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In the twenty-ninth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Mia Chung, Executive Director of the Octet Collaborative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chung begins by exploring the relationship shared by genius and effort. As a concert-level pianist, Chung began playing the piano at the age of seven. By the age of nine she determined she would pursue a calling as a concert pianist. While blessed with a considerable measure of talent, that talent needed to be accompanied by hours of practice during which she pursued technical precision. Over time, however, she also notes she needed to develop an appreciation for what beauty as expressed through music could offer. That appreciation not only added to her ability to perform as a pianist but also sent her down a path in search of the relationship beauty shares with truth and goodness. Chung discusses the lessons she learned as an undergraduate at Harvard College, as a graduate student at the Yale School of Music and the Julliard School, and as a faculty member at Gordon College and the Curtis Institute of Music. Each one of those chapters added in its own unique way to Chung’s ability to appreciate that relationship. Only now looking back can Chung see how the lessons learned during each one of those chapters prepared her to lead the Octet Collaborative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). While Chung originally sought to establish a comparable Christian study center at her undergraduate alma mater, a core group of faculty members at MIT were already in place and eager to support such an effort. Chung then closes by discussing ways that the Collaborative and the faculty who invest in its efforts are prepared to be of greater service to the mission of the Church.
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Mia Chung, Executive Director of the Octet Collaborative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thank you for joining us.
Mia Chung: It’s great to be here, Todd. Thank you for having me.
Todd Ream: In 1988, Good Will Hunting earned eight Academy Awards, including best picture and best original screenplay. In one scene, Will Hunting, a character played by Matt Damon, tries to explain to his girlfriend, Skyler, played by Mini Driver, his ability to do organic chemistry, in contrast to his inability to play the piano. In relation to playing the piano, he says with Beethoven, when he looked at a piano, it just made sense to him. He could just play. When seeing a piano, Will says he sees a bunch of keys, three pedals, and a box of wood.
But in relation to organic chemistry, Will says he could just play. To begin, when you see a piano, what do you see?
Mia Chung: Well, I think what your question is tending towards is this notion of those who are natural geniuses, right, naturally gifted towards something and those who may not be. And for me, I probably fall somewhere in the middle. In other words I had talent and definitely a desire to, to express myself through music. But the piano itself was a formidable challenge. I mean, it was something that, that had to be on a physical level understood, right digested, acquired.
Um, and so I think what I loved about the piano was the challenge that it posed, the combination of challenge and possibility. So that’s, that’s how I started as a 7-year-old, which in actuality is kind of late to be you know, as a starting age for a concert pianist. But my mom really wanted me to be reading before I started music, which now makes sense to me because I think that understanding notation and directions and how to learn a piece, you know, there has to be a certain level of literacy and fluency with the written word to go alongside the understanding of music.
Uh, and so I went at the piano with sort of this desire to technically understand and, and master and sort of make progress at, you know, sort of the landscape of the keys on the piano. But that was a very rudimentary, basic entry point. What I didn’t realize at the time when I was seven was that I was opening up a universe of the imagination of understanding across disciplines, a universe of emotion, entry ways into history and the shaping of culture over time, and ultimately, into the world of theology.
And so who could have anticipated this as a 7-year-old? You know, the keyboard is white and black keys, systematically ordered, right, in through octaves, like 12 half steps of an octave. And just that technical introduction to the instrument, understanding of the physical layout of the keyboard, actually opened up a world of exploration I could never have anticipated.
Todd Ream: So the physical layout of the keyboard is part of the piano’s appeal, because as I hear you talking, I think, well, oboists might argue the oboe you know, shares that for me or, you know, tuba players, some of my favorite characters might make that argument well.
But for you, I wanted to ask you a little bit more, what is it about the piano that does that for you?
Mia Chung: I think, well, first of all, the patterning of the keys, it’s, it’s visually striking, right? For instruments like such as wind instruments, brass instruments, strings, you know the guitar might be an exception to this because it’s got frets, but those instruments, I mean, you don’t visually see the actual pitches, right? You have to produce them. And there’s very clear structured ways of producing those pitches.
