is one of those searches for greater emotional depth and profundity. 
    
My next selection is an etude, a study that is designed to teach the pianist some element of technical or musical proficiency. Like all of the best piano etudes, whether by Chopin or Debussy or Liszt, these etudes are not just technical exercises but works of art. I’d like to play for you now an etude by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. You could spend a lifetime practicing this piece – and greater pianists than I (am) have done just that. I hope this provides some insight into the practice of music. This is Scriabin’s Etude opus 8 number 5. 

[A. Scriabin: Etude Op. 8 No. 5.]

To end my set and to transition into Professor Crawford’s presentation of classic Broadway tunes, I’d like to play a transcription of Gershwin’s timeless song, “Embraceable You” by the piano virtuoso Earl Wild, a snippet of which you saw in the intro video. I feel incredibly lucky to both create music and support it with my legal skills. Now that I’ve been on both sides, I see more than ever that art needs (and has always needed) all the help it can get to survive. So I ask of you: If art enriches your life in some way, if it presents to you visions of beauty, if it tells you something about your place in this universe or your relation to other souls in this world, if it moves you - then fight for it, fight against cuts in arts education, fight against the elimination of national funding, fight for people of all economic backgrounds to have access to expression through music. Fight for it, and I’ll be right there with you. Thank you. 

[E. Wild: Virtuoso Etudes on Gershwin Songs; “Embraceable You”] (video of previous performance here)
 

Photo credit: Dan Chen. Many college memories were revisited as we wandered Harvard Square afterwards. 

On Being Asian-American/A Noodle Soup Addict

Is this post just about food, or does it have some nuance? You be the judge. 

Nobody gives you a manual on how to be the child of immigrants. Your parents, if they arrived as students to the United States as mine did, may have received a pamphlet at an orientation meeting about life in their new country. We, their children, however, get no such document.  Instead, we are born straddling two worlds and left to figure out how to navigate both. 

The country we grew up in is the easier one to manage. After all, it is home. Born and raised in Ohio, I assumed the Midwestern life: eating unhealthy foods, playing outside with the neighborhood kids, and staring at the tv for hours every day. If you grow up as I did in an area where there aren’t many people like you, you identify with the majority culture. Of course there were times when I was told that I didn’t actually belong, based on my name, appearance, or some other superficial indication. And immigrant parents sometimes imply that you don’t entirely belong, in a subconscious effort to cleave you to their beliefs, which are increasingly incongruent with the world that you know best.  Despite these moments however, I knew that I belonged here as much as anyone else. As a child, my patriotism flared fierce anytime someone challenged my identity. When asked where I was from, I stood my ground. I am an American, and I am from Ohio. Final answer. 

Halloween with the neighbors. 

The other world, the world from which your parents came, is more of an enigma. Its influences are undeniable, embedded in your DNA and the way your family raised you, fed you, and taught you. However, these old world influences are overshadowed by the more familiar ways of the home country, so they recede to a dark file cabinet in your consciousness. How many of us were forced to go to Chinese School on weekends, suffering through hours of seemingly pointless class and retaining nothing? How many of us know nothing about the history of the country from which our parents come came?  Despite the Cultural Revolution being responsible for the mass migrations that ultimately led to my soul being deposited on American soil, I was probably in my twenties when I read any more than a few paragraphs about it in a world history textbook. 

Something about this guy. 

For me, the enigmatic old world is Taiwan, where my parents were born.  While growing up, I visited Taiwan only twice: once when I was three and once when I was 12. The trip when I was three consists of very hazy scenes viewed from the height of a chair seat. I remember the air being damp and surfaces sticky, and I remember the sounds of street peddlers in the early morning. I also remember going to this day school that I absolutely hated. The kids at the school, upon finding out that I was from the USA, showed genuine horror, exhorting me not to go back because all the people with all the guns would certainly shoot me dead (some things never change, huh?).  Apparently I cried every day until someone came to pick me up. Attending American preschool was fun, but trying to fit into this one made me miserable.

