Cheng chose an incredibly ambitious program for his final thesis performance, and he did not disappoint. With pieces by Bach, Berg, Beethoven and Schumann, Cheng wowed the audience with his verve, grace and sheer endurance.
"It was really an astonishing act that I haven't seen done here yet," said Director of Instrumental Music and conductor of the Amherst College Orchestra Mark Swanson. "This is my sixth year, and this is the first time I have ever seen anyone pull that sort of feat off."
The thesis ran for close to an hour and a half, with three out of the four pieces completely memorized. The audience left in awe. "I knew he was a musician, but was not prepared for what I heard and saw in his senior piano recital," remarked Professor of Psychology Lisa Raskin, Cheng's academic advisor. "Oh my goodness-such proficiency and musicianship."
The beginning
Surprisingly, Cheng didn't play piano at all as a first-year at Amherst. He was burnt out.
He had been playing piano since age five, when his grandmother first gave him lessons. "My grandma taught piano to basically my entire family-my dad, all his siblings, and then me, my brothers and all my cousins," Cheng said.
From those lessons, his passion for music gradually burgeoned. In third grade, he began playing the violin in addition to piano. He would get together with his two brothers and six cousins, who all lived in Freemont, Calif., and play chamber music. "The early exposure to music really helped me catch on," Cheng said. "I remember at a pretty young age starting to form opinions about music. I didn't know that much about it, but I could tell if I liked it or not."
He continued both violin and piano through high school, when he attended San Jose Mission High School. With the exception of one year in choir, music remained an activity separate from school. "High school is kind of interesting in how different it was from Amherst," Cheng said, "It was everything a liberal arts school isn't … it's a great school, it's one of California's tops but it's just very unbalanced towards the math and sciences."
Outside of school, he played violin for three years in the Oakland Youth Orchestra, but his main focus was on piano. He continued to take piano lessons, though no longer with his grandmother as teacher. "Piano did take up a lot of my life in high school. I was playing two to three hours a day, competing," Cheng said. As a high school student he participated in the Junior Bach Festival, the California Music Teacher's Association Convention and the US Open Piano Competition.
College search
Amherst was not on Cheng's radar at all when the college search process began; he had never heard of the school, let alone the concept of a liberal arts college. He fortuitously stumbled across it while doing an online search.
As he read about the College, he grew more and more interested. "On paper I was sold by the open curriculum, the student-faculty ratio, all of the stuff that Amherst usually sells people on because I had never heard of it before. It didn't occur to me that schools could be like that," Cheng remarked.
After his visit to the campus, the decision to come here was clear. "I think it was a combination of me wanting to leave California, and me being awestruck by this different environment," he said.
Bach and brains
From the beginning, Cheng was pretty set on being a neuroscience major. He was officially hooked his sophomore year, after taking the introductory neuroscience class. "Usually you hear students complaining about labs," he said, "but you don't really complain about labs when you can go in and do brain surgery on rats. It was pretty amazing." In addition to being a neuroscience major, he figured he would also be pre-med, since the neuroscience major covers so many of the requirements.
Cheng ended up being a major in music as well, though this decision was less clear at first. At Swanson's behest, Cheng joined the Amherst College Orchestra as a first-year member of the violin section, but he decided to take a year off from piano; he needed a break.
By the end of that first year, however, even though he remained away from the piano, Cheng decided he wanted to major in music. The turning point was the class Music 31: Harmony and Counterpoint I.
The class revealed a whole new aspect of music to Cheng-theory. "I remember thinking how awesome it was that music could be an academic discipline. All through my life I'd pretty much just focused on the performance aspect of it-I played piano," Cheng said. "It opened up a whole new dimension to my understanding of music, and it was definitely something I wanted to explore more." Cheng compared it to a proficient English speaker going back to study the basics of grammar. The theory he was learning in class could then be applied to the music he had been playing for years.
Cheng's academic work, though not as public as his musical performances, received just as much praise. "I have seen him take five courses over many semesters and do superbly in all of them," said Raskin, "He was a student in my class on History of Psychiatry in which he proved to be outstanding; he has a first-rate mind, is a trenchant writer and is great fun to have in seminar."
Music professors similarly lauded him for his school work. "Tim is indeed an unusually gifted student," said Valentine Professor of Music Klara Moricz. "I taught him in a seminar that focused on the analysis and interpretation of 19th-century music. It was fascinating to see the ease with which Tim would decipher the most difficult harmonic progressions. ... He is a quiet student, who absorbs everything he hears in a class without much effort."
As an aside from school and music, Cheng has also been a four-year member of the club volleyball team. As a first-year, he and Enis Moran '07 revived the team, which had been out of existence for a few years. "It's been really, really fun," Cheng said, of his experience playing volleyball at the College. "I think club sports kind of embodies what Amherst is. You can do stuff because you like to do it. You don't have to be great at something to earn the opportunity to do something. Amherst assumes that you can do almost anything, and then lets you try it out."
Virtuosic performer
Cheng's remarkable thesis performance this April marked the culmination of an extraordinary musical career at the College. Cheng returned to piano his sophomore year, and began taking lessons from Chonghyo Shin, from whom he continued to learn for the rest of his years at the College. Cheng has played violin in the orchestra for four years, played chamber music on both the piano and violin and provided piano accompaniment for a number of performances. He has stepped in whenever and wherever needed. "Tim Cheng has been a remarkable presence in the music department. No student in recent memory has performed with such distinction in so many situations," said Professor of Music Jenny Kallick. "It has been the greatest pleasure to work with him and watch his astounding journey as a performer and musician."
This past fall, Cheng played the Grieg Piano Concerto with the Amherst Orchestra. "It's exhilarating [to play with an orchestra]," Cheng said, "I'd never done it before. It's one of those once-in-a-lifetime things. It's one of the reasons why I am so thankful to Amherst; I would never have been able to do this anywhere else."
"When you're playing with anybody else that's not a full orchestra, the problem is always balance. But in a concerto, when you have a whole orchestra behind you, you can just pound away. It's great," he added.
His concerto performance, much like his thesis, was met with uproarious applause and praise. "He was performing at the level of a master student at a conservatory," said Swanson, conductor of the orchestra. "We're lucky at this school, every now and then we do get people like that."
Swanson noted the remarkable two-way interaction he had with Cheng while preparing the concerto. "It was a wonderful interaction between soloist and conductor," Swanson said. "Tim's ideas were very fully formed, with a couple minor exceptions, and he was prepared as a professional would be … It was pretty astonishing how fully formed his musical ideas were."
Though Cheng has not pursued violin as seriously as piano, he still has taken much from his four years in the orchestra. "I love orchestral music … Playing violin in an orchestra is nice because you can enjoy the music without being nervous at all," said Cheng. "The ability to perform without being nervous-it just frees you so much."
Whether for his solo piano playing or his leadership of the violin section in orchestra, Cheng was applauded for his incredible commitment to the music department. "He is sort of a go-to person because of his wonderful musical abilities across the board," said Swanson. "Tim is one of these guys-where do you need me, how can I help."
Surgical aspirations
While Cheng's thesis performance made many audience members realize what an extraordinary talent he is, it made him realize that for now he does not want to pursue a career in music. "As great as it was, I don't want to do it forever," Cheng said. "It's nice to be able to do, but doing it over six months is different from doing it over the rest of your life. I think I would get burnt out."
As of now, Cheng wants to be a surgeon. "I've always liked the idea of being able to do something manual … I figure I should use my hand-eye coordination for something. I can save lives," he said.
Next year, while applying to medical schools, Cheng will remain at the College as Assistant Director of Instrumental Music. In this capacity he will teach, perform and even engage in some conducting. He has already been invited to perform another concerto with the orchestra in the fall.
Once he heads off to medical school and begins the long process to become a surgeon, music will almost certainly lose the prominence in his life that it has had during his years at the College. Yet, it will always remain a part of his life. Cheng said his link to music will shift more towards being a consumer of it than a performer, but that he definitely plans on owning a piano once he is through with medical school. Like his grandmother, he hopes to teach his children how to play. There is little question he will be supremely qualified for the task.