Episode 3: The Value of Variety: Charie Chang

About the Episode:

Musicianship is more than just practicing scales daily and entering competitions. In fact, an excessive focus on technique and competition repertoire can cause later difficulties expressing oneself musically and learning new styles of repertoire.

In this episode, pianist and violinist Charie Chang speaks about the value of learning a wide variety of repertoire, the fundamentals of Baroque and Classical pieces, and how to build a healthy and sustainable relationship with music.

Intro/outro music: Addinsell Piano Concerto, "Warsaw Concerto," performed by Charie Chang

This interview has been edited for clarity. 

CAILEEN WAN, HOST:

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the third episode of The Music Mind Lab. My name is Caileen, and today I'm joined by Charie. Charie is an amazingly talented young violinist and pianist, and I'm so excited to have her here with us today. So, can you please introduce yourself a bit to us, so tell us how you started to learn instruments and how long you've been playing them.

CHARIE CHANG, GUEST:

I started piano when I was five and I started violin when I was six. When I was a kid, my parents would just be like: do you want to play the piano? Because they had my sister put into piano and they would always make me watch her practice and be like: “you want to be like that when you get to like five years old, right? You want to be like that?” And I'd be like, as a little kid, I'd just be like, “yeah,” because it looked cool. And then afterwards, my sister learned the violin, and they were like the exact same thing. It was like copy and paste. They're like: “Do you want to learn violin? That looks cool, right?” And so, violin started. And I think violin — I've complained a lot as a kid about practicing because I felt like, [for] piano you could just sit down and start practicing, but violin was really annoying to me, because it's like — what do you mean I have to rosin, and tune, and actually stand up and have good posture? 

CAILEEN: I really [...] like everything you just said, especially about the difficulty of picking up the violin to practice versus the piano. I feel like that's not talked about enough. It's so much easier to start practicing the piano. 

Going back to when you were younger — I know obviously you said you didn't really enjoy practicing as much, neither did I — but back then, was it your parents? Did they help monitor your practice? What was that process like? 

CHARIE: When I first started, my parents they had this criterion, that was like, you ought to play it five times perfectly. So that would be like what I would do for everything. And obviously when you're a little kid, it's fine, because your whole piece is like five notes, right? But when I started practicing scales, it would be, at first, difficult to get the coordination right, and I would get really annoyed because it was five times straight. And if I messed up on the fourth time I would just have to go back over. 

I remember being annoyed with the actual criteria, because I was like, that's not fair. Why do I have to play it five times perfectly straight. It's so annoying, because then I would just get really nervous on the fifth time, because I felt like I would have to get it done, and I feel like now [...] that was not the best way to practice, because then like the goal was to just like get through it instead of actually like thinking about how I could get better.

And also, my parents never really defined “perfectly” because neither of them played music. So I feel like their equivalent of perfect was technical perfection, like you've just gotta play all the notes right. And like, do the one forte on the page — that was it. 

CAILEEN: I feel like I'm just relating everything you say, but I feel like the five times perfect is a very universal experience for a lot of beginners. And I was wondering, do you still go by that method? Is that still part of your practice? Or if not, how has your practice changed over the years?

CHARIE: Part of me would love to still be able to do it five times perfect, except now that my pieces are 10 minutes long, if I had to do that, it would be 50 minutes of straight technical perfection, and I genuinely just don't think I have the capacity to do that unfortunately. A bigger problem was that they never actually set a thing for me to practice, and I would just be like, okay, like I can get it done now without having to do it five times. So I kind of cheated my way out of practicing.

But that was not a good decision, either, because that did not help me. [...] I felt like such an accomplished little kid cheating the system being able to get out of practicing, but then the moment I realized that practicing miraculously actually helped, that was not a great realization for me, because then I realized, oh, I've been going about it all wrong.

So, I guess practicing now, just [be] more focused by section [and] figure out what you actually need to get done. Because it's like, you could practice, but how do you maximize the efficiency of your practicing? [...] You want to get things done when you practice, you could always just run through your piece, like five times, [but] what does that actually tell you? 

It's like you gotta be there wholeheartedly when you practice. If you're watching YouTube shorts while practicing, you're not gonna get effective practices, and the mindset of going into practicing is similar to the mindset of writing. [...] Because when I was younger, my practice was a lot like doing math problems because it was just repetitive, and you apply the same subject to everything. But that was not a good solution because you weren't able to actually bring out the musical finesse of the actual piece. So, if I were to equate it to a subject now, it would be English because when you write, you actually have to be focused and figure out what you want to convey — instead of just getting addition right — and [get] the words down on a page if that makes sense at all.

CAILEEN: What you were mentioning earlier — how now that we're older, obviously we have less time to practice, and it's more difficult to structure a lot of time to devote on your practice time — I was wondering, especially on the days that you don't feel like in the correct headspace to go into practicing, like feeling super focused and super ready like you're mentioning, how do you make those days still happen? How do you get through those days and still get your practice done? 