But the piano is strikingly visual, right? The ordering and patterning of these half steps in octave units moving from the base all the way up to the treble. And so I think that structure attracted me, but aesthetically speaking, it offered another dimension, which is, I could play both melody and harmony, right. It could also be a rhythmical instrument, right. Because it is sort of a percussive construction. It is hammers that hit strings, and so it’s like rhythm, melody, harmony, all wrapped up in one, so it’s the musical language, just in one ball of wax.
Whereas a lot of other instruments, you know, we will play a melodic line and can sometimes tend towards harmony. Like string players can play double or triple stops, you know, two pitches, three pitches at the same time. But that’s not what it was primarily designed to do. Whereas the piano has these multi sort of faceted capabilities.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. I want to go back to what you were talking about in terms of aspiration or potential. And then also persistence in terms of practice. Uh, and that you said you sort of fell somewhere in the middle here.
You know, at what point, if any, does drawing the potential for beauty out of a piano, you know, for you seem to become one of that inspiration, but then at what point does it also, you know, you recognize that involves this persistence in practice? And perhaps also too, at what point does the practice itself even become beautiful to the person who really understands what the piano can offer its potential?
Mia Chung: Yeah, that’s a great question, Todd, because I think well let me just start here first before I enter into your question. In this balance of inspiration and sort of grit or hard work and investment, I think our current cultural moment, we like to see things like practicing the piano or an instrument, which is really hard to get a small child to do, right. I mean, there’s an element of, of endurance and discipline and attention and focus that is, is demanding for a child.
And so often we will say, oh, you either have it or you don’t. You’re either a natural, which going back to your original quote you’re designed for it or you’re not. But that default way of thinking I think actually prevents people from actually mining the riches of music and playing an instrument.
What I’d like to put forth is that there is nothing that is worthwhile, that doesn’t have a cost. So inspiration doesn’t just, you don’t just pull it out of a hat, or you’re not just wired towards, or I shouldn’t say wired, that sort of deforms our anthropology, but you’re, you’re not necessarily you know, made to just be inspired.
There’s a lot of priming that goes on. So practicing scales, for example, you know, people think, oh, this is a warmup. A physical warmup, you have to run the C major scale, G major scale, D major scale, you know, over and over again so that your muscles get warmed up and they think of it purely in physical terms. But in actuality, what you’re doing is you’re priming your imagination because scales are the alphabet or the building blocks of the, the words and then the sentences and then the paragraphs that the music will then thus embody.
Because music is a narrative language. Uh, it’s just an abstract narrative language. And so there’s a connection between that physical cost and discipline and investment in learning how to play an instrument, how to practice it, how to gain technical mastery that ultimately gives you the tools towards inspiration.
Perhaps the best analogy is writing, learning how to write. You, you have to learn how to speak first or you, you hear right? There’s comprehension as a child, you understand, and then you learn how to speak, and then you learn how to read, and then you learn how to write. And writing well is a long sort of enduring pursuit, right, that takes so much mastery of grammar and spelling and all the things that we don’t, that we’re loathed to invest time in that we’d like to sort of efficiently bypass, but you can’t because spelling and grammar is part and parcel of the mastery of writing, later on that one can achieve if one practices.
So these things are not sort of a binary. Uh, this is a continuum, if you will. And so I would just say if you’re fighting with a child who doesn’t want to practice, of course in a moderate, with moderation and, and understanding of the child’s sort of makeup and perception, keep them engaged in the language, the possibilities of the language that music offers or the instrument offers. But all the while instilling a sense of this is worth it. And just gradually, you know, ramp up the amount of time that they’re expected to practice.
And the other thing I would, I would share is this there’s this great quote by Ernst Von Dohnányi, was a great pianist, but also a composer. And this is at the turn of the century of the 19th, of 20th centuries. He wrote, “Everything depends on how one practices.” One student may spend five hours at the piano and will not accomplish as much or progress as fast as one who spends one hour at work but concentrates his whole mind on the task before him. The first is a mechanical machine. The second uses his mental powers.” So there is also this aspect of qualitative improvements on how one practices.