Although often hidden, these old world influences are prone to come out at strange times.  At one point in middle school, I slapped my Sanrio eraser onto my face in utter boredom or exasperation, and I realized at that very moment that it smelled like Taiwan! The eraser smelled like Taiwan! It took me decades to figure out why. One day in an Asian grocery store, I rediscovered the Yakult drink, these yogurt drinks that come in insulting small sizes. Seriously, as an adult, it’s barely enough to wet your tongue, but as a kid, it was a wonderful treat. And then I made the connection - the eraser smelled sweet and slightly cultured like this drink! 

It makes sense that, as a child, smells and tastes constitute your strongest consciousness of the old world.  Before you can understand the hardships your parents endured, the challenges they faced, the training and education they craved, and the sense of greater opportunity they longed for, before you can understand all of this, your nose and your stomach tell you about your parents’ past lives. From the earliest age, you understand that food and drink mean home. 

As a kid, I grew up on awesome home food and drink. My mom is an excellent cook, and her side of the family is in the restaurant business. My uncles, once fine chefs in Taiwan, run a vastly under-appreciated Chinese restaurant in Ohio, where they make gourmet dishes for Midwesterners who would just as happily go to Panda Express.  Once in a while they’ll carve an exquisite bird from a carrot or turnip just because they can, and because it only takes so much skill to fry crab rangoons. In this environment, I grew up a bit of a Chinese food snob, which means I get pretty grumpy when I am forced to eat non-Asian or sub-par Asian food for long stretches of time.

So it is no surprise that my trip to Taiwan at age 12 featured some delicious eats. I remember the warm pineapple buns from the bakery down the street, the papaya milk from the convenience stores, the seafood at fancy restaurants, the freshness of the vegetables everywhere. My family lived right off of Yong Kang Street, which is FOODIE CENTRAL in Taipei (and aren’t all Taiwanese foodies?), so you could trip out the door and have the meal of your life. They lived right off of the triangular-shaped park near one end of the street, which was the starting point for all of our tasty expeditions. 

My favorite food, however, was easy to find - right at the corner of the park. There, beef noodle soup awaited me every night. At that corner, an old man sold the dish from his rickety steel cart piled high with bowls, which seemed barely rinsed. Basically, the options were a small or a large bowl. Once you ordered, he would slap in the soup and the noodles and the beef (so tender) then hand the steaming bowl immediately back to you. As a kid that soup was so spicy to me but also so addictive. We went so many times, I got used to my mouth burning and my skin damp as we stood in the night air amongst the hordes of Taiwanese people. It was always worth it. Back in the States, I’ve tried all kinds of versions of beef noodle soup in an attempt to relive the satisfaction that came from one bowl of that street stall. I even try making it myself, tweaking my mom's recipe to my tastes. But nothing has ever come close to the real thing. In the futile attempt, I have become a noodle soup addict. How can a bowl of hot goodness be so comforting regardless of the ambient temperature? 

The park today. Seems cleaner than I remember. 

Fast forward to last summer. I had unwittingly chosen as my life partner a non-Taiwanese violinist in a quartet with serious Taiwanese roots. He went more regularly to Taiwan than anyone I knew. I decided to join him last year on one of these quartet trips, as an excuse to experience the country as an adult and to see my family. Once there, I expressed to my uncle a desire for good beef noodle soup and he, perhaps jaded by long exposure to the treasure, shrugged and agreed to take me to a famous place. At a bustling noodle shop just off of Yong Kang Street, we waited in line not too long before being seated upstairs at a large round table with other diners. The interior was cafeteria-like and not at all fancy, but there was a convivial feeling in the air. Each of us ordered the house beef noodle soup, and when it arrived, my family commenced slurping it as if it were just another meal.  I took my time smelling the broth and scooping up a spoonful, fully expecting to be disappointed. Then I put the spoonful in my mouth -- and something magical happened: my memory was sent spinning into a time warp. Here in this dark, rich spicy broth, was the exact same flavor that I had had at that cart near the park decades earlier. All of a sudden, I was back there, the same night air on my skin; in my mind, the constant annoyance of a preteen, the discomfort of being in a foreign land, and the discovery of my relatives as strangers and yet family. It all washed over me in a fraction of a moment.

