The Montreal Questionaire. On the eve of my departure for Korea. Hello again, 2008?

To better introduce yourself (Be creative!)
(Answer in a few short lines):

1. How old were you when you started to play? What led you to choose music?
I was about seven years old when I started playing piano, though far from seriously – most of my childhood was dominated by a somewhat “normal” upbringing per se; that is to say, hanging out with friends and playing sports. I didn’t actually “choose” music until age 20, after my third year pursuing a Legal Studies degree at UC Berkeley (a school which I left prematurely). Suffice it to say that my side hobby of playing the piano quickly took over any (totally incompatible and ridiculous) desire to pursue law. I left California and moved to the East Coast.

2. Do you have a career or passion that you would like to follow in addition to music?
Sadly, we are naturally destined to be inextricably connected with that for which we have talent – the rest, I guess, we designate as hobbies or perhaps more poetically, passions. I would like to write like Vonnegut, but I can’t. I would love to sing like Fischer-Dieskau, but you don’t want to hear that. I want to paint like Kandinsky; alas, in my dreams alone. Someday before I die, I want to dunk a basketball. That probably won’t happen.

3. Who is your favourite pianist and/or artist?
Since he fits into both categories comfortably, I don’t even have to think much to answer “Leonard Bernstein.” Aside from his ultra-cool/super-hip “West Side Story,” his all American good-looks and charm, his ability to turn the esoterically intellectual into something colloquial, his charismatic piano playing, and gargantuan intellect, Bernstein constantly reminded every one of us that the power of music goes beyond the merely aesthetic into the realm of the humanitarian.

4. Describe a particular moment that left its mark on you:
While I was attending UC Berkeley, I worked as both a security monitor for the Music Department and later took a job as a “lounge” pianist for an upscale Italian restaurant. I remember the exact moment I decided to pursue music, while playing a Chopin Nocturne for the restaurant; I realized, I no longer cared about anything else. I went home and downloaded the applications for the Yale School of Music and The Juilliard School. The rest is history - it’s been almost exactly ten years since then now.

5. What person, living or dead, would you have liked to meet (performer, conductor,
politician, movie star, etc.)?
Though I’ve seen him around the city (and, sadly, never really had the courage to march up to him and introduce myself), I would love to sit down and have a meal with Elliott Carter, if for nothing other than to hear a first-hand account of every major event of the 20th century. I sometimes wonder what it must be like to look back at nearly 103 years of wars, upheavals, politics, genocides, and most obviously, the evolution of modernism in music. Maybe it’ll happen. It looks like he’s going to live forever.

6. What’s on your iPod?
Ha. Does everybody have an iPod these days? If I owned one, it would probably contain (totally arbitrary): a Schubert song, a Beethoven string quartet, a Tupac track, an old school Mariah Carey song, the Crucifixus from Mass in b minor, and the like.

7. What is your favourite TV show/movie?
TV. This is embarrassing: 24, Whose Line Is It Anyway, Family Guy, Prison Break, Jerry Springer (hush), and lately, The Food Network. Movies: Anything by Tarantino, Wong Kar-wai, Kurosawa, Coppola, Kubrick, Almodovar; or anything containing an Alien, Rambo, or a Terminator.

8. Tell us about something you can’t live without:
Too many. Sushi, Karaoke, Single-malt Scotch, Seamless Web, Wikipedia, the Moma, the Guggenheim, the YMCA, my copy of “The Rest is Noise,” K-town, chamber music, friends and family.

9. What will you do in 2012?
I guess I’m going to continue my efforts to eradicate that popular stigma of the “freelance musician” as a terrible synonym for “unemployed and broke.” I’m based in New York City, the mecca for classical music and the arts, so my plans go with the winds of my own career. Upcoming tours include one in South Korea with a violinist and another with a Baritone. Basically, I’m just going to try and live.