♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtsAably in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artstably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation
with Louann Carnahan, who is
a neurologist, specialized in epilepsy and an accomplished classical pianist.
You can find the resources mentioned by Louann Carnahan during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
♪ Frédéric Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu ♪ (Short excerpt)
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I am with Louann Carnahan, who is a neurologist specializing in epilepsy
and an accomplished classical pianist.
Welcome, Louann.
Hello.
Thank you for being here. It's amazing.
I've followed your Instagram for a long time, and I'm very excited
to have this conversation with you.
I'm very honored that you're having me on here.
Okay, so I always start by asking my guests to present themselves.
Where did you come from?
Where did the music start in your life?
Because I know that it started early.
Sure.
So I was born in Taiwan, but my mom took my brother and I to the United States
when I was two and a half, so I grew up in the United States.
And so that's how I have the straight standard American accent.
My piano life got started when I was five.
I started taking lessons.
It was, of course, an Asian thing to do.
My mom, back in Taiwan, she grew up in
more poor setting, and so she
always wanted to take lessons, but they didn't have the money.
So of course, she put us in lessons.
So that's how I got put in the lessons.
I took lessons all the way up until high school graduation.
In the beginning years through elementary school, of course,
I wasn't very serious about it.
There was even a time where my older brother got put
in lessons around the same time. He's four years older than me.
He stuck with it for only two
years, and he was clamoring to quit.
Around the same time, I guess I was the same way.
I was non-motivated to practice, and so I was also fighting to want
to be able to quit, too.
I think it was especially probably between second to fourth grade
or something like that.
But my mom just refused to let me quit for whatever reason.
So I pushed through lessons.
I think it was to the point where it was a situation of probably
wasting time and money from the lessons just because I wasn't really practicing.
But anyway, she refused to let me quit.
And then around sixth grade
is when I finally got more serious about practicing.
It was actually because I was forced to.
My parents have a manufacturing business in China, so they were constantly
traveling internationally when I was young,
starting from elementary school age.
And so when I was in sixth grade, she
found a couple through church, and they
became surrogate-type parents, guardians, so that we would stay with them.
We would live with them during the school year.
They came and stayed in the house that was just like our neighbor,
like next door neighbor.
I was in this weird situation of bouncing between two houses.
My parents basically will be gone nine months, the whole academic school year.
We would basically live at these surrogate parents house.
They would come home, maybe...
My own parents would come home maybe once every few months just
for a little a little bit.
We would stay in our own home, regular home.
It was this weird situation of bouncing between homes.
But anyway, so when we started staying with the surrogate parents,
we called her aunt Judy and uncle Bud.
That's in our Chinese culture,
where for respect any older generation,
outside the family, even, we would call a woman aunt or our uncle.
So they were aunt Judy and Uncle Bud to us.
And aunt Judy was pretty strict.
And so she forced me to practice.
And of course, when you practice, you tend to get better.
And so then because I was forced to practice, I started making progress.
And starting around middle school age, you start to feel more motivated
to keep going once you start to feel like you're getting a little bit better.
My teacher was proud and stuff, so I felt like I was
accomplishing something on the piano.
Then that's how I really got more momentum.
I did the State Music Association,
the federation, Music Teachers Federation.
I did those, the state, whatever those federation association.
It's not really a contest, but that sort of thing.
Then I also did just local or regional actual competitions.
That came more so in high school age when I was, again, more serious.
I was pretty serious
about it for being a student.
I did go to a few state-level competitions
toward the last maybe three years of high school.
I placed.
I never got first.
I never won a competition, but I would usually get second place or third place.
And a couple...
One of the competitions, I think I went two years in a row, and that was
a regional, a few states, across three or four states in my region.
So I guess that's the spectrum of my competition career in high school.
So that was the level, I guess, of playing.
My hands are very small, so I only can barely reach an octave.
So my teacher had to really select repertoire very carefully.
I didn't find this out until just recently, a couple of years ago.
But we met up and she told me that she had a hell of a time trying to find
repertoire for me to play because I couldn't play the standard,
advanced high school student repertoire, the Beethoven Sonatas or Rachmaninoff or
something like that, or Schubert even.
I managed to learn it in med school.
I actually learned how to stretch out my handspan slightly.
So I can reach an octave better now
as an adult than back then when I was
taking lessons with my teachers.
And my teacher was surprised.
The reason how I ended up running into her was there was this surrogate parents.
Her daughter had a birthday, a big celebration.
She was also a pianist.
I guess that's why she forced me into practicing.
