Preserving a passion for music amid the rigors of grad school, Aaron Kuan and the Dudley House Orchestra hit the right note
What does the rapid sequencing of DNA through graphene nanopores have to do with playing solo violin?
Not a lot.
Ordinarily, this is where some slick rhetoric should help demonstrate the surprising and illuminating correspondences between these two very different pursuits. For graduate students attempting to launch academic careers without sacrificing everything else in their lives, though, the challenge is often about managing identities between which few correspondences can be found.
As music director and conductor of the Dudley House Orchestra, Aaron Kuan stands at the head of a roomful of scholars who are trying to retain a place for music amid teaching loads and draft chapters. Like them, he sees the orchestra as a welcome break from his work as a PhD candidate in applied physics. Unlike them, though, Kuan is just as much a professional musician as a professional academic: he holds an M.M. from the New England Conservatory and has performed as a violin soloist with the Schenectady Symphony, the Yonkers Philharmonic and the Empire State Repertory Orchestra.
His unusual straddle of these two worlds began in his freshman year of college, when he joined the inaugural class of NEC’s joint program with the Harvard Music Department, which allows students to graduate in five years with degrees from both schools. Kuan was a pre-college student at Juilliard, but was also interested in science, and was glad for the opportunity of a liberal arts education unavailable to most conservatory students. He was also glad, he admits, “to delay the decision about a professional track.”
Taking classes at Harvard and traveling across the river for private lessons, he quickly realized the different demands made by the different tracks. “Solo violin requires a certain stage personality, you have to be comfortable almost improvising. Science requires a personality that likes to be well prepared.” Although he had already made a name for himself in the concert hall, he realized that his own personality was better suited to the lab, where he liked the sense of clear expectations and definite progress.
By their fourth year, his colleagues in the program were all charting careers in music, but Kuan began planning a PhD application. “In order to go into professional music one really has to have the sense that the world needs to hear you, that it would be a crime not to perform,” he says. “I wasn’t sure. In science, it’s much clearer what the point is, and you’re still making progress even if on a certain day you don’t do a great job.”
Kuan is especially optimistic about that progress now, in Professor Jene Golovchenko’s lab. His research on nanopore DNA sequencing, he says, “is going to change the way we live. Imagine having a complete genome in just ten minutes. It’s very clear why this is important.”
Even as he builds a career in engineering, the Dudley House Orchestra has allowed Kuan to preserve his musical identity, planning repertoire, organizing rehearsals and performances, and conducting. And by trading the bow for the baton, Kuan has found a way to at least partially reconcile his art and his science: “Conducting is a lot more suited to my practical personality. A soloist can’t always be thinking of the practical side of things. In conducting, that’s an asset.”
And despite his professional background, he says the orchestra has never disappointed him: “We actually have plenty of musicians who are just as good or better than me.” Even more importantly, though, “Everyone is obviously incredibly intelligent, so things come together very quickly.”
That’s an advantage especially important in a roomful of musicians all competing for time with their alternate identities.
The Dudley Orchestra Wants You
For this fall, conductor Aaron Kuan has planned a concert featuring Mendelssohn’s Third Symphony and his own abridgment of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Rehearsals have begun, and Kuan urges all musicians from the GSAS community to consider joining.
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for more information, and see the Dudley Orchestra page.
Story: Nicholas Nardini
Photographs: Risa Kawai