Meet Stephanie Ho

We were lucky to catch up with Stephanie Ho recently and have shared our conversation below.

Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us and offering your lessons and wisdom for our readers. One of the things we most admire about you is your generosity and so we’d love if you could talk to us about where you think your generosity comes from.
Generosity is a form of empowerment. When we perform music, plan programs and create concert events we think: 1. How can we give back to our community? 2. How can we be of service to our community? When we prepare with these two questions in mind, we feel strengthened and focused on our project. It becomes less about how we practice and rehearse a composition to perