Chuan C Chang

I was born in Taiwan in 1938, grew up in Japan (1945-1958), started piano lessons in 1949, and moved to the U.S. in 1958; received a BS degree in Physics from RPI in Troy, NY, and PhD in Physics from Cornell Univ. in 1967. Worked in analytical research (electron spectroscopy) until 1998, mostly at Bell Labs.

The writing of my book "Fundamentals of Piano Practice" originated in an incident in 1978 when I took one of our two daughters to her piano lesson with Mlle. Yvonne Combe. Little did I know that it would change my life, a once in a lifetime experience. After a few years of lessons, our daughters were progressing at unbelievable speed, which my wife and I attributed (mistakenly) to their exceptional musical talent. During this lesson, the teacher took out a frayed book with all the lesson pieces arranged according to difficulty, for choosing a new piece to study. Mlle. Combe said, "Choose whatever you want!!!", and my daughter looked all over the book for what she might like. I couldn't help interfering to ask "Shouldn't she stay within her level of difficulty?" The teacher smiled knowingly with our daughter and answered "Difficulty isn't our problem, is it?" I was so impressed by the implications of what she said that I decided to investigate this teaching method. It took me about 15 years of research to realize that most teachers do not teach practice methods and another 10 years to gather the material for this book.

I taught myself to tune the piano by reading books because, as a married student living on a research stipend and my wife’s baby-sitting income, I did not have the money to pay a piano tuner to keep my piano always in tune. Since neither my wife nor I had absolute pitch, I must attribute our daughters' accurate absolute pitch to the fact that our piano was in tune since their birth.