She played in church when she was younger.
So her daughter, for her 88th birthday, 88 keys, she decided to have...
Instead of waiting to the 90th milestone birthday, she decided to have
a big celebration in honor of her being a pianist for her 88th
birthday, 88 keys on the piano.
So she invited me to come and give a concert.
And I had already, again, this is very coincidental.
I had already been invited to give a concert.
My aunt, my mom's sister, They wanted to have me do a concert in Taiwan.
So I had already learned a good amount of repertoire, a few pieces.
And so I played that same concert,
and actually, I learned Beethoven's first movement of the Moonlight Sonata.
So I added that in as well to the birthday party concert.
So my teacher, because it was in my hometown, my teacher was able to come.
So over 20 some years after the fact of ending lessons, my teacher came
and she heard me play now as an adult.
She asked me, she was like, How are you reaching?
Did your hand get bigger?
So that's how I told her.
I was like, I figured out how to gently stretch my handspan.
Obviously, the length of the hands and the fingers, they don't change, but
just the width of how wide I can open it.
I could feel actually the difference.
I remember when I was in high school, my left hand, especially, was tighter.
The tendons in the palm was stiffer, so I couldn't open the thumb
and pinkie width as much.
That's what I worked on in, I guess, med school or something like that.
Even now, I still work on making sure
to keep my finger width, handspan as
gently, limber as possible so I can maintain
the barely octave reach that I have.
That's how my early career was as a high school student.
I ended up pursuing medicine.
Obviously, I'm a neurologist, a physician now.
But even through med school and residency, I maintained the piano
because it's always been a part of me.
When you started when you're five and you stick with it for so long
and you're serious to the point of pursuing competitions in high school,
it was something that I really felt connected to.
I did take a break from classical music in college.
I ended up playing in church for the four years while I was in college.
But then when I moved away to med school, because those four years where I wasn't
playing classical music, then I felt like something was missing.
I really felt a calling to go back to classical repertoire.
So that in med school is when I decided to deliver back
into the classical repertoire.
And I ended up learning all new repertoire on my own in med school.
I always dreamed about playing those bigger pieces like I was
mentioning in high school.
All my piano teacher's other students, they all got to play like Schubert impromptus
and the Beethoven sonatas and stuff.
So I just decided to...
I guess that's when I started working on stretching my handspan.
So I taught myself the Schubert Impromptu Opus 90 No. 3.
I think it's number...
Or maybe it's number...
Yeah, it's number three, the G flat major impromptu by Schubert.
So I learned that because I remember there was one of her other students She played
that in her recital, her senior recital.
And I remember really loving that piece in high school.
I did also end up learning Rachmaninoff, Prelude in C sharp minor, believe it or not.
For me, I'm also very petite in stature. I'm only 4.8 inches,
and then coupled with my tiny handspan that
just barely reaches an octave,
of course, Rachmaninoff is just out of reach for me and the power,
you know, the stamina that it takes.
But anyway, I don't know. It's a miracle.
Or it was just stubbornness because I just wanted to do it.
So I found a way to do it. What else?
Other repertoire I learned in med school - oh, one year, I learned
the solo Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin.
But I had those motivations because I was already practicing in med school
just to keep it up and to have a stress release for all the pressures
of being a medical student.
My teacher had taught me so well that...
It's not that she taught me the repertoire that we worked on
when I specifically studied with her, but I learned how to practice,
how to learn repertoire on my own.
She really taught me so well that I was able to maintain being
a lifelong learner.
That's how I was able to go on and learn the repertoire on my own.
Now, with the technology the world of YouTube, lots of piano professors,
very high-quality, educated piano
professors offer so many online classes,
master courses, and also free videos.
After I learn repertoire, then I turn to
these piano professionals who offer video
tutorials to sharpen up and get proper,
educated master class-level advice.
Because I didn't pursue a music degree, so I don't have the same formal knowledge
of repertoire or interpretation.
So that's where I still take the help of piano professionals that way.
But the mechanics, the basics of how to learn the piece initially.
My piano teacher taught me so well
that I just know how to approach
digging in for the first time of a new piece.
And part of the reason why piano has really stuck me is because it really
helped get me through the time of my own medical condition.
I'm sitting in a wheelchair.
I have a disability, and I have a muscle disease.
So It's a progressive, meaning it gets worse over time.
It started when I was in my early 20s.
Actually, when I was in med school, when I started med school, is when the muscle
weakness started presenting itself.
I started having leg muscle muscle weakness, like thighs and hip muscles.