CHARIE: So the philosophy of one of my non-music teachers, as we were discussing this, he basically said: no matter how much time school gives you to do your homework, even if you have another 70-minute period that is completely dedicated to doing homework, you will never get rid of the pressure or the feeling that you have not enough time.

You can have all the time in the world, but the thing about people is that once they know that they have this specific amount of time, they know that they will be able to drag it out. So, I feel like, genuinely, like when you approach practicing, it's like I always tell myself, like, there's 24 hours in a day, you spend this much of the day at school, and then you spend this much of the day on everything else and like, do you really, actually, not have enough time? Or are you just incompetent? [...] That's also not the healthiest way to put it, but I feel like it sometimes works, because usually when I have a lot of homework, it's always because I probably procrastinated on it, or I stacked it up onto one day. 

[A] bigger thing about finding time to practice daily is being also able to manage your time in your schoolwork. And obviously, that is not an easy thing. I don't think anyone is able to perfectly do that, even though some are better than others. And I'm not one of those people, unfortunately, but in terms of practicing on days where I can't practice, my solution usually is to practice first, because practicing you can at least attribute a set amount of time to. You can't really say, oh, I'm gonna complete this essay in an hour because that never really works out, but practicing you could be, okay, I'll start now, actually lock in, and then I'll stop after maybe an hour and a half, and then you can kind of structure your homework time around practicing. And I would say, if you're not in the headspace, then find something else to do that is equally productive. 

Usually practicing is actually my solution for not being able to do homework, especially at school, maybe during a free period, [when] I can never actually focus, so I would just go practice because you don't necessarily need to have [a lot of focus]. Practicing is less based on the moment. I would say some homework is because you always know exactly what you need to do, because you've just been doing it for such a long time and you know what parts of the piece that you're struggling on. I guess the more detail-specific work maybe has to be done at home because it's hard to immediately get into the right headspace when you're practicing. 

But I would say if you were struggling to time manage — lay out your schedule [and] write it out. Writing it out is actually very helpful because you see what you do every day, and then what are the times [that] you have nothing. I [wrote] out my schedule once from Monday to Sunday, and I was like, wow, I didn't realize I had such little time on these particular days and then I have a lot of time on these particular days, but why does it always feel like I have the same amount of time? So you're just gonna look at it and be like, am I psyching myself out into thinking that I don't have enough time, or do I actually not have enough time and it's the latter? Find out ways to distribute it. 

CAILEEN: This is all amazing advice that you're giving. I was also just curious — going into more like the specifics of your practice schedule — once you get started, do you have any specific techniques that you use to work on difficult passages? Or maybe, could you talk about a specific example of a passage or a piece that you had a bit of trouble with, and then what practice techniques you used to work on that? 

CHARIE: Perhaps a slightly less related to the question at first, but I'm a huge advocate for playing a variety of pieces with different textures, because I feel like a lot of pianists, their goal — obviously competitions is a really large part of music sometimes — but if the goal of winning a competition is outweighing your actual musical learning and being able to play a range of periods, I feel like you should take a step back.

Especially in piano, it is so important to learn a different touch for the piano, because you're always going to have a different tone when you're playing Bach versus Chopin. And especially when you're recording things — not for competition, but just for professors, or people to critique, or play and examine it — a lot of the time, one of their criteria is that you have to play a Bach Prelude, and a Fugue or something similar. And then people genuinely are just not able to play this because it is so incredibly different from other things and other repertoire that they might be playing.

The biggest thing that sets you apart from being like a metronome and a robot in music is obviously being able to express different things. I feel like this is a very universal truth that everyone knows, but in order to do this, you can't just be on one default setting the entire time. In order to bring out different characters, you also have to be able to play different textures, which then requires you to actually have an arsenal of different textures. [...] I feel like, especially for me, when I was younger, I really, really, really disliked playing slow pieces, and I also disliked playing pieces by Mozart especially, and also his major pieces. Because the most difficult thing is making it look easy. When you're in a competition, there's so much pressure to pick a showpiece or pick a piece that is technically demanding and musically demanding. And very obviously everyone can hear and know that it is difficult.

But personally, the hardest pieces and the pieces that have inspired the most growth have been the pieces that do not sound demanding at all. And that is the difficulty about them — that you have to make it seem [easy], and you have to hide the actual difficulty. And a lot of people miss this when they're playing competitive pieces. So, I think part of my advice would just be: don't be 200% locked in on your competition the entire time. Because that is also bad for you, [and] you miss out on a very integral part of being able to develop your musical capacity. 