Todd Ream: Yeah. I can’t help but ask, because you’ve referenced children and children practicing and sometimes the resistance that parents and/or teachers may experience with that.
But you said you came to it at approximately age seven for some of the reasons that you’ve been unpacking here too, that your mom was sensitive to and understood, but that that was a little potentially late in terms of introduction. Is there an age at which we should start introducing children to the piano or perhaps other instruments?
Mia Chung: Yeah, it depends on the instrument to be honest. Um, because violin, for example my husband and I have four children, and so they all started with string instruments. And the reason they started with string instruments is because the violin, for example, they have like these smaller versions that are sort of proportional to the body size of a child, right? 32nd, 16th, you know, one eighth, one quarter, one half, and then you work your way up to a full, full-size violin. So you can start younger there, right? You could start aged two, three. I mean, it all depends on, on how eager you are to see your child embrace music as a parent.
But piano’s a little different, right? There’s not a, a, there’s, it’s one size fits all. And so it’s not like you have modified versions of piano for children. And so there are some physical challenges, right? To being able to, you know, reach a certain span as a child. But in general for the piano, I think age five is a certainly reasonable age to introduce it.
And what I would say to parents is that remember that this is not about the instrument. This is about the language, the language of music, and what that language offers. The instrument is the conduit or the medium to accessing the beauties, the transcendence, and riches of a language.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask you now a little bit more about your own story. You earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard College, master’s degree from the Yale University School of Music, and a doctoral degree from the Julliard School.
At what point did you discern that service as a piano performer, did that child at age seven who was practicing, at what point did you discern that service as a piano performer would prove central to how you’d come to exercise your vocation?
Mia Chung: I think I was nine when I determined that being a concert pianist would be my calling.
Todd Ream: Only within two years.
Mia Chung: And not, not for the reasons that you know, I wouldn’t describe any sort of depth or meaning to, to, you know, why I was nine when I chose this, other than the fact that I realized as I have a performer in me. So someone who likes to communicate, right, with an audience. That’s always been a part of my nature and I think, you know, I probably had an ego to go along with it, right, that, that fostered sort of the imagination, an imagination that said, hey, being a concert pianist would be a wonderful thing to do. Uh, because I get to be on stage and I get to present music that would communicate to others.
So I, I understood that about myself from a very young age which is why when I was nine I watched a young prodigy, Ana-Maria Vera play the Haydn D major piano concerto with the Boston Pops. And so this was on public broadcasting. I was, you know, I grew up in the Bethesda, Maryland area there, and right outside of DC. And watching her play, introduced me to a realm of possibilities I, I, I didn’t realize was possible. She was extraordinarily poised a wonderful musician technically accomplished.
And there she was working with Arthur Fiedler, who was then the conductor of the Boston Pops and collaborating with this piano concerto. And I thought, oh my goodness. This is the sky’s the limit. Just because you’re a kid doesn’t mean that you’re limited to sort of the childhood ditties, right. Or the piano curriculum that you are starting off with. Um, as a child, as a kid, you’re not limited to that.
And that’s when I literally, to the day after watching her perform, I started practicing two hours a day, everyday, much to the annoyance of my brothers because I would get up before school. Um, you know, if we had school at 8:00 AM, I would literally get up at six to practice to get in like an hour to 90 minutes of practice before I left for school. And they would hear it, that would wake them up too, right? So they were, they were incredibly annoyed.
But I just had, I felt like this was something I had to do. So this is a drive, a determination that was in part my character and personality. But I do think in retrospect it was, it was sort of a calling, if you will.
Todd Ream: At what point then did also service as a music educator become central to how you understood your exercise of your vocation?
Mia Chung: Yeah, well, that’s a great question and one that probably takes a lot of time to unpack, but I’ll try to be really succinct with this. In going to Harvard College, I mean, and, and keep in mind that I had already been performing a lot, competing, I had already done international competitions before I got to college. And I entered college when I was 17. And so there was virtuosic sort of strengths to my playing. There perhaps wasn’t the depth of understanding of the music that I, I would’ve hoped for, okay, at the time.