Walking tended to get very tiring.
I couldn't climb stairs.
That was one of the first manifestations of how it was.
And so that was when I got sent to the neurologist for a workup
of the muscle disease.
Well, actually, that was actually not the first time I presented to a neurologist.
The reason why I am a neurologist and I specialize in epilepsy
is actually because I also have epilepsy as a patient.
I'm also a patient myself.
I had my first seizure in high school during a calculus test during my senior
year, stress, sleep deprivation, all of those things are epilepsy,
epileptic seizure triggers.
Getting on the medicines, my seizures are under control.
But then there was a where I ended up off seizure medicines in college.
That's how I ended up having my third seizure
at the beginning of medical school.
It was right around that time, it was at the beginning of
the second year of medical school.
I had a seizure, again, on the day of quiz.
It was because of the seizure, I went back to the neurologist in medical school.
That's actually when I noticed definitely something was wrong,
something was weak about my legs.
My classmates noticed as well.
I couldn't lift my thigh off the exam table very easily.
I was having trouble doing that.
My classmates agree like, Yeah, that's weird.
That's when I started the workup for the muscle disease.
They sent me for EMGs, and then they sent me ultimately
to a neuromuscular specialist in town, and I went and had a muscle biopsy.
And all of this happened toward the end of second year, it takes time
to get in with all the doctors and doing the initial test.
So third year, medical school was rolling around, and that's the year that all my
classmates were heading off to the start of their third year clinical rotations.
But because my neurologist wanted to refer me out of state to do my muscle biopsy
to a more specialized academic center that had a, I guess, more advanced
pathologist to do the muscle biopsy.
She knew she had already started recommending that I go ahead
and take the entire year off because to travel all that time,
and then I would have lost too much time.
The month, whatever it is, it would have been thrown off.
Then you can't catch up because the schedule is very set.
Every month is a new rotation, and you have your whole year schedule
laid out and made for you.
It becomes very - in the world of medicine, training, especially, everything is very
laid out and scheduled, and so you can't really deviate from that.
Or if you do, I mean, of course, life things always
come up, but it's very hard.
My neurologist just recommended me to take off the whole year
so I could just focus on getting the diagnostic work up.
It was that year that I was...
That was the second year of doing the piano concerts.
That was how I had so much time to practice that I was able to learn
the Rhapsody in Blue by Gerschwin, the whole 25 minute piece.
It was cool.
That was the good thing about that year,
that whole medical diagnosis.
I mean, of course, that was the most difficult time.
I remember being at the neurologist.
It was before she even sent me off to the muscle biopsy, but she could already tell
from my exam findings and that she knew this was some form of progressive muscle disease.
Right then and there, she was already recommending that I start using a mobility aid.
And I'm 20-something, early 20s, young person, and that was a big shock.
I remember that day when she said that in the appointment.
It's like the room became muffled.
It's like this weird sensation of I was there, I was hearing
what she was saying, but it became like an outside perspective.
I don't know. It was the most bizarre thing.
And I guess it was just the emotional processing of it.
We came out of the appointment, I was in tears.
Both my parents happened to be there for that appointment.
Luckily, they came back.
They were in the United States at the time, so they were there to support
going for this medical appointment.
My mom was there along the hallway.
She went with me when I had to go out of state for the muscle biopsy.
Even though my parents traveled internationally, because
they were constantly in China doing business or other in Europe
for their manufacturing business. But she was always...
When something happened, when something medical happened,
she would always come back.
The seizure that happened in medical school.
She was in China at the time, and the seizure happened.
And of course, when you have a seizure, you can't drive temporarily.
And the state that I lived in was the standard no driving for six months.
And that changed everything that year because I was living off campus at
the time, so I couldn't drive to campus.
She came and she got me an apartment on campus where
a majority of the students live.
And it was just you just walked across the street.
So that was temporarily, my housing was shifted.
It was just the bare bones.
She got me an apartment, and there was a mattress.
I probably had a kitchen table to eat and maybe study, but that was it.
It was about the most bare bones place because I had my other place
that I lived, for the standard place.
What about pianos?
I did have a piano, coincidentally.
That's how I ended up having...
I was practicing all this time during med school because we took
a little rinky-dink upright. I don't know.
I moved...
Of course, this whole medical training process,
you have to move every single time.
You're changing to a new training location.
So I took a piano with me almost everywhere I went.
So to start on my third year clinical rotations, after I completed the muscle
biopsy and got back on schedule to start my third and fourth year clinical
rotations, I had to go away again out of state to do that part
of training because our school was...