In terms of practicing difficult things, I have a very basic approach to go about it. For technically challenging things ,I would just do rhythms, but also obviously practice your scales. Especially as a kid, I hated practicing my scales and what that led to was I had atrocious hand posture on piano for years; when I would play arpeggios, I would stretch my hand like this, and that would lead to the side of my wrist tendons, basically [getting] destroyed. And then that gives you lowkey tendonitis and a lot of wrist issues. So, I would say, definitely make sure the way that you're practicing and your hand structure is not detrimental to your hand because you don't want to sacrifice your bodily function. This is sort of a given, but yeah.

CAILEEN: I'm just gonna circle back to what you're saying earlier about choosing repertoire. That's definitely something I resonate with hugely because I've had experiences where I've been learning a Bach Prelude and Fugue, and my teacher would be like you're playing it so romantically, like this is not the correct style. It's because I've become so accustomed to only really focusing on practicing these beautiful romantic pieces that I thought were pretty and nice to play. And so I was lacking the musical knowledge and actual understanding of how to play things from different periods for sure. So, for me, those Preludes and Fugues were immensely helpful pieces of repertoire. What were some other specific pieces of repertoire that helped you?

CHARIE: Mozart Concertos, all the Sonatas, all the early classical things. Oh, I did not like it at all whatsoever. It would be like, especially the ones that are like — the fortes are not true fortes, and the touch is like a feather. Probably the phrase I've heard the most common was that “you're being too aggressive and you're like attacking the keys in a way.” That's, like, not fitting the style. 

I feel like the violin to piano struggle is real, because in violin, you can kind of tell when you're doing something wrong. [...] In piano [...] when you do something wrong, [...] there's not technically something wrong with the sound. You could play everything in the wrong style, but there's nothing actually wrong with it. 

Especially on piano — elementary through middle school, I stopped maybe last year — my teacher would literally make me play four pieces per year, and it would be like each of the periods. And I feel like a lot of people hate playing Baroque music — I will just put that out there, especially on piano, they just don't like it — but Baroque music is a lot of what I played when I was in elementary school, because, like, you know Bach Festival, I would play like the French suites, etc.

I feel like that builds the foundation for every other era, because what you have in especially Bach music, is you have three different voices and having three different voices is such a difficult thing to do. And it's like, especially when you have Urtext, [...] they don't put any dynamics. They don't put anything on the music. It is just the notes, and perhaps one footnote, that's like, oh, actually we changed a single trill. That's what we have; that's what you have in the edition. And I feel like it's so interesting, because then everyone plays at the exact same way, because Baroque music is supposed to be so intuitive, like looking at the music and looking at the phrasing, look at the voices you are just able to figure out where with the formula, when you go up, your dynamic goes up. Maybe that's the one thing you need to play for. 

You're kind of able to just figure out which parts need to be brought out. And that's so important. When you're figuring out more complex, maybe romantic music, [...] there's obviously not just like one line to it. And especially, I feel like a helpful tool that I do is, I use so much color on my pieces that my pieces are at this point not just performative art; it's literally an actual art piece, because everything is just highlighted. And also I'm very liberal with my use of marking this, especially if I keep forgetting something, I'll take a 9B pencil, draw five circles around a single note.

So, to figure out that music, at this point, just annotate it, that would be my advice. It's useful.

CAILEEN: In Baroque music, I think what you said was very interesting to me because you said it's quite intuitive for people when you're learning Baroque music, but actually, in my experience, I feel like it's been kind of the opposite. [...] I feel like when there are so many voices happening at the same time, it's like the decision of, like, what do you voice? Voicing I feel like has always been like a very big struggle for me, because obviously this shaping and everything — it can seem intuitive. Oh, like, the rise and the fall, like it goes up. It goes down. Crescendo and decrescendo. But how do you actually add nuances to it? How do you have the characters? 

CHARIE: Well, I'm not exactly sure. I just feel like one time I asked my teacher, she was marking my music, and she was like, this part is the climax. And I asked her, how do you know, and she looked at me, she was like, do you think there's any markings on the text? Do you think Bach actually wrote this in? No, but it's just because you can kind of tell from the phrasing. 

And also one of the more interesting things that I think is, especially because in Baroque music, there's some repetition, right? Pianists will play that differently. Some people bring out the first phrase and don't bring out the second phrase; somebody will do the opposite. So you can have discrepancies in how you play that. And there’s also [...] I feel like the Chopin Nocturnes, [...] the main thing returns a lot, but every time you play that theme, you have to play it differently, and you can choose different ways to play it differently.

But in terms of what to bring out in voicing, well, I feel like the first thing is to achieve a balance between your three lines, so that would be important. Also figuring out where your phrases stop and end is a large part of that, because you could kind of figure out the climax of each point based on that, and especially because the key changes are very noticeable. It's not like Dvorak where you change keys every three seconds; the key changes are very drastic and noticeable, and therefore you can kind of figure things out based on it.

