Piano Lessons

Story posted March 14, 2016 in News by Ruijia Zhang

Weiyan Li is a Chinese teaching assistant in the music department at Penn State. This is her fourth year studying piano in the U.S. She finished her graduate degree in Ithaca, and she is pursuing her Doctor of Music Arts in piano performance now.

Li started to play piano since she was three. “Speaking of how I fell in love with music, it was very natural and my father should take the credit,” Li Said. Her dad is a amateur musician and owned his own band with his friends. “I was very lucky. At that time in China especially in the small town, people were really poor, but I was the only one that could listen to the music every day.” Her early education in music inspired her to pursue a music career now.

Li has been teaching private lessons for over ten years since she was a high school student. Now she teaches Music170, a public piano lesson, at Penn State. She found it difficult to teach public lessons because there are over ten students and pianos in one classroom. She was not able to correct each student’s mistakes by hand, only to play on her now piano, which is shown on the screen on the wall.