Now the literary among you will read this and call to mind the famous madeleine moment in Proust’s masterpiece, Swann’s Way. I cannot hope to describe this moment with any similar facility, but I’ll tell you that my beef noodle soup moment was just like Swann’s madeleine moment. One mouthful of soup sent me hurtling on a journey of memory that unearthed long-buried memories like an industrious squirrel recovering nuts. The familiarity of the soup was strangely emotional. It was as if I had returned to a place that I did not know I had left. The intensity of the moment told me that I too was of Taiwan - that the country was somehow embedded in my being, even if I hadn’t yet organized its influences. I paused, spoon in midair, mouth agape, marveling at what just happened as everyone around me slurped onwards unawares. My uncle later told me that this restaurant was opened by the old man with the cart and a business partner who later backstabbed the old man and took over the enterprise after learning the old man’s secrets. After being ousted, the old man apparently went back to the corner of the park to restore his stall, but it was too late. At this point, the restaurant has outlived the old man. A sad story that explains why the soup was so familiar. 

The magical soup. 

After years exploring Asian-American identity, I still don’t fully understand what it means to concurrently inhabit two worlds. But for me, the old world soul of an immigrant's child is like that sip of soup. The collective experiences of our forebears are all there in us somewhere, subtle and intermixed like the flavors of a secret recipe. And it can take a while for those influences to emerge. We start with sensory triggers and hopefully move on to more intellectual probes of the old world. I'm now in my second consecutive summer of discovery in Taiwan, and I'm grateful for these opportunities to deepen my understanding of this place. I now appreciate much more - not just its culinary riches and natural beauty but the social structure that has put in place stronger infrastructure and healthcare systems than in my home city, and the ways in which people treat each other with warmth and generosity and hospitality. 

It has been personally beneficial for me to acknowledge my dual identity and not suppress one or the other, but on a national scale this is critical. Recently in my home country, groups of people who believe in one supreme identity have come into the open, brandishing their symbols of exclusion and violence against people unlike them. As someone who is 110% American, I feel a duty to validate the non-white portion of myself and the immigrant struggle that gave me the opportunities I have, as a way of celebrating this country that I love so much. At the same time, for perhaps the first time in my life, I am fearful that my home country will finally lose sight of diversity of identity as an invaluable thing. These days, I’m clinging to my soup, hoping that we come around. 
 

What I Learned at Juilliard

Somewhere over the rainbow, on West 65th Street ...

As part of a recent concert with horn player and MSM buddy John-Morgan Bush, we did a Q&A on musician life with local high school kids. They asked thought-provoking questions about topics like finding the right teacher, practicing, dealing with disappointment, and generally preparing for a life in music. Some of them will soon have to decide, as many of us have - should I go to music school? 

It’s a tough question. When I was their age, the choice was clear - “real school” gave you real benefits - practical skills, a marketable degree, a shot at a job. What did conservatory offer? As far as I could tell, they gave you access to a building and a teacher, and you sat and practiced as much as you could, after which you had no job prospects. Sounded pretty dumb to me. 

Decades later, when I decided to leave my job and go to that “dumb” place, all I knew was that I wanted to play music, and play better, and that conservatory was supposed to help. I think that’s why most people go. But a million questions remained. How do I get better? Better at what? What do I need? To what end? Who will help me? I didn’t really have a clue. 

The answers to all of these questions started to fall in place after I heard an anecdote about Josef Gingold, one of the most influential violin pedagogues of the last century. As the tale goes, he would ask a violinist to play Paganini, to see if they had fingers, a Bach fugue, to see if they had a brain, and a slow movement from a Mozart concerto, to see if they had a heart. 

