A Gift From God

IT ALL BEGAN when the mother of a friend of Mia Chung's called Mia's mother to tell her about how Mia was constantly playing her piano. Perhaps trying to get rid of the noisy kid, the friend's mother suggested that Mrs. Chung buy her own.

That made Mia a very happy seven-year-old.

"I remember waiting on the curve of the street for the moving van with the piano for eight hours. I sat outside until the sun went down...It was the greatest gift of all."

Fourteen years later, Mia Chung '86 is sharing her gift with the rest of the world as the most renowned concert musician to come out of Harvard since the cellist Yo-Yo Ma '76. In April, she was the first Harvard student in 10 years to give a benefit concert when she performed for Phillips Brooks House at Sanders Theater. Her next recital will be at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. later this month, and she has been invited to compete in the Gina Bauchauer International Piano Competition in Salt Lake City. And to top it all off, she will be performing for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this fall.

Pretty good for a 22-year-old.

DURING HER YEARS at Harvard, Mia has devoted many grueling hours to practice, sometimes as many as eight hours a day. Still, Mia claims her social life has not taken a beating. "I probably don't socialize as much as other people do, but I think enough to keep me going so there is a balance of work and relaxation."

Her roommate of three years, Tracy Valezquez '86, agrees. Mia, she says, is very dedicated to her piano-playing but "when she is out of the practice room, she becomes just one of the girls." She emphasizes that there's more to Mia than playing the piano. Mia seems to do "more in addition to her practice than most of us without such a commitment."

Still, Mia herself admits that she sometimes thought about giving up all the lonely hours of practicing--but only until she was 10. "By the age of 10, I started to slack off and I wasn't practicing very much and my teacher always told me to practice more. But I was always dumping my books after school and going out to play," she says.

Mia's piano playing days then almost came to a halt, but an inspirational experience pushed Mia back to tinkling the ivories, this time for good. "One night I saw this 10-year-old performing a concerto with the Boston Pops: She was my age. That really struck home, and I was thinking, 'Boy, she is incredible.' She played a Haydn concerto, I remember distinctly. I was so impressed that right after that concert I started to practice and I said if someone at that age can be that good I really want to know how far I can push myself. I knew then that I would be a pianist."

HAVING CHOSEN her career at the age of 11, Mia began giving classical concerts at 12. By the time she arrived at Harvard, she had already won several national competitions, such as the Baltimore and National Symphony Orchestras' Young Soloists Competitions, the Beethoven Competition for Young Soloists and the Johann Sebastian Bach International Piano Competition (Prepatory Division).

With all these competitions and awards under her belt, Mia could have entered any conservatory in the country where she could concentrate solely on her music. But, she says, she realized there is more to life than just playing piano. So she picked Harvard.

"I had been active academically throughout my high school years, and I felt that if I had gone to a conservatory, then I would have lost out on a liberal arts education. Academics were very important to me. Eighteen to 22 are very impressionable years, and if you give up your education then, you really can't retrieve it later on.

"I do think that it gives me an advantage over many other performers who have not had a liberal arts education, because after all, life is not just music. It's many other things. You have to grow emotionally and intellectually. If you're channeled into one thing from the beginning, I think it sort of stunts your growth as a person."

Ironically, Mia herself admits that she did not get a chance to "test the water" at Harvard. She may have entered her freshman year with an open mind, but even then, the pull of performing was too strong to resist.

"It was funny. Freshman year, when I first came here, I was thinking, in the back of my mind, well, economics or law. But then I had these concert commitments, and I was immediately channelled into music. There was no doubt in my mind that that was what I was supposed to do."

A CRITIC from a Washington newspaper once wrote, after hearing one of Mia's performances, that she showed "sensitivity, intellect, and a sense of the divine."

There's more truth in that than the critic himself may have realized. For Mia, her faith in God is what drives her career. "I play to glorify God," she says, and she believes that her talent is a gift from God to be used to serve Him. In a place as widely agnostic and cynical as Harvard, Mia's candid, sincere faith seems unusual and even refreshing.

"I personally believe that you need a strong internal goal to pursue this kind of a lifestyle [as a musician] or these goals because after you die, it's over. What do you live for? Do you live for the applause or something that's very temporal? Is it fame or money? That doesn't serve the art or anything greater.

"Of course, pleasing the audience is important, but after a while, your body and mind become exhausted. There's got to be a resource that constantly pushes you through the day to day practices. And God and Christ are the sources of strength for me."

So the piano was a gift from her parents, but the ability to play, for Mia, is a gift from God.

HER HARVARD EXPERIENCE, Mia believes, has been a good one, and certainly hasn't held back her musical career. Rosen Professor of Music Leon Kirchner, who has taught Mia in a few classes, says Mia is a "very talented pianist," and "depending on her work and luck, she should do quite well as a professional pianist."

While she has no doubts about her decision to attend Harvard, Mia does believe that there is room for improvement. In particular, she criticizes the lack of emphasis Harvard puts on performing arts in general and in music in particular. "I think Harvard likes to take a strictly academic and intellectual approach to things, not an applied approach."

She cites the Visual and Environmental Studies Department as the one field of study in which Harvard has broken its strictly academic attitude, and she says she thinks the Music Department could follow suit without compromising its intellectual and academic standards.

At the risk of sounding totally treasonous, she says, "Yale has been a fine example of the combination of hard-core academics and performing arts. They are a shining example for us, hopefully, to follow." Mia is, in fact, putting her money where her mouth is, as she will head to Yale this fall to begin work on a master's degree in performing arts.

And after that?

"I hope to have some recording contracts down, and go touring with European and American symphonies across the world," she says.

And keep on sharing her gift from God.