Common App Essay Essay - Harvard University

In that moment, I knew everything, yet I knew nothing. I had expected piano improvisation to be easy — after all, I had spent the past eleven years growing up with the piano, expressing emotions through the piano, coming of age with the piano. Yet there I was, in my first ever improvisation class at Juilliard, sitting in front of the familiar instrument, unable to play a single note. My first day at Juilliard flashed before my eyes: standing in the corner of crowded elevators on my way to class, scribbling away at my theory homework, basking in the artistic flair of my fellow pianists. I remembered the hours spent practicing finger work on every surface available, from the wooden classroom desk to the airplane tray table. I recalled reading innumerable books on music and art, and experiencing the sensation of my brain expanding to the size of Einstein’s. All of that hard work, I realized, made me a great pianist — but not an artist. Playing prewritten sheet music and reading prewritten books made me only a technician, a manufacturer of other people’s ideas, rather than my own. It seemed as if the past decade of studying piano were just a warm-up, a preparation for my blossoming as a true artist — a preparation that started with this improvisation class. My teacher’s interruption brought me back to reality. “Don’t worry, you can play anything you’d like! Here, let me demonstrate.” He walked up to the piano next to me and began to play. He did not need any sheet music in front of him — he was simply pressing the keys of his own accord, however he liked. I watched in amazement as he navigated the keyboard with facility, cocking his head sideways every once in a while, as if listening for new musical ideas in the air. I laughed at the syncopations in his rhythms and the dissonances in his harmonies, which perfectly reflected his upbeat, eccentric personality. Hesitantly, I joined him in this dance (it was more of a drunk march than a dance, actually), playing a melody from Chopin’s second sonata. Never had I viewed Chopin as bland, but against my teacher’s original musical creations, my melody was utterly banal. And so I changed each note, one by one, deconstructing Chopin’s calm until there was no longer any sense of musical cohesion. My fingers were suddenly emancipated from Chopin’s order, gliding up and down the keyboard, discovering new musical landscapes. With my teacher’s incessant rhythms as a backdrop, what was once a tranquil melody became a sweeping, almost avant-garde tune. Every so often, I inserted a sighing motif into my improvisation to depict my former stress, or a frantic melody to illustrate my newfound excitement. I was now painting a picture — not of Chopin, but rather of myself. My teacher and I continued playing for about fifteen more minutes, but fifteen minutes was not even close to enough. After the class ended, I rushed to a practice room nearby and improvised for the entirety of my one-hour break. The sensation was addicting — to finally become liberated from the scales, études, and sonatas to which I was chained for over a decade. I had achieved a new creative power; from that moment on, music became so much more than simply learning the notes and channeling different composers. Music became a means of channeling myself, of acquiring a profound self-understanding that not even ten thousand hours of relentless practicing could bring me.