The Diploma that Doesn't Exist Anymore

On biǎo qíng, muscle memory, and playing two lines of Mozart badly in a Viennese heatwave

I was on the plane from Split to Vienna reading a new Reese Witherspoon thriller, which I only mention because every other person in that cabin was reading a physical book. Literally. Paperbacks, hardcovers, one guy with something in German that had a ribbon sewn into the spine. A week of island hopping in Croatia and I still hadn't earned the right to be seen with an actual object.

So I put the phone in airplane mode, opened Voice Memos, and scrolled all the way down to the bottom.

First recording: June 30, 2015. Titled FULL. Thirty-eight minutes, twenty-two seconds.

I listened to the whole thing.

It's a recital run-through. Me at fourteen years old, Bach into Mozart into a Chinese piece called Spring Dance, no stopping. And it is riddled. Missed sharps. A flat I clearly did not see coming. Semiquavers that lurch rather than run. Dynamics that arrive like somebody elbowing a volume knob.

I sat there at cruising altitude wincing at a kid, and then somewhere in the second movement of the Mozart I thought: how the f*ck did I do that?

Both things, at the same time. It's not good. I also could not do it now.

The recording exists because that November I sat the DipABRSM in Piano Performance.

Quick translation for anyone who didn't grow up in the classical pipeline. ABRSM is the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, a British examining body that's been grading musicians since 1889. Most people know the graded exams: Grade 1 through Grade 8, one instrument, one exam at a time, roughly one a year if you're moving well. You can't sit Grades 6, 7, or 8 until you've passed Grade 5 Music Theory, which is a completely separate track of key signatures, cadences, transposition, and four-part harmony that has nothing to do with your hands.

That's the decade. Grade 1 around five, theory running underneath it the whole way, Grade 8 sometime in early high school if you haven't quit. Most people quit. Reasonably.

The diploma sat above all of it. On the UK qualifications framework it's Level 4, the standard of a first year of an undergraduate music degree, and the Open University used to grant 35 credits toward a degree for holding one. So the shorthand people use is "basically an Associate's in performance.”

Four sections, one sitting:

1. A 35-minute recital you program yourself, chosen mostly from an approved repertoire list, with room for a piece of your own choosing.

2. Programme Notes, or an essay on your recital, around 1,100 words, submitted in advance.

3. A “Viva Voce”: the examiner questioning you on your own writing, the repertoire, and where the music sits in history.

4. A quick study. Unseen piece, around Grade 6 standard, five minutes to look at it, then play it.

The recital is the part everyone pictures. The quick study is the part that ends people.

And then, in 2024, they killed it. ABRSM withdrew the DipABRSM and folded the entry-level diploma into the ARSM, which had been introduced in 2016 as a bridge between Grade 8 and the diploma and got promoted to replace it. The ARSM is a thirty-minute performance. No written work, no viva, no sight-reading.

My piano and musical background comes from my dad's side. My grandma studied music in college and taught piano in Taiwan, then in New York after she immigrated, first a studio on Thompson Street in SoHo, until her landlord bought her out, then Flushing, Queens. Her little sister, my great aunt, played in the Taiwan Philharmonic. Both of them are still teaching. I don't think either has ever considered stopping.

I started at three. Piano and violin, because why do one.

The test center I would go to each year to take my ABRSM exams was also in Flushing. The ancient, exam room was up a set of creaky stairs with red carpeting, in an old building where another music studio, Songs of Songs, held its lessons. The room itself was stuffy in a way I can still smell, with a grand piano taking up most of it. Twelve years of walking up those stairs to perform, in front of an examiner who flew in from England, songs I had played every day for a year, at a standard I never quite hit.

November 5, 2015 was the last time I was in that room playing the Sonata for my DipABRSM test. Exactly a week before my fifteenth birthday.

I still remember blanking in the second movement of the Mozart Sonata, which took up close to half the recital. The Adagio is slow, and it's intricately repetitive, which sounds like it would make it easier. It doesn't. I went into some kind of trance and simply forgot to take a repeat. I noticed roughly one bar too late. Cortisol went up, heart rate went up, and I finished the movement in a body that was clearly no longer mine. The third movement brought me back down, and I'm fairly sure Spring Dance was a banger.

There's a second voice memo, September 5, 2015, titled “:)”. Thirty-five minutes, thirty-eight seconds. Much better than June. Still not right.

Then on the day, with the examiner in the room, definitely still not at the bar I'd set for myself, but somehow I passed anyway?

Back to Vienna… I got there in the middle of a heatwave that broke the city, with the highest temperature ever measured since regulatory bodies began measuring temperature! The apartment I was staying in Neubau was in a building that used to be part of a paper factory, and inside it was a flat 95ºF with no meaningful opinion on the matter.

There was a Yamaha keyboard in the corner of the work room. Plastic, unweighted, with cute children stickers on the keys that were wearing away.

I sat down, and my hands went to the opening of the Allegro. Small hands, clubbed thumbs, eight years of barely touching a piano. I got about two lines in and stalled completely.