Gingold with one of his many famous pupils, a young Joshua Bell. Read what Joshua Bell had to say about his beloved teacher here. 

That story, apocryphal or not, has stuck with me because it is one of the most vivid yet succinct illustrations of what I need to develop to become a complete musician. It also explained lots of things: why someone with dazzling technique could still put audiences to sleep, how intense emotional experiences could make you a better musician, and why so many scientists and doctors are Bach-obsessed amateur musicians. It also explains why true musical prodigies are rare: to fit the bill, you have to have preternatural ability in all three arenas from a very young age, and most of us are born with lots of room to grow.

I’m pretty sure Gingold didn’t intend this, but his story also transforms all conservatories in my mind into some version of the Land of Oz, where young violinists wander the Yellow Brick Road between practice rooms, linked arm-in-arm and dressed in the creepy Technicolor costumes of the 1939 film. Some of us are the Scarecrow, hoping for a brain, others the Tin Man, looking for a heart, and some of us a weepy Lion, seeking courage (I’ll call this body control or technique - which gives the courage to play anything!). In some way, we are all Tin Lion-Crows - we could use help in all three areas. (It also makes me wonder which administrator at Juilliard is the man behind the curtain. Hmmm…) 

Which character was I, and what was I seeking in the Land of Oz? I didn’t really know. I always figured my Scarecrow brain was decent - as a kid, I used to recreate pieces I’d heard on classical radio on the piano, and memorizing has always comes easily to me. A former teacher once asked me, a week after I started a Bach keyboard partita, whether I’d memorized it yet. “It seems you memorize something by just looking at the cover,” he said.

But I suspected that I needed help in all three arenas. For instance, certain repertoire felt beyond me - my arms would get too tight, or my sound would be choked, or I couldn’t play facilely enough, and I couldn’t figure out why. I could fool enough people, but I felt like my body was struggling. (This struggle would eventually lead to playing injuries, a painful experience I have painstakingly overcome - and a story for another time). Of course, my musical heart and brain also needed maturing. I had long been winging it on my own undeveloped intuition; my music history and theory was mostly unschooled. I remember once when someone asked me if a piece was contrapuntal and I didn’t know what she was talking about. I think I was 14. 

Luckily, I ended up in the amazing Oz-ian land of Juilliard, an often surreal place with an unreal amount of talent. It was the only school I applied to because it was a good school - and two subway stops from my apartment. And I lucked out! My time in Oz was transformative for all three Gingold-ian spheres - brain, body, and heart. Here are just a few of the most influential courses and teachers I found there. All of them changed my life, sometimes in surprising ways.

Juliana Gets Courage
(Private lessons)
Private lessons are the centerpiece of musical training, conservatory setting or otherwise. I knew when I arrived that I had technical gaps, but I didn’t know that my chosen teacher, Jonathan Feldman, was a veritable piano technique guru. He taught us the principles of the Taubman approach, which is designed to minimize unnecessary tension and maximize the use of the body (particularly the upper body) to produce whatever result you wanted on the piano. 

I had unwittingly stumbled on a technical approach taught and used by many of the piano virtuosi I had long admired. And it was available to me too! It was a revelation to realize that these people weren’t necessarily born with special wrists or fingers - they just really knew how to use them. Over my first few years at Juilliard, I had to break down my old technique and build new habits. At times I felt like a child beginner, but after the rebuilding was done, I had the tools to address anything in the piano repertoire (with work) and to diagnose and help others with technical issues as well. It is no understatement to say that I would probably not still be a pianist today without this technical training. I am no longer fearful of my physical concerns, and I can spend more of my time transcending them and dwelling on the artistic planes of music. Absolute game-changer for me and for many others. (Find out more about Dorothy Taubman and her legacy here, at the institute maintained by the wonderful Edna Golandsky).