But that realization that I had so much to grow into, right, there was, there was a lot of depth that I needed to mine in the music came about because I was blessed with a fantastic mentor at Harvard and her name was Luise Vosgerchian. She has passed on so she’s no longer with us, but was a protege of Nadia Boulanger, who was probably one of the most influential teachers in Paris, you know, to composers, musicians alike from the 20th century.
And Professor Vosgerchian basically said, told me, and also said this in an interview about me that, you know, I had this technical prowess, strength, but it was yet to be seen if I would cultivate like the depth of understanding of the music, right, that would meet or match sort of the technical virtuosic prowess. That was to me incredibly humbling hear that from her. And I remember reading her quote with this, you know, very statement when I was a sophomore. And then it made me wonder like, what was it that I was missing? What was I not seeing? What was I not hearing or investigating enough? And that started me on this path towards understanding music as a narrative language.
What I will also say at the same time is being at Harvard College at that point in time, you know, it’s a major research university, there was, there was a lot of emphasis on research and advanced learning. So there was perhaps some foundational knowledge and understanding about music over time through the various styles, the baroque, classical, romantic, modern styles or eras that I needed to shore up that foundation. It was in that process of doing that for myself that I realized that my intellectual interests are directed towards generalized thinking.
In other words, principles and ideas that make sense and work for the music but also then reach out beyond the music to other disciplines and pursuits. I began to discover that as an undergraduate, but I had to first understand how I thought and where my mind gravitated towards, and it was certainly towards that more generalized thinking and drawing connections.
It was at that point I realized, whoa, teaching music, being a music educator is a really important calling. It’s one thing for me to train up pianists who can win competitions and play concerts. It’s another thing for me to empower students toward a level of understanding that not only increases their love for the language, but wants them to share that with others. So there’s this kind of, you know, exponential growth, right, if you will, or support for the art form that goes beyond one’s own acclaim and accomplishment.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Along these lines then, whether it was then, or perhaps still to this day, is there the work of any particular composer, that if you could only play one piece, this composer’s work would be that, or perhaps listen, that this composer’s work would be that music that you, to which you would listen?
Mia Chung: Sure. Well, this sounds, you know, kind of hackneyed, but you know, often J.S. Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, are the three Bs. You know, the alliteration is, is, you know, handy, right, to keep them in mind. But their music is what draws my imagination and, and my thinking the most, my emotions. So if it were a piano piece, I’d probably say, you know, the Goldberg Variations of, of Johann, uh Johann Sebastian Bach, or maybe the Hammerklavier Sonata of, of Ludwig van Beethoven.
But if I had only one piece to choose and it was beyond the keyboard literature, I might choose the St. Matthew Passion of Johann Sebastian Bach. And if you’re asking why, it’s both, well, I would say because it’s not only because of the picture of the Christian faith that Bach so beautifully and compellingly portrays through the passion. It is the marriage of text to music to sort of artful, compositional skill that always prioritizes emotional connection.
You know, that’s probably highlighting the pietism of J.S. Bach, right. Um, he doesn’t forget the integration of heart, soul, mind, and strength. All four are in equal balance. And so I just find that work incredibly powerful and every time I hear it, there’s something new that comes to light.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. You’ve performed as a soloist and with orchestras in North America, Central America, Europe, and Asia. To date, you’ve recorded seven albums.
Do you have a favorite piano on which you’ve played, or perhaps a favorite piano and a favorite concert hall?
Mia Chung: That’s a hard question because I think so much of one’s subjective impression of, of the pleasure of playing in a hall or on an instrument is impacted by even, even the visual beauty of the hall. Uh, you know, the rapport that one has with the audience. So there are many other factors that feed that perception of, of what’s a great hall or what’s a great piano.
But if I had to strip it down, I’d say in general I’ve, I’ve always enjoyed playing on American Steinways Concert D Instruments, which is the full nine foot sized piano. And there are certain Hamburg, I recently played on a Hamburg Concert Grand at MIT that was just phenomenal. So in general, you know, sort of the Steinway instruments, whether they’re American or Hamburg, have been my favorite. There are always exceptions to that rule, you know, other makers that have done well, but if I had to limit it, I would, I would say that.
