Name: Conrad Tao
Year: 2015
Concentration: Asian American Studies
Conrad Tao, CC ’15, is far from the typical Columbia student as he juggles being a renowned pianist and composer while trying to obtain an Ivy League education. While most of us were learning our ABC’s, Conrad was experiencing the beginning of what he’d come to know as his love for classical music. He started playing the piano at 18 months old and had his first public performance at the age of four. When he was nine he started studying and pursing music at Julliard in their pre-college program. As a young child, Conrad says he “[saw music] as an unfamiliar language that presented a lot of possibilities.”
Currently Conrad is enrolled as a student in the Columbia-Julliard exchange program, while working as a concert pianist, composer, and a musician. Professionally, Conrad describes himself as a pianist and a composer, but as a student he says he is “hungry intellectually for something that seems satisfying and critical.”
Conrad is taking a semester off from school to pursue his career and he has been working nonstop as he preforms around the world. These past few months alone, he has preformed in Såo Paulo, Chile, and Berlin. His immediate plans are to continue working on his projects and his performances. His goal is to use the space that he works in to introduce modes of critical thought. He wants to challenge the spaces he’s working in and ask questions about the kind of people he is trying to reach through his music.
Over the summer Conrad put together the Unplay Festival in Brooklyn hoping to question the context of classical music and hopefully also introduce possibilities for a grander revolution for this type of setting sometime in the future. Conrad tries to question every single choice he makes regarding his musical career, in the hopes of making honest choices and developing both emotional honesty and emotional directness.
When asked about his interests outside of music, he responded by saying, “I don’t know if I do anything outside of my life that is not somehow musical,” because everything comes back to music for him. He likes reading about politics and rethinking political theory, and as Conrad believes, these interests present fields of artistic possibility. He also wants to develop good relationships with friends. However, these “personal and emotional connections can also be looked at in an artistic way,” says Conrad. When it comes down to it, everything presents musical and/or artistic possibilities for Conrad. It must be the musician in him that allows him to see such interesting perspectives.
Tao preforming with the Detriot Symphony Orchestra in this past October 2013.