CAILEEN: Now that we've talked about so many wonderful things, we are unfortunately reaching the end of our time. So I was just wondering, could you share some of your closing thoughts? What's a final message or word of advice, or just something that you want the listeners to keep in mind?

CHARIE: I remember one of my biggest fears when I was a kid was having a huge memory slip. I once had an adjudicator tell me — if you are focusing on the story of the piece, you will never have a memory slip, and that was such an interesting thing to think about when I was actually there. This goes into preparing yourself for a performance, but I feel like during performance if you think about the actual state of the performance like that is never good. For example, it's like, oh no, this passage is difficult. And if you think about it from that standpoint, you're gonna mess up. 

The time to worry about your intonation is not 30 minutes before you have to actually play — that's like three months before, when you're practicing and drilling this section. Before your performance, what you should be thinking about is what you want it to be. You have to think about what you want to express, because that is the only thing you can take in the moment.

So, really funny story. In sixth grade, I had a concerto competition, and I was about to go on with my confidence because I went first and right before that my first thought was, you know, the beginning is very exposed. What if I just messed up the beginning?

You can guess what happened. That is exactly what happened. I messed up and I looked at the adjudicator and went: “Can I restart?” And then he just looked at me. It wasn't even a look of disappointment, or anger or etc, he just looked at me, and he looked very interested, and he was like, yes. 

And that was genuinely one of the most weird experiences I've ever had because it was like — the second time I played it, my mindset was just like, it's gone. I might as well just do it. And the funniest thing was, I played the beginning exactly the same. I played it equally wrong because I had still not recovered from believing that I could not play it properly. So, I played it exactly perfectly as wrong as I did it the first time, except this time, I just went with it. I was like, just continue whatever you do. At this point, be confident in your wrong beginning. 

And this is [...] one of the life lessons I've learned from music because it's like, at what point do you just sacrifice it and continue for the goal of actually doing a complete performance? I'm sure that the adjudicator would have rather me skip the beginning and play everything else rather than continuously stop and ask to restart. [...]

And my favorite thing about that entire experience was that during the master class after it, he asked me, why did you restart? Did you just not like the beginning? And this also opened another field of possibilities to me because it is so important to convey that you want to convey that people in competitions — like literally Chopin competition if you want to go that far — they will stop and restart, not because they did anything technically wrong, not because they had a huge memory slip that I did, but just because it didn't feel right. 

And I low-key think that might be one of the most beautiful parts of music, because it's so subjective, and it's so important to convey what you actually want to convey that it's like people can overlook your technical mistakes, [and] people can even overlook having a supposedly bad performance [if] the end project product of it is what you actually wanted to get to. 

As a kid, I didn’t particularly like music, and that is a true confession that [...] it's not very good; I kind of regret it. Now that obviously I'm in high school, but I feel like it was a very love-hate relationship for me. 

Because I feel like [when] people ask me, what do you do, I would obviously say music because it was like a staple of my life for so long, but especially after doing competitions and losing some of the competitions, I would be like, do I want to say that? Because I thought [...] it was embarrassing to say that you do music but you're not actually good at it. And then, at one point, you just have to cut your losses, because I feel like nobody truly dislikes music. It's so impossible to do that. At what point do you just realize that the main point of music is not to actually like to win? Because if you go about it from that standpoint, then you're always just gonna be inferior.

There's always going to be a person, or multiple people, [...] that will always beat you and everything. And you could spiral so badly and just use this as a justification to not practice enough or be like, oh, I have to have other interests besides music. But at some point, you realize it's not even good for you. You're not making yourself happier. You're not making your parents happier. You're not making your playing better if you just go into that mindset. So it's like, what do you want to do with music? 

Like, for me, I feel like I would not be able to successfully have a career in music, but I still like [it], I really enjoy it. So, it would be a thing that I would want to pursue in my free time and maybe not my actual career. You know what I mean? You don't have to be all in, or all completely out of music. You could have a balance, but you also have to just know yourself. The main thing is just being able to understand where your limits are.

And sometimes, it's very painful to have to go through that and be like, I'm not good enough for this because nobody wants to hear that and especially like nobody wants to hear that from themselves. Because if you hear someone else say that to you, you could just be like, I could prove them wrong, but once you actually understand where you are at, and then you say to yourself it's not probable. It takes a bit to get over that, but I think that once you do, you're really interested in music. It's a lot better.

CAILEEN: This is like crazy for me to listen to, because I feel like so many of the things you're talking about are realizations I had much, much later in life, and the fact that [...] you're just such an incredible thinker, and I really admire the way that you think about things and that you apply these things to your own life. 

So, thank you so much, Charie; I learned so much from this session. And I'm so grateful to [...] have been able to talk to you about this. And thank you so much to everyone for listening. Please be on the lookout for the next episode, which will be released next week.