So I opened the MacBook, went to IMSLP, and pulled up K. 570. If you were classically trained you know that website's interface better than any other.

Interesting, I hadn't known at fourteen, and honestly hadn't known at twenty-five until I looked it up in that apartment, that Mozart was actually not born in Vienna. He was born in Salzburg in 1756, moved to Vienna at twenty-five, and died there ten years later. And K. 570 was written in Vienna in February 1789. He entered it into his own catalogue as a sonata for piano alone.

Which is where my Programme Notes (pasted verbatim below) fall apart. I wrote, at fourteen, that the sonata was "initially written for a piano-violin duet." That's backwards. The violin part was added by somebody else for the posthumous 1796 edition, five years after he died, and it's been considered spurious for a long time. (I also typed BMV instead of BWV for the Bach. Neither error was caught.)

So I was sitting in a converted paper factory playing a piece badly on a plastic keyboard, roughly two miles from where it was written, in the city Mozart chose rather than the one he was assigned, having gotten the facts about it wrong in writing a decade earlier.

Which brings me to the concept of biǎo qíng, 表情. My grandma's word, and the one thing she said about playing that I've never been able to shake:

"This is what makes a true pianist different from just a good one."

While there isn’t a clean definition, the closest in English is "expression," but she meant something more specific: the connection you have with the music, and whether any of it actually makes it out of your body and brain, and into the room, as you perform a piee.

When I taught for her through high school, the way we operationalized biǎo qíng for a seven-year-old was purely physical. Nod your head with the beat. Shift your torso a little. On violin, sway with the main pulse. It's a scaffold, and every teacher knows it's fake, and you do it anyway because you're teaching the shape of the thing and hoping the thing eventually arrives to fill it.

You can't force it, is what I've landed on. Some people are wired more toward it than others. But it also behaves like an acquired taste, which means it runs on its own schedule and that schedule has nothing to do with an exam calendar.

In the paper factory, at maybe forty percent accuracy, dripping, my technique fully gone, I think the biǎo qíng came out in a way I did not have when I was 14. My mom, who came to Vienna with me, probably noticed too as she attempted to record a rare sighting of her adult son playing the piano.

The “connection” framework was still there, like embers of a weak fire, but one that’s always “on,” the phrasing and where the piece was going and what each line wanted. After eight years of playing once or twice a year on somebody's out-of-tune upright, the biǎo qíng just took over my hands while my hands failed to keep up.

The DipABRSM exam a decade earlier could measure accuracy, and I think was bare minimum. It could measure whether I knew what a diminished chord was, and I did. I could name ornaments, trace key progressions, and produce 1,202 words on Baroque contrapuntalism and Mozart's finances. I’d like to think that it also measured something that a rubric cannot measure, which is the biǎo qíng I hope I displayed in that stuffy, smelly, old room.

I’m listening to FULL again on the train to Budapest once more, as I write this reflection. Same missed sharps. Same randomly lurching semiquavers. Same kid, but a deeper appreciation for the art of music, to be classically trained, and a connection that hopefully I’ll possess for the rest of my life,

The programme notes are below, exactly as I submitted them in 2015. I've left the errors in, BMV and the violin duet and all. If you find others, please tell me. I'd like to know what else I got wrong and passed anyway.

———

Programme Notes, DipABRSM

Submitted for the Diploma of The Associated Board of The Royal Schools of Music (DipABRSM), Piano. Thursday, the Fifth of November, 2015. 1,202 words. Reproduced unedited, factual errors included.

• Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) — Prelude and Fugue No. 14 in F♯ Minor, BMV 859

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) — Sonata in B♭ Major, K. 570 i. Allegro ii. Adagio iii. Allegretto

• Sun Yiqiang (1945–Present) — Spring Dance

Prelude and Fugue No. 14 in F♯ Minor, BMV 859 — Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)

Johann Sebastian Bach was arguably one of the greatest composers of the Baroque Period. Because Bach was born into a musical family, he was introduced to music at a very early age. As a young man, he decided to become an organist as well as a musical instructor for the Church and royal courts. Throughout his life, Bach composed what we see today as phenomenal works of music; however during the 1700's, his compositions weren't as widely lauded because the complexity of the pieces that Bach created weren't as widely accepted as the simple pieces that were popular at the time.

One of Bach's most famous creations was The Well-Tempered Clavier, a comprehensive masterpiece that was an assemblage of forty-eight preludes and fugues composed in every major and minor key in two books; the first was completed in 1722 and the second in 1742. Bach's purpose for composing The Well-Tempered Clavier was not only to use every single key, but also to help clavier learners become more comfortable with different finger and musical techniques. The term "clavier" refers to all instruments with a keyboard; therefore, all the pieces in the books could be played on any keyboard instrument. Since Bach did not offer much specification of the instrument, the turning systems, or of any stylistic details, it was a clear indication that the use of individual expression and interpretation of the music was encouraged.