In terms of halls, I think playing in the Concertgebouw in Holland in the Netherlands, was a highlight for me, acoustically, the recital hall in the Concertgebouw which is where I played, and I, I really enjoyed that space.
But I would say in terms of an audience interaction playing for a group of people in Tonga all places, right, was perhaps the most memorable experience. It was because this notion of concert music was foreign to, to the Tongan audience. But, you know, this isn’t of, you know, islands off of I had to go through Fiji, right? I flew to Hawaii, then to Sydney, then to Fiji, and then I went to Tonga. So it was a long journey. But there was nevertheless, such an appreciation and joy in their response to the music that, that remains with me, has remained with me for three decades.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. That’s wonderful. Not, not the answer I would’ve guessed, but for that, but for that very reason, yeah, wonderful, wonderful story.
For two decades, you served as the artist in residence and professor of music at Gordon College, and then for 11 years you served as professor of musical studies and performance and as a trustee at the Curtis Institute of Music. Would you describe the discernment process that led you to accept those respective appointments, and in what ways did your service at a liberal arts college differ from your service at a conservatory?
Mia Chung: Another great question. I finished my doctorate at Julliard in 1991. And really didn’t have an idea or sort of a preconceived notion of what would happen right after that because one can start, like, you know, competing and concertizing and sort of strive for the stage as a hundred percent of the pursuit, or one can also pursue an academic route alongside that.
I just didn’t know what combination of these things would emerge, but literally it was, it was providential. I think, you know, God offered me this opportunity to teach at Gordon College right out of the starting gate after finishing my doctorate. And so I knew no other option. I did have another opportunity which I turned down at a state university, but chose to go to Gordon.
And in this small liberal arts context, I think what God was doing was not just equipping me, but sort of addressing the areas of insecurity if one, if, if I will, if I use that right word or questioning or curiosity or exploration. All of those things in one, giving me an opportunity, the space, if you will, to carve out my own voice as a musician. And Gordon afforded me that in such a wonderful way. And all the, all the while affording me conversations with professors in literature and in philosophy, in biology, in the Bible department, which were so rich. Um, so it was a continuation of my beginnings, you know, in, in Harvard, sort of that liberal arts college, right. I felt like I was a kid in a candy shop, to be honest. And, my colleagues and my department chair afforded me opportunities to teach in ways that I had never imagined.
So it was initially about the piano, piano literature, piano pedagogy. But as time went on, I had the opportunity to teach music history, music theory, music analysis, opportunities I never could have anticipated. And I will say whatever I was lacking as an undergraduate at Harvard, in my understanding, it was this season as a professor ironically, that I was able to gain new insight that would shore up the foundation that I had longed for as an undergrad.
Now compare that sort of rich learning discovery to the chapter at an institution that is sort of wildly different from the liberal arts, Christian liberal arts setting, right, which is the conservatory. So going from Gordon to Curtis is like going, having the pendulum swing from one end to the other, right. Here is a super elite conservatory, was known as the most selective institution of higher learning in the country. So more selective than Harvard, Stanford, MIT you know, they, they were accepting 3% of their candidates at the time when I started in 2011 2012, sorry, and they are very narrowly pursuing a kind of musical mastery, instrumental mastery or, or vocal in the opera department, mastery that would lead to, you know, the highest, professional accomplishment right on the stage. So these were performers who were destined to become great international stars.
The discernment process, as I mentioned, for Gordon College, there was no discernment process. It just happened providentially. And the same was true for Curtis to be honest. And my husband was being recruited. He’s in biotechnology, down to the Philly area, and we went into the season of prayer and discernment as to whether this was the right move. We were moving from Boston down to Philly.
And all of a sudden this opportunity at Curtis opens up, well, that is really unusual for a teaching opportunity to certainly kind of coalesce at such a school. And so we did feel called to go and so seamlessly, you know, sort of went and started at Curtis in January 2012. Um, so I took the fall semester to situate my four kids in their schools, their respective schools.
But when I went to the conservatory, what I noticed instantly was that this breadth of learning, right, was obviously not there to the same degree nor was there as much opportunity. There was a tremendous amount of pre-professionalism that drove the culture, which, which makes sense because that’s what you’re priming students to become, these great professionals in the concert world.