They only had enough spots to house a third of our medical school class.
And then everybody else gets sent all across the United States.
They have partnering hospitals, academic places that take medical students.
A large portion of my friends had already gone up to Michigan,
and they were already up there.
It was funny, I had - It's a lottery system.
I had randomly been lotteried into staying on the campus in the medical school.
But because my friends were all up in Michigan, I actually
traded and gave up my spot.
Because a lot of times when the people who have families, spouses in
the same place where the medical school campus was, of course, most people
wanted to stay there, so I actually gave up my seat to stay on campus.
But when I moved up there for third and fourth year,
then we took the piano up there.
Then when I moved again to another location for residency,
we took that same piano.
It definitely made its way on the rounds across the country.
That's how I ended up having access to the practicing the piano all those years.
When did your medical condition
prevent you from playing the piano?
I noticed in residency, my arms,
my shoulders had started getting weak.
They were already starting to get weak toward the end, later years of med
school, but definitely in residency, probably about halfway through.
It was probably shortly after I gave that concert at the residency
graduation ceremony for one of the upper class who graduated before me.
I could feel that my shoulders were starting to get weak.
I was still able to play, but then I think it my third year
of residency that I could no longer play, or I was getting too fatigued
to play the Fantaisie Impromptu.
And so I knew at that point that
the progression was starting
to become serious.
And that actually made me sad to where I no longer wanted to play.
I was still physically capable of playing at that point,
but I knew I was losing it.
And so probably my last year of residency, for sure, I actually just
was not motivated at all.
Looking at the piano just made me sad because it was a reminder that,
again, it was yet another thing that was being taken away from me
because of the medical condition.
And so when I moved for fellowship, fellowship was only one year.
And so I didn't end up taking a piano because it was only one year.
Anyway, I was already getting sad that I was losing piano.
But then we moved finally now as my job,
my final location of where I live now.
Once we settled in, again, I got that itch.
I missed piano, and I just had that need no matter what.
I talked to my mom.
I said, Is it worth it to get a piano again here?
Of course, the piano at home in my hometown, that's so far away.
So it wouldn't be worth to take that piano here.
But she was like, Well, go ahead and get it.
If it's going to make you happy, then do it.
You can play it for however long as you can.
If you can only play it for a month, then that's okay.
She said something crazy like that.
I've always been a bit of a Steinway person.
When I was 16, that was a milestone birthday because I came home one day from
school and like, Oh, my God, there's a Steinway grand piano in the living room.
So that was what was at home and what I got to practice on
all that time of being at home.
Of course, when I moved here and I was working as an attending
and I wanted to get a piano back, I said, Is it worth it to get a Steinway?
Of course, being as expensive as they are.
She gave me - Because she was supportive and she gave me permission
to want that and saying it was okay.
Because I was just afraid of that it would be a waste.
You spend that much of an investment.
And literally, what if I could only play a short amount of time?
But she said, Okay, if it's going to make you happy for a month, then that's good
enough, and that's good enough for me.
She helped with making that purchase.
I was very lucky to have her support.
But because my shoulder muscle progression was getting worse,
it did get to a point where I physically was no longer able to maneuver my arms
around the keyboard. Also, technically, I was working full-time hours,
but I was only working part-time productivity compared to what
the other physicians, what a typical full-time physician
the productivity expectations and the schedule, the call schedule.
I had accommodations, actually. I was very lucky.
I had accommodations throughout residency for the call schedule because, again,
physically, because of the disability, because of the fatigue and the muscle weakness,
I ended up having to approach my program
directors and the chairman of the department at my residency program.
I said, I'm about to quit.
I'm physically ready to drop.
I can't go on like this.
Luckily, I had a very good mentor when I was a third-year medical
student, and he gave me advice.
I called him when I was about ready to drop in residency, ready to quit.
He said, Well, why don't you approach your program director and see
if there's something they can do to help?
That surprised me.
I never would have even thought that I could ask for accommodations.
I would never have had nerve, or it just never even crossed my mind.
I thought my career was going to be over.
They miraculously ended up agreeing, and they made it very easy.
I didn't have any paperwork, didn't have to go through filling out FMLA
forms, didn't need a doctor's note to say I needed it in writing.
Of course, they could see. I was riding around on a scooter.
At that time, I was able to get up and walk.
I'm still in ambulatory wheelchair user, so while I need the wheelchair, I'm
much more reliant on the wheelchair now.
I can only walk a very short distance.
But back then, I was able to get up out of the chair or the scooter
I I used the scooter at the time to ride around the hospital.
