When Chan Mi Jean stepped onto the stage under the lights at Carnegie Hall, she continued walking a musical path that started at 4.
Jean (pronounced like “John”) serves as UT Martin’s director of keyboard studies. She also works as a chamber musician and opera coach and has performed internationally in Austria, Canada, China, Czechia, Italy, South Korea and Thailand. She has won numerous national and international competitions, including the Irving Shain Woodwind-Piano Duo Competition with oboist Emily Knappen, and has received an honorable mention in the American Prize Instrumental Solo Competition for her recording with former UT Martin tuba professor Steve Darling.
From Korea and China to the United States, Jean’s performance journey has spanned the globe, finally leading her to the Carnegie Hall stage in 2023 after she won the eighth annual New York International Music Concours in piano the year before.
“That is everyone’s dream,” she says. “If you’re going to do a musical performance— especially in classical music—you want to be able to say, ‘I performed at Carnegie Hall,’ right? It’s a kind of statement, kind of a proof that I have attained a certain place. I might not be the best in the world, but I did something significant.”
Jean performed a Franz Liszt transcription of Robert Schumann’s love song Widmung, the first song of Schumann’s Opus No. 25 called Myrthen, a collection of 26 songs Schumann presented as a wedding gift to his fiancée in 1840.
“Originally, Schumann wrote a lead for it, and then Liszt transcribed it into the piano,” Jean says. “Liszt’s style is as a virtuoso pianist: very brilliant writing, using all kinds of keys. It’s very beautiful, but, at the same time, very showy.”
Jean’s prelude began in Seoul, where her father studied as a full-time seminary student while her mother taught piano lessons and played for a church.
“We had lots of kids coming to our house to take lessons,” Jean says.
One day at 4 years old, Jean asked to learn too.
“My mom said, ‘You’ve got to do it for sure—if you start, you’ve got to do it for life.’ I still said yes.”
Her playing days began.
When her father graduated, the family moved to China, where he worked as a pastor and a missionary. Jean was 7.
“My parents really wanted me to play piano, so they found me a teacher from the conservatory in China,” she says. “I started studying with her and going to the conservatory. It was like a high school and middle school arts program.”
For college, she chose to study in the United States. Jean earned a bachelor’s degree from Asbury University, a master’s degree and performer diploma in piano performance from Indiana University, and her doctorate degree in collaborative piano from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jean enjoys playing classical music, especially that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
“Mozart was also a big opera composer, so his music has a singing quality,” she says. “It’s very hard to play it on the piano because the piano is actually a member of the percussion family. It’s very hard to play a connected sound … but Mozart was really pushing pianists to achieve that.
“That made me open my ears and listen closely to how singers perform or how other wind or string instruments do when they make a connected sound. Mozart made me a better musician by making me open my ears to other sounds.”
Jean enjoys performing and bringing music to others.
“As I get older, I get more life experience that I can put more into the music, understanding more about what the composer had in mind. It’s all very fascinating; it’s never boring,” she says.
Jean has recorded two albums, one of which led to an honorable mention in the American Prize Instrumental Solo Competition in 2021. The other album she recorded was earlier this year, Franck/Brahms/Fauré, which featured Jean with violinist Bartholomew Shields and was recorded at the Steinway Studio in Fulbeck, United Kingdom.
While playing at Carnegie Hall remains a forever memory, Jean says her favorite performance may be her first solo recital as a first-year high-school student in China.
“It was 90 minutes of music,” she says. “It probably was not perfect at all, but everything was memorized, and I played Liszt, Chopin, Bach—that kind of very advanced music.”
Members of the Chinese church where her father pastored attended the recital.
“The hall held 750 people, and I think about 1,000 people came to my recital,” she says. “I received flowers, enough to fill my living room. There was nowhere to put any more. I think that’s what really motivated me, inspired me and pushed me to go for this career.”