Um, but I always wished that I could bring along that breadth and richness of the liberal arts tradition and, and inject that in, in the context of performance learning. Because you can’t isolate this tradition of performing classical music from the rest of history, culture, art, literature.
Now keep in mind there are liberal arts courses but you know, in the Western tradition we silo things, right? We have courses and then we have the thing that we’re training to do professionally, which is to be a concert musician. So there are some significant differences in the learning environments there. I’m not sure that you can address them structurally, but I try to do that now in my current role, teaching at Harvard in this chamber music performance seminar with the Parker Quartet.
Todd Ream: Would you then tell us a little bit now about your current role services as the executive director of the Octet Collaborative, and other efforts in which you are currently invested?
Mia Chung: Sure. So that I would say did require a lot of discernment. Um, after teaching at Gordon and Curtis, you know, what happened was in 2017 we were brought back to Boston. So my husband was recruited back to Boston, being in biotechnology. And for myself, there was sort of a big question mark, what I would do next.
In the year of 2017 and 2018, I invested a lot in discernment, prayer and discernment, trying to determine what that would be. And in the spring of 2018 I was invited by the Chesterton House, which is a Christian study center at Cornell, to give a lecture. And the lecture I gave was entitled, you know, “Music, Math, and Mortality.” And that was an exposure to the Christian study center world that I could never have anticipated. It surprised me what was possible. I didn’t even know about the Christian studies center movement, even though it had been afoot for decades by the time I was exposed to it.
But I came to realize that there was, you know, not only the riches of the liberal arts tradition, right but then, you know, you integrate into that the riches of, of Christian scholarship, of theology, philosophy, of ethics. And, um, suddenly, you have sort of three dimensional, four dimensional sort of understanding, potential understanding, right, of why the world is the way that it is. And I was blown away at a secular research institution, such opportunity could exist.
I returned to Boston and asked around, I actually called Drew Trotter who was then the director of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers. So there are various different centers across the country, and he was executive directing the consortium, and I said, what’s going on in Boston? Boston has the highest concentrations of institutions of higher learning and what study center exists there? And he said, actually, there is none right now.
And, but there are some folks who have been talking about this for a while, so you might want to meet up with them. So I did reach out to them and started a steering committee to see if, if we could launch one. And initially my hope was to, to see this at Harvard given that it was my alma mater.
But providentially, I met through the Veritas Forum, two professors from MIT in July of 2018, and they were talking about the Christian faculty community there, how they would pray together, they would meet and share their work with one another. There seemed to be kind of a collaborative spirit there, not only along academic lines, but spiritual lines.
So Ros Picard was one of the professors I met as well as Cullen Buie and both of these faculty members Ros is in affective computing and Cullen Buie is a mechanical engineer but these two faculty members among many a host of others, Ian Hutchinson, who I believe was an interviewee on your program, and many others. Ann McCance, who’s an economic historian, Troy Van Voorhis, who’s a chemist.
Another faculty member who’s a great partner of ours is Dan Hastings. Um, and for example, he will be working with us collaborating with Octet to form a class on leadership, ethics and character, which is where all of these areas of inquiry are leading, right, is in the formation of a person. It’s one thing to make intellectual decisions, but it’s another thing, of course, to shape habits and disciplines and ways of being that serve society well. And the list goes on.
Uh, but these folks have become really important partners in the work of the Octet Collaborative. So we, we kind of pursued MIT because of the sense of community and this locus, if you will, right, of spiritual, academic engagement that was already happening among the faculty members. It’s also the case that Harvard is a very decentralized university physically, right? Parts of it are in Boston, across the river in Alston, and then Cambridge. And so the question is like, how would you draw people together? It was a little bit more of a physical challenge, whereas, MIT is sort of, this campus is sort of contained, though it’s large, it is in one location.