Juliana Gets a Brain
(Orchestral Conducting; French Diction). 
I think most of us enroll in conducting thinking it’ll all be about how to wield a baton like the greats, but it quickly becomes clear that to be a good conductor is to be a good musician. You can move your body in a myriad of ways, but unless the intent is deeply considered and clear, you might as well be this:  

Orchestral players, we've all been there, amirite?

The course, in which we conducted different excerpts every week with an "orchestra" of duo pianos, helped me grow my Oz-ian brain through plenty of practice in score-study and musical analysis. Preparation for every class required me to marshal all of my skills, then multiply them by a panoply of instruments and their transpositions. You had to keep track of all relevant aspects - such as phrase lengths, harmonic changes, texture, and character - for all of the individual parts, and communicate them in a way that produced an effective net result. This class definitely gave my old brain a few more wrinkles (good for brain, bad for face). Sure, I also learned my way around a baton and improved my own personal conducting style, but more importantly, I realized that my sense of command was directly connected to how well I had studied the music and crafted my interpretation in advance. 

Conjuring music without an instrument, somewhat counter-intuitively, also helped me develop physical command. I was freed from the strictures of the piano and could channel my interpretation more freely and creatively with my body, but every movement had to communicate effectively. Our patient and supportive instructor, Jeffrey Milarsky, showed us how small modulations in our movements could have vast consequences for the clarity of the rhythm, dynamic, or shape we were trying to show. Our motions had to be expressive and yet enunciate our intent - a helpful practice transferable to the playing of any instrument! 

Another brain-builder, in a different way, was the French diction (pronunciation) class. This was a sleeper hit. I certainly wasn’t excited about this course, but it’s required for my degree program so that graduates can find gainful employment as vocal coaches and opera pianists. Having never spoken anything but native tongues, I knew French would be a struggle. But at least I now know why. Pronouncing a foreign language is not magic; it is training your tongue and lips and face to do unfamiliar things with ease. Despite how frustrating it can seem, it is doable with practice and a good teacher, and we had the best one of them all: Tom Grubb. Exacting, blunt, and analytical to a fault, he had us practice our French vowels in front of hand mirrors for an entire year. While I’m not sure I mastered the many gradations of the “e” vowel that he himself devised, I’ll never forget how to produce them. This course was another lesson in using my brain to harness my body in a very specific, analytic way. Like excellent piano technique, good diction was not someone else’s birthright, but could be mine too with a lot of dedication. 

Thanks to these courses, and as part of my journey towards a growth mentality, I no longer subscribe to the myth of talent or genius. There are analytical approaches out there to help with any skill, whether it is signaling a new tempo with a flick of a wrist, playing rapid octaves without pain, or singing on nasal vowels. Those tools and their accompanying empowering mindset were some of the greatest gifts of my conservatory education. 

Juliana Gets a Heart
Did I also get a heart? I think so. I can’t attribute this to any particular course, but I have to say that there is something healing about being immersed in the world’s greatest music all day (Mahler 2? Slow Mozart? All Bach?). My heart, cold and defensive from years of production rather than introspection, began to peek out and warm to the passion of these works. I think those of us drawn to music find a spiritual power in sound, as others find it in a natural vista or a great painting. As I played, listened to, and studied music, I could lose myself in it, be buoyed up in it, and meld myself with a more universal force. This immersion helped me reconnect to that aspect of music that I love, and to revive the ardor somewhat deadened by corporate servitude.

So, should you go to music school? Well, if you know what skills of brain, heart, and body you’d like to work on, and you can summon the resources to help you, I guess there’s no need. Many successful musicians went to Harvard, for instance, and came out the other end no worse for the wear. But those people often already had careers, which indicated a certain level of precocious accomplishment. If you, like me and most normal people, need more help, it it sure would be a tall order to gather everything you need into one place. 

Ultimately, like in any adventure, it’s the people you meet who are the most influential to your growth. I’ve met so many phenomenal colleagues and mentors in music school, and for that I'm immensely grateful. Daily, we continue, with each other's company and help, on the journey towards being the most complete musicians we can be. 

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