TC Today - Teachers College Columbia University

Practice Makes Personal
Helping his students improve has made Victor Lin a better musician and human being
Victor Lin has recorded, performed his own compositions
and drawn high praise from the jazz
supernova Kenny Barron. Yet his musicianship
has been equally galvanized by his students at the Stanford
Jazz Workshop, the Mark O’Connor Fiddle Camp and
Columbia's Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program—
including one who inspired Lin’s TC dissertation.
“He asked me, ‘What do I practice?’” recalls Lin, an
accomplished violinist, bassist and jazz pianist who is
graduating this spring from the College’s Music and Music
Education program. Without quite articulating it, Lin had
pondered that issue his entire musical life. “I said, ‘Well,
there are standard set of things everyone does, but just
because I did things a certain way, doesn’t mean it’s most
effective for you.’ And then I started to wonder, how did
all the legends practice? What did they do?” And above all:
how to make improvement a less “blind and self-propelled”
process for his students than it had been for him?
Lin was made to play classical piano and violin by his
parents at an early age. He was blessed with an ability to
recreate what he heard, a gift he used mainly to impress his
friends by playing themes from video games and the latest
pop songs. He joined his high school jazz band “because it
was cool”—but resolved to take music seriously only after a
friend laughed at his first attempt to solo.
What if we taught kids from
the get-go that excelling on a
bunch of different instruments
was the most ordinary thing?
“I started listening to the music that we were playing and
stealing everything,” he recalls. “It wasn’t until the fourth time
I’d played the same solo that I realized I should change it. I had
stumbled onto the way you’re really supposed to learn music.
“A lot of my early experiences were like that,” he says.
“You have this chip on your shoulder and you think, ‘I’m
House pianist Lin has performed at the farewell for
President Arthur Levine, the inauguration dinner for President
Susan Fuhrman, and other TC events.
going to show them.’ Then something else knocks you
down, and you have to match that, too.”
That was the sequence when he went to the University
of Washington at age 17 after Stanford had turned him
down. Unsure whether he wanted to be a doctor, a lawyer
or a professional musician, he spent his first year taking
math, physics and music theory.
“I’m at a huge university, feeling overwhelmed and taking
classes that I hate, and my bubble gets burst,” he recalls.
“It was humbling to discover that I was the worst jazz pianist
there. I was so bad I didn’t even get into a group. I barely
qualified for lessons. It was the ultimate reality check.”
Lin became a Christian and spent the summer after
freshman year working at a Salvation Army Camp, where
he discovered music could really help him reach people.
“Kids there don’t care about your training,” he says. “But
they can sense if you care about them.”
Lin focused harder on music, and when he discovered
Barron’s album People Time, with saxophonist Stan Getz,
he knew he didn’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer. After
graduating, he moved east to study with Barron at Rutgers.
He took lessons with Barron once a week for three
years, a process he found fascinating and frustrating. “He’d
have a piano, I’d have a piano, and we’d kind of go at it
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