The prelude presented today includes an apparent "argument" between the right and left hands of the player, a similar style to most of the other preludes within The Well Tempered Clavier. The argument is represented through the ubiquity of contrapuntalism, the exchanging of repetitive ideas, the splashes of ornamentation, and the minor tonality. Furthermore, the many notes and the simple rhythm suggest that the prelude must be played with a somewhat light touch, thus resulting in an agile "dispute" between the hands.

The fugue is a four-part polyphonic piece, indicating that there are four voices within it. From the beginning of the fugue to the end, one will notice that the main subject introduced in the first four bars of the piece is "sung" by all four voices. The stepwise pitch patterns, mainly acting as counterpoints of the subject, and other rhythmic variations contribute to the harmony and expressiveness of the fugue.

Sonata in B♭ Major, K. 570 — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

i. Allegro / ii. Adagio / iii. Allegretto

Although Mozart died at the early age of 35, he was able to compose over 600 works of music, thus entitling him to be one of the most greatest composers in history. Mozart already began to show musical talent in his childhood; he was able to first create music at the age of 6 and play multiple instruments. As Mozart matured, he became accustomed to a lavish lifestyle, achieved through the fame that he brought with his compositions of his numerous concertos, symphonies, operas, and sonatas. However, in the late-1780's, he couldn't support the opulent lifestyle that he lived, due to the looming threat of the Austrian-Turkish War (1787-1791). Mozart failed to perform as much as he once did, hence resulting in financial difficulties, causing him to fall into a deep depression. Despite his poor health and desolation, Mozart was still able to compose a few works, including Sonata in B flat Major, K. 570 in 1789. Initially, the sonata was written for a piano-violin duet; however, it became acceptable to play the piece with just the piano. This three-movement sonata clearly epitomizes a typical work from the Classical Period, and more importantly incorporates distinctive elements that express Mozart's severe despondency at the time.

The first-movement, Allegro, begins with a simple, flowing first subject in a major key. It rhythmically repeats within the contrapuntal movement in various keys. The contrapuntalism suggests that Mozart had been influenced by the works of Baroque composers. Unexpectedly, a harmonic change appears in the middle of the movement and modulates, or changes, the melody from a pleasant major key to a tense minor key. The repetition of ideas can be clearly noticed throughout the movement as well as the use of counterpoint, which subtly enhances the melody.

Adagio, the second-movement, holds a character of tranquility while including repeating phrases. This movement expresses tolerant resignation through its slow and steady tempo. Similar to the first movement, the key changes in the middle of the movement and returns to the starting key. Overall, the second-movement is structurally concise, maintains equilibrium, and ends with a feeling of forbearance.

The final movement, Allegretto, is a lively, playful Rondo finale. One can easily hear the syncopation and chromatic elements throughout the movement as well as mild dissonance and a simple harmonic design. The spirited character of this movement brings an ambiguity to whether Mozart composed this movement in an attempt to bring cheerfulness in this dark chapter of his life.

Spring Dance — Sun Yiqiang (1945–Present)

Sun Yiqiang is a contemporary composer and pianist of Chinese descent. Motivated by his passion for music, Sun learned to play the piano at the age of five and attended the Shanghai Conservatory of Music at the age of 12 until he graduated from high school. In 1976, Sun began performing with the famed China Philharmonic Orchestra until 1980. He then traveled to the United States to attend Washington University where he received a master's degree in music. However, he realised that his life's calling was to spread his love for music; therefore, he returned to China where he is currently dedicating his time as a piano professor and a performer for the China Philharmonic Orchestra.

During the year of 1980, Sun traveled to Xinjiang, a part of China that was known for its unpredictable weather and its natives: the Uyghurs. There, he was inspired by the positive perseverance of the Uyghur people who continued to carry on their duties during the unexpected changes in weather of the springtime to write "Spring Dance". Listeners of this song could easily notice how the music symbolizes certain weather changes and aspects of nature.

"Spring Dance" tells a beautiful story of a typical, early-spring day in Xinjiang. This piece is structured of three main sections, which represents the three main parts of a day. The first section (morning), begins with a tender introduction that transitions into an animated melody accompanied by a stimulating tango rhythm. The melody and the tango rhythm repeat throughout the rest of the section and become increasingly intense until a climax is reached, followed by a cascade of notes and an ominous, quiet chord, foreboding a violent storm. The next section (midday) starts off with vibrance, and introduces a new melody played with repeated intervals. However, the listener can hear the start of a storm with the stretto chords, representing the sound of rain. Both tension and dynamics become intense. The use of dissonant chords, which manifest in the violent thunder of the storm, becomes increasingly noticeable until a dramatic tremolo followed by a powerful major chord ends the section, signaling the abrupt passing of the storm. The last section (evening) is quiet and serene, thus symbolizing the calmness after the storm. Elements such as the tango rhythm are reintroduced. It then ends with a suspenseful, dissonant arpeggiation (rolling) chord, revealing the true end of the day while foreshadowing the events of the next day.