Peitao Zhu was only 5 when he began piano lessons.
Doing so made sense. His parents, now retired, both were professional musicians: father Xicai Zhu, a singer, and mother Xiaorong Zhu, who taught traditional Chinese instruments.
“My mom was actually my first teacher, for about a year. My mom knew enough to get me started,” says Zhu, an assistant professor in the Department of Counseling and Higher Education.
“And then, when I was 6 or so, I started to have lessons with a teacher,” he adds. “I had been going to her for almost over a decade when I reached college.”
Earning a bachelor’s degree in biotechnology left the piano as a hobby, he says, “but it’s just something that I’ve always kept as a part of who I am.”
“If you were to ask me why I like piano so much, or piano music so much, I can’t really tell you. It’s just something that is so intuitive. I like the full range of expression. I like the versatility. I like the fact that it can form complex and dynamic musical textures,” Zhu says.
“These are rational answers,” he adds. “I don’t think that’s how I thought when I was 5. I didn’t have the language. I just liked it.”
NIU audiences can behold his lifelong passion – and his talent – at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 19.
Zhu will perform a free and open-to-the-public concert in the Recital Hall of the NIU Music Building, featuring solos and exciting collaborations (including four-hands pieces and a jazz trio) spanning numerous composers, periods and genres.
He assembled the diverse program with some of his favorite composers: Sergei Rachmaninoff, Frédéric Chopin, and Nikolai Kapustin, whose works blend classical and jazz.
“I want to play pieces that speak to me. I think that’s the only way that I can make sure that the music I make can, and might potentially, touch other people,” he says, “and even though I’m not a good improviser, I do love jazz music, so I put a lot of jazz pieces in the program.”
He also has a request for those who attend: “In light of the many painful events happening around the globe, I encourage you to donate, in an amount within your capacity, to any cause or organization that aims to reduce human suffering.”
While the recital fulfills a mentor’s philosophy that “music is meant to be shared,” Zhu is able to draw connections between music and his work as a counselor and counselor-educator.
“For me, music heals, inspires and empowers me to express myself more fully and deeply,” he says.
“I have numerous times where I find comfort. I find solace and sense of meaning,” he adds. “Sometimes, I simply want something for background – when I do work or when I’m walking. Other times, especially when I find myself more emotionally vulnerable – when I feel like I’m needing company or I’m needing a safe place to retreat – music oftentimes holds that space.”
Counselors can tap into that power with clients.
He remembers leading a therapeutic retreat for male survivors of sexual victimization when the background music earned positive reviews, “especially music that is wordless so that we are not distracted by whatever the verbal message is.”
“Instead, we get to reflect,” he says, “and we get to project whatever feelings that we have. It becomes a vehicle of meaning and, potentially, healing.”
Although Zhu neither teaches nor researches music therapy, he speculates that its curative abilities truly flourish for those people who already hold deep connections to, and find significance in, the sounds.
“Maybe it’s just because music has been in my life for so long,” Zhu says. “I don’t see music as a tool or simply a means to an end. Music is only meaningful when you make a connection to it. I don’t think it should be forced upon anybody.”
For Zhu, however, music opens a window to his soul.
“As a person, I tend to be more on the reserved side. I’m not the most extroverted person in the room, and people usually perceive me as pretty calm and collected, but I think that music helps me access a very different side or a different layer of myself,” he says.
“When I’m performing, I love the pieces that are fun and energetic and sometimes explosive, or things that are passionate or sentimental,” he adds. “I don’t get to show this part of myself in other settings, and music and the piano as an instrument, helps me access and share a fuller version of myself that other people don’t get to experience.”
Similarly, he says, counseling clients who find comfort and release in listening to their favorite songs might then feel safe to expose their inner thoughts or selves.
Music sometimes can succeed when verbal interaction is not, he adds, “as we are allowing ourselves to be touched and moved physiologically and neurologically. It liberates, in a sense, and helps to build that connection.”
Zhu also believes that educators who are musicians can liberate their teaching in the same way if they think back to those lessons.
“One of my piano teachers told me, ‘You have to practice a lot and you have to practice deliberately, because if you just keep running the pieces, you’re never going to get better. You have to practice and get the techniques down, but when you’re performing, you have to transcend the techniques. You have to be in the music,’ ” Zhu says.
“And that’s very similar to teaching,” he adds. “When you’re creating the materials for teaching you have to be very detail-oriented. You have to have good examples. You have to have good time management. But, in the moment, it’s about the energy in the room. You can’t be obsessed with, ‘I have to deliver everything I prepared.’ That’s not good teaching.”