So those considerations led us to MIT. And so we were founded in the spring of 2020, so there were two years of exploratory work. Uh, the Veritas Forum is a great partner in sort of exploring whether this would be viable. And now we are in our, our, we’re five years old and, and we have programming that’s geared towards, you know, our mission is really to promote human flourishing in collaboration with faculty, staff, and students as formed by the historic Christian faith. And our programming centers along the lines of extending and advancing intellectual hospitality to promote civil discourse, which was, you know, I think something that’s very much in need across not only the academy, but our, our country in general, the world.
The second area is promote an advance ethics in science and technology. Something that has been sort of a bygone consideration, in our technologically driven world.
And the third area is to promote awe and wonder, the qualities that enable us to not only live healthier lives, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, but also to rightsize us, right, to change paradigms of how we think the world actually works because right now we’re so siloed disciplinarily speaking, right. So awe and wonder brings the arts together with the sciences to create connections.
Todd Ream: Can you then speak now to how you’ve come to understand the academic vocation rooted in these efforts, as a piano performer, as a music educator, but then now one who spends her day interacting with nuclear physicists and mechanical engineers and helps them cultivate their understanding of the academic vocation and how faith and learning are supportive partners, integrative partners in this process. Can you speak to that evolution, how you’ve come to understand it now?
Mia Chung: You know, it’s really fun actually looking back, right, looking backwards and seeing sort of the beginnings of, of being an aspiring pianist, developing some expertise, understanding, and knowledge of, of the, so the canon, you know, that the keyboard literature presented me with. And then seeing that sort of expand out, right, almost like the big bang, starting with a very compact situation and focal point of, of learning and spreading out.
I always wondered as a young person, as a musician, how my faith would ultimately be integrated in an explicit way into this work as a musician. What I realized was the music was already priming sensibilities within myself to enable me to make those connections. So it’s not just an intrinsic, you know aptitude or way of viewing the world as a generalist. It’s that music actually cultivated that need for coherence, if that makes sense, a need for understanding that transcends the art form that I was working within.
And so, as time grew, went on, you know, I talked about becoming a music educator, wanting to explain or deepen understanding within the context of music history and theory and style. And then that sort of grew out towards adjacent disciplines, right, of learning about art and literature. I mean, I, I didn’t share earlier that, you know, I would do internships at the World Bank, or I would do this at the National Gallery of Art in the summertime as ways of expanding my understanding of how the world works.
Well, fast forward, the Christian Study Center really is a more explicit way of connecting and weaving all these areas of inquiry together, principally driven by my faith in Christ, right? The sort of the, the Gospel motivation, the Gospel narrative, the Gospel understanding that, that gives me insight into the way the world works and how people are and why we are both in these moments of challenge, but also the opportunities that the Gospel affords us in spite of what seems like insurmountable challenges. So it’s just this ever expanding engagement that crosses over disciplines.
But here’s the opportunity. What I didn’t understand at the time, even though I, when I was seven, nine, I thought saw myself on international stages playing the piano, right? I could never have imagined how much enjoyment, how much joy and transcendence would be experienced, not just by playing great pieces of music, but by engaging these larger conversations.
And this goes in parallel with our changing cultural moment. I was educated at Harvard College at the height of secularism in the eighties, right. And now already how quickly the tide has changed. We’ve turned a corner. We find ourselves in this post secular moment. And now, reason and truth, scientific materialism, naturalistic reductionism, these sorts of things are being challenged, right, by emotions, tribal affinity, you know, the discourse on social media, the desire to sort of elevate this idea of individualism, expressive individuals.
You know, you can call it whatever you want to, right, but emotions how one feels within. How do you make coherent sense out of all of this chaos, right? And so it almost feels like faculties are being pitted against one another. In other words, when I say faculties in heart, soul, mind, and strength. And the cool thing about Octet, you know, our driving Bible verses are from Mark 12:30 and 31, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength,” right, which hearkens back to the Shema, Deuteronomy 6, and then also love neighbor as you love yourself. So it’s this integration of the four that I find so beautifully modeled and exemplified in music.
Now, to bring it back full circle, music is a metaphor for that level of integration that I think the world is longing for right now, even as these faculties are pitted against each other, right. And we just wonder is there any truth? Is there anything beautiful anymore? Is there any good? And we’re reminded that the Gospel message of something so dehumanizing as a crucifixion could be elevated because of God’s redemption of humanity through Christ to something so beautiful. So the coming together of truth, goodness, and beauty, there has been no moment where this is in greater need than now.
