A Lifelong Obsession With Music

Since I was a child, I was always fascinated by the ability of music to make people feel emotion. To me, music was more exciting than all of the magical spells and supernatural powers I saw in films and read in novels. From an early age I started asking my mother to take me to learn piano. My dream was to be able to make someone feel the emotions that I felt when I listened to music.

And so, at a young age I started piano lessons and began to learn how to play. I enjoyed my lessons, but I always felt like something was missing

Although I loved many of the pieces I was learning, I still didn’t understand how the pieces were written. For me it was just a task of memorising random notes with no concept about how they all fit together. As I learned more pieces I started to discover patterns within the pieces and began trying to make my own pieces. But when I tried to show my piano teacher the pieces I had made, she discouraged me from ‘wasting time’ and told me to just practice the pieces. At this point I really couldn’t understand the purpose of all of these 1000’s of students spending hours practising and never even learning how to understand music and create their own music. And so I quit piano…..

When I quit music my love for music never ceased even for a second.

But I had become disillusioned by my experience of realising that music education was just focused on teaching people to memorise the same works, by the same composers and never be able to just sit down and create something new.

I still continued to play all of the pieces I had learned and I started trying to learn all of my favourite music (pop, rock, movies, video games, jazz). And I started noticing that all music shared a common language and the differences between genres were usually superficial things. And I started making my own versions of songs and eventually composing my own songs/pieces.

When I was 16 I became obsessed with classical music, especially the music of Chopin, Liszt, Ravel, Debussy and Rachmaninoff. And started lessons again with a classical teacher and then completed a Bachelor of Music (Classical Piano Major) after finishing high school. Since then I have slowly worked to increase my repertoire with around 130 songs/pieces from a variety of genres memorised, and I have also composed many works for piano and am constantly improvising new music. I have a piano residency at the VIP room at the Star and also at David Jones. I also frequently upload music to Youtube and have over 3 million views.