But I could go in the hospital rooms and clinic and do an exam on the patient.
So all of the actual pertinent stuff that we needed to do for training and to learn
how to do physically, I was able to do.
It was just the call schedule that was too hard on my body, too fatiguing,
because I had actually gone through intern year doing all the same schedule.
I didn't say anything.
I never even brought up the need for accommodations up until that point.
Even as an intern, the only thing I ever had to do was I had to find a spot
to put my scooter at the hospital.
Even then, I never officially requested anything.
I just picked a spot in the intern the call room that first year,
and I just put it there myself. I didn't ask anybody.
It didn't really have any... There was no formal to do about it.
Of course, no one's going to touch it. Everybody just left it alone.
Then you would go home and have this post-call day, but you were coming home
working from a 28-hour shift, and you would have the afternoon
to sleep and rest, and then you would have to go back to work the next day.
That was when I got to the breaking point at the end of my first year,
transitioning into the start of the actual formal neurology residency year.
That was when I was to the dropping point, and that was when I approached
my neurology program directors and the chairman of the department.
And there's also this sense of... you have to compensate
when you have a disability, you have to work harder.
I mean, I don't want to say I work harder than everybody else,
but you have to prove yourself.
And I felt that way anyway.
I've always had this chip on my shoulder so I always
felt like it was this weakness.
Having the scooter, the mobility aid, it always felt like
this elephant in the room.
I guess that really motivated me to make sure that I did a good job and I learned
what I was supposed to be learning.
I got the evaluations that I got during intern year.
I guess it's, again, I pushed myself
that hard and I proved that I really
wanted to be there and I proved that I was capable of being a hard worker.
But my body, medical condition physically, was not going to allow it to continue.
But at this time, you were still...
You were trying to get back to your Steinway too, right?
Yeah. Well, that was,
yes, when we moved here back to being out
of training and when I was working, then this was a couple of years after I
graduated fellowship, when we moved to where I'm working now
that, yes, we did finally end up getting the Steinway
is what I have here at home is what I'm playing on my videos on social media.
During that time working, the beginning years of working
as an attending, I eventually just did get to the point where I couldn't
raise my arms to play anymore.
And so I did stop playing.
But again, it was like that sense of, oh, my gosh, I can't lose piano.
So at the same time when I was knowing in the back of my mind for mental health
reasons, I needed to start accepting the fact that I was going
to lose piano out of my life.
I decided anyway to build myself.
I came up with this harness design.
There's a metal frame that I came up with, and I hooked up straps to it, so
it supports my arms, dingling in the air.
And so that facilitates me being able to move around the keyboard.
My husband ended up figuring out how to make it.
It's a very kind of like duck tape together.
There's like zip ties and an elastic strap from a fabric store and
a small dog harness that I wrap around my arms.
It's just hanging from a metal frame that's zip-tied to the piano bench.
I mean, very rinky-dink stuff.
Nothing fancy or expensive at all.
These are just very cheap materials.
They just get anywhere.
But anyway, he built it.
But still, How did you...
Okay, let's try to figure out what works, and let's just
bring a frame and some straps.
Between the moments where you stopped and the moment
where you said, Okay, I need this frame.
How long was it?
Probably a couple of years.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, probably a couple of years.
But the way I figured out, I think being a neurologist and understanding
the neuroanatomy especially the muscles, the specific muscle groups.
I knew exactly what muscles were weak and the exact movements
that I needed help to maintain my arms.
And so that's how I came up with the design of what the harness
and the frame needed to be.
Because in all my search, when I knew that my arms were going and I was no longer
going to be able to play naturally, I had reached out to some local company
who made an exoskeleton type
for arms, to hold up arms for children.
And so I actually did that.
I went to the clinic here in town, and they were very gracious
and willing to make me the...
It's like one of those for scoliosis,
like a torso, a TLSO type frame.
And then the attachments, they had this metal frame, but that device actually
wasn't able to help me, because -
No, because then you don't move anymore.
It was too limiting.
Yeah, there was no movement.
There was no lateral movement.
And the way that it actually held up my arms, it did not
hold up my arms correctly. It actually put my arms this way.
And we don't play the piano this way.
We're up with our elbows like this in this type of a plane.
We play the piano this way, where the arms need to be bent like this.
And so that device failed to meet my needs.
So that wasn't able to help me with the piano.
So that's what then I knew, okay, I need to be able to figure out something
to hold my arm in this position because the specific muscle groups
that's weak in me is especially the shoulder rotator cuff muscles.
So that encompasses the shoulder, the deltoid muscle.
That was probably the first muscle that went.
But it also encompasses the muscles around your shoulder blade.
So the external rotator.
So the muscles that turn your arm out that way.
I can't do that.
I have to push with my other hand to make it turn this way
and to hold in this position.
Because my elbow flexion and extension, so the bicep muscle and the tricep muscle,
when your elbow is in this position, I can hinge up and down
like this at the elbow.
And my wrist and my hands are completely normal strength, full strength, luckily.
Thank goodness.
And so the small dog harnesses that I have zip-tied, if you see from
the videos, one cuff is here and one cuff is above my elbow.
And it's cuffed in a way, hanging from the straps, that it holds my arms
in this external rotation.
But my finger strength, my hand, grip, my wrist, flexion,
extension, and all of the movement that we have here, that is normal.
My neurologist, she's surprised.
She didn't know I played piano until I started posting on social media.
It's funny.
There was a neurologist group for women neurologists.
They stumbled on my video.
I came to an appointment and she was like, Oh, you're famous on the internet.
She had stumbled upon my video and she's like, How are you playing?
I was like, What is this?
Then she was like, What?
She held her hand up to my hand.
Of course, everybody's hand is bigger than mine.
She's like, Oh, my gosh, how are you playing with such small hands?
When you started showing that you must have had a lot of questions, right?
You decided to go on Instagram and show your story about the frame.
How did you come up with this idea of saying, Okay, let's go live
on social media and show this?
Well, I remember, of course, being in a...
It was a horrible devastation.
It's this grief when you're faced with
this horrible news of your life changing
and shifting from a healthy world
to be an able-bodied person to shifting
into this world of disability. I think it's a completely different realm.
I feel split as a person.
I mean, it's a very bizarre feeling that I've lived with my whole life.
The shift in my self being able-bodied all through high school and college
and then starting in med school.
So I know how painful it is to go through
that process and grief and coping.
I had that mentor in medical school.
Also, as part of how he helped me so much is he helped me get established
with the therapist.
And the therapist is who helped me
learn how to cope and just face all of
the difficulty, the mental, the emotional difficulties.
She learned - she taught me how to cope with that.
So I started posting on social media, one, because I guess I just
wanted to help encourage other people to show what's possible.
And to show people with disabilities that
you can dream, you can have a career.
I became a doctor.
I'm a musician.
And so I wanted to show other people with disabilities just to give a source of...
Because for me, I didn't have that when I was going through it.
If I would have had another person to see that, okay, life isn't over.
There can still be a lot of possibilities that you can do,
you can achieve, if you want to.
You have to put in the work to do it.
But I didn't have a role model like that, someone that I could turn to.
Because traditionally, I feel like society, not only the physical barriers
of having a disability with just being able to get a wheelchair to
a public place, that's the physical side of disability, of how it's limiting.
But then there's the social construct of the limiting factor of disability, where
it's just this dichotomy of able-bodied society and disabled community.
And able-bodied general society
sees disabled people, I guess, with a certain stereotype.
So there's not this representation out in mainstream society where you see
teachers with the physical disability, doctors, musicians.
Since posting on social media, I have actually - many people have reached out
through messages and commenting on the videos that there's a whole world of us
musicians with disabilities I never knew.
I thought I was alone.
That's the way I started.
We are a lot. I can tell you.
There's a lot of musicians with disabilities.
That's wonderful and that's amazing.
I think we need more representation.
I like seeing you on social media because
when I learned you were a doctor,
in disability studies, in the academic field, there is this opposition world
between the medical and the social model.
You are representing both the medical and the social model and being an artist.
When you do your videos, you show how difficult it
is to practice and how the piano...
I love this part of one of the conversations that
you have frequently, actually.
I'm taking one in November, for example, where you were practicing something
and you were saying, But why do the piano factors make these
pianos so big with such a big - can they do something
that would accommodate me and with my smaller hands and with my-
Yeah, narrower keys.
Yes, I remember the video you're talking about.
Yeah, that was a big frustration that this is all going through my mind.
You were even saying these pianos are built for big men
like Rachmaninoff and Beethoven, with big hands.
Yeah, a huge hands.
Yeah, I remember that.
Yeah, his hand is probably like double, like two of my hands put together.
It's probably the size of Rachmaninoff's hand.
But unfortunately, the modern piano was made for keys to fit that hand.
Actually, and just not having anything to do with medical limitations, but just
all classical pianists are affected by the size when there's actually
the PASK. There's this organization that they're trying to advocate
to incorporate these narrower key options into the piano world.
I don't remember the abbreviation of what it stands for, but
there's this PASK, is the organization
that's trying to advocate for
narrower key options for pianists.
Because actually, when you look at the statistics,
females, the average handspan of a female can only reach a ninth.
So the Bell-shaped Curve, when most women fall in the realm of a ninth.
And then there's this little overlap where, again, the 10% of women,
those are the problem, traditionally, the ones who have the ability to go on
and become famous concert pianists that we know of, Yuja Wang,
as an example, just one example, there's many female concert pianists.
But you have to have a certain handspan size to be able to reach the repertoire
that is required to be a concert pianist playing these concertos
and everything else, advance that I can never...
I can only dream about playing, but never will be able to.
I love the Polonaises, especially Chopin's Heroic Polonaise
in A-flat major, Liszt's La Campanella, all of those famous pieces that
every classical pianist can play.
I will never be able to play that because my handspan just isn't there.
And the same thing with men, the bell curve shape with men,
there's this overlap of the 10 % of men, this certain population of men
who say that they can only reach a ninth.
So that's small for a male hand size.
And so statistically, that's why when you look at the hand size,
when you look at the population of people where the majority number
of pianists fall, the modern piano size is actually not
serving the majority number of people where their handspans fall.
And of course, I'm in the extremely smaller size
I'm not even anywhere near close to the size of the average female handspan.
Those are the challenges that I face.
It's way more handspan, width-wise,
than even the average female hand size.
Yeah, but then you also show how you practice and how every day
it gets better like everybody else.
Practice your piano and every day, you get a little bit better.
Your Instagram channel is full of either these videos where we
see you practice or these videos
where we see you in your context of life.
I love that.
I'm so glad.
I'm glad that it resonates with you and hopefully
that it resonates with other people.
Yeah, I heard because there was a couple of videos where, being in the classical
community, there's a certain minority of elite of certain opinions that
are hard, critical of other musicians.
If you don't show the video in top performance,
performance level quality playing,
it's like you're going to get eaten alive.
There was a couple of videos where people were just, That is horrible.
You're horrible.
And they're criticizing the speed, the tempo, and then the technique.
I mean, everybody's got an opinion There is this...
One commenter mentioned that, Hey, they appreciate the fact that I show
normal life and how the real process is.
It sounds not good and perfect and performance level in the beginning.
It's okay to show that.
I'm glad that that resonates with you.
I suggest you do you.
And that you don't care about the others.
No, It's great, but it's social media, so
everybody has an opinion on everything.
But yeah, no, I think it's fascinating.
It's full of little details of things that a pianist
lives every day, so that's great.
But especially seeing you play with this frame, for me,
it was like, That's really brilliant.
It's really like, Okay, let's remove the problem that is causing my arms
to not hold and let's use the hands and let's use a basic frame.
I love that idea.
I want to go a bit further on that.
Do you have any projects that you are working on,
now that we know you on social media?
Yeah. I happen to be recording.
I recorded, actually, I completed it.
I worked on it for three days this week, actually, so it's
very coincidental timing.
I'm very lucky that I met you and we get to be having this conversation.
But I recorded it, and I want to try to
release and make a public debut
as a recording artist and release the Chopin's Nocturne, Opus 9,
number 2, in E-flat major, to release it to streaming platforms.
And that is a whole new ball game.
I don't know anything about it.
Again, YouTube, tutorials, I learned and little snippets here and there from
people's videos who explain the process.
I had to delve into more online tutorial videos about
the audio engineering side of putting out
a recording of decent quality.
Words like compression and just even
the microphone position and micing
a piano is way more complicated than
whatever, other settings potentially.
Technically, I only have the one mic, and so I'm not technically
recording in stereo.
Don't tell the streaming platforms that.
Hopefully, they'll still accept it. But all of those things in all these terms
that I just have no knowledge of, and I don't know any about thing
about the postproduction side.
This is very much, I guess, analogous to my harness.
It's like this Ricky Dink, zip tie situation.
My brother is the one that got me this microphone, this new one.
He got it for my birthday last year, which I was sitting around with not
doing anything with it because I didn't know how to use it.
Anyway, when he visited, he came from Thanksgiving, and he was like,
We need to get you set up with this microphone.
We worked through it, we set it up, made it work with my phone.
It's one of those USB mics, and it comes with an app.
In the app, you have all of these settings,
and that's what I didn't know anything about.