I think I wanted, maybe if I could sum this up, there is a quote by the Swiss Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, who is a 20th century theologian, that hounds me and motivates me. And I should say, on a side note, that he was an aspiring concert pianist when he was young. And in his late teens decided that he would instead of pursuing the concert stage, he studied with a protege of Clara Schumann, Clara Schumann being Robert Schumann’s wife, so really comes from a very august line of, of musical tutelage, decided to become a theologian instead.
But he writes this in the glory of the Lord, which is one of his magnum opus, “Beauty is the Word, which shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing, which the thinking intellect dares to approach since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness, no longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask and its absence exposes features on that face, which threatened to become in incomprehensible to man. We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order, the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters, truth and goodness, without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name is, if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past, whether he admits it or not, can no longer pray, and soon, will no longer be able to love.”
And what I think this sums up to come full circle is ultimately as Christians, leaving out beauty, which is such a central facet of music and music making, the beauty of playing a piece, the beauty of understanding it more deeply, the beauty of communicating with an audience and moving them towards transcendence toward the sublime, away from the routinized, mechanical, mundane realities of day-to-day life, that beauty can never be separated from truth and goodness.
And it is my hope that as Christian scholars, as those who follow Christ, whether in the academy or not, that we can understand beauty as being an essential and core aspect of this, this sort of threesome, if you will, this Trinity, if there’s sort of an analogous, you know, relationship to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that these things are integrally tied and connected. And so it’s my hope that we can reclaim that as the Church to restore beauty to its rightful place.
Todd Ream: For our last question then for our conversation today, you just mentioned the Church and it’s been implicit in many ways through our conversation here, but this pursuit, this need for coherence that the academic vocation ultimately was established to pursue, got lost along the way, and we live in a moment now where perhaps forces are coming together that will allow for this need to be reestablished and for us to make.
In what ways can the academic vocation then, as cultivated, for example, through efforts such as the Octet Collaborative and the Church be partners in this pursuit? How do we forge tighter relationships between the two?
Mia Chung: Oh, that, that’s also a really wonderful question. I think there’s no simple answer to this. I think we need to drive for cultural change together, the academy and the Church can, can sort of link arms, if you will, in this effort, right? And what is this effort? It’s really the effort to prime the imagination because beauty is accessed through the imagination, right? And in the same ways that we have cultivated the pursuit of goodness through faith or the pursuit of truth, the reason, we need to prime the organ of the imagination and to allow emotions, you know, deeply human emotions to come to the fore.
I think there has been somewhat of a, of stripping away of those dimensions of human experience, right, from, from our experience within the Church. Well, some would say, oh, now sometimes some, some areas, right, or forms of worship might prioritize the opposite, right. We all always calibrating differently depending on our nature. But what I would say is the three must come together. And if we could examine this and have conversations together of how it might be, that’s a great starting point. How can we reclaim the imagination and beauty, which was once an essential part of the Church’s undertaking, right? It was the center of artistic creativity and, and communication.
I would perhaps add this, that right now, one of the things that Octet does is we reach out to theologians at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, and we are trying to form a community through the regular practice every six months of having a retreat together. So it’s like a half day retreat. And we talk about faith, theology in relationship to technology, particularly, you know, artificial intelligence, social media, right. And we talk about the theological sort of resonances or, or identifications or observations, right, that are at hand as we see both the deformation of our society, but also the opportunity for reformation, right.
And we always inject and present art and music in the midst of this, as we do this for all of our programming. And it’s, and it’s my hope that perhaps this can become an MO, right, a, a practice, a way of operating that becomes so second nature for the Church that the arts and literature and philosophy and ethics can be incorporated into church conversations. But it first begins with the formation of community, which is why we bring these two sets of faculty together to be friends. That is where so much richness is possible.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been Mia Chung, the Executive Director of the Octet Collaborative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Mia Chung: Thank you, Todd. It’s been a great pleasure.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