I had to go to YouTube and look for the online tutorial explanations.
That's what I was doing this week.
I was learning how to tweak this and that, and then the amount
of reverb and, I guess, the timbre or how much the tone quality.
All of that is through this app.
I managed to complete that.
I recorded for three days this week.
The minute you push the record button, it's like you forget how to play.
You forget the piece all together.
I mean, there's a bunch of starting and stopping, and then playing halfway
through, you suddenly forget what note you're playing or you play a wrong chord,
and then that throws you off, and suddenly you forget where you are,
or you use a wrong fingering, and that subconsciously throws you off
so then you have a brain fart.
But I managed to finish the recording.
I took some photos yesterday for the album cover, and I played around with it.
It's me, Louann Carnahan.
I'm releasing Chopin's Nocturne in E flat major, opus 9 number 2.
Coming to you on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music,
and all the other streaming platforms.
Live Monday. Hopefully.
We will put the link.
There is a resource page with this We are going to be able to have
the direct link and click and have your release.
How exciting.
Okay, I have one last question for you before we complete this interview.
It's about people who might have counted on your life, have helped you
figuring out some of your path, especially in the musical path,
I would say if you have one or two people
to think of in the in that era,
who would it be and why?
Well, yeah.
Starting off in the very beginning of my life would be my mom.
She's the one that put me in piano lessons, as Asian parents do.
But she is also the one that would not let me quit.
She was paying for two years worth of lessons
that were a complete waste of money.
And good or bad, I'm not to say that
all children should be forced to do something
that they're not enjoying at the moment.
But for me, I was lucky that it ended up working out, and it
is what was needed to be in my life.
Because if I would have quit lessons, there would be no piano.
And then I wouldn't have had piano to fall back on to help me to learn to
cope and grieve as I was going through my own medical process.
So my mom, first and foremost to her, Thank you for not letting me quit piano
when I was clamoring to quit, when my brother was quitting.
Then Aunt Judy, my surrogate parents, when she forced me to practice,
that's when I got better.
For sure, she played a big role in helping my progress.
Then, of was my piano teacher, Mrs. Minasian.
I always called her. I can't call her by her first name.
She goes by Joyce.
I've heard other people call her, but that's actually her middle name.
Her, I guess, name is Mary Minasian.
I hope you don't mind.
I'm sharing your name.
But Mrs. Minasian, she was my piano teacher that I took lessons from.
I actually didn't start with her.
I started lessons with someone else.
I think I was with this first teacher for maybe six months or something like that.
But my mom, because in her circle of friends, her Asian friends,
their teacher was Mrs. Minasian.
So my mom changed me over to her.
And she was the one that I studied with from age six
to my high school graduation.
I graduated high school when I was 17.
I have her to thank.
My teacher just gave me such a good foundation and piano technique that I
don't struggle with those things, how to maneuver, how to play arpeggios,
how to play trills, how to play scales, The only thing is I struggle with octaves
because my hands don't reach.
So there is no point of perfecting octaves because I just can't play pieces
that play repetitive fast octaves.
So that is, I guess, one technique
that I don't have any mastery level of.
But yeah, I cannot speak highly enough of my piano teacher,
and she taught me how to learn.
Writing and fingering, In the very beginning,
it's a very painstaking process.
When I sit down to look at a piece for the first time,
it can take hours or something as you're working your way through it.
And then you change fingerings, you play it around and you figure out
what works and what doesn't work.
And then even as you play it longer and you get it faster, closer
to speed, then you find out that that fingering doesn't work.
So I'm constantly changing.
Then practicing hands separate, putting hands together, dynamics,
all of that musicality stuff.
I mean, all of that process, she just gave me such a tremendous foundation
that she set me up to be able to be an adult lifelong learner.
Well, we arrived at the end of our interview.
It was really fascinating.
Thank you so much for sharing your story and sharing your thoughts.
We will share also your Instagram page so that people can have a look
at these amazing videos that you post.
Cool. Well, Thank you very much.
Again, I'm so honored that you reached out to me, like little me.
I'm like nobody in the realm of social media.
I'm so honored that you reached out.
I know I took probably a month to get back to you.
I know you originally reached out in December,
but I thank you for being patient and that you didn't give up on me.
You were so kind and still responsive and wanting to have me on.
But I saw your email and I was like, Oh, my gosh, wow.
That's an honor. It's an honor.
Thank you so much.
Well, have a fantastic day and good luck with the release.
Enjoy.
Thank you so much. It was very nice meeting you.
Thank you.
Have a good day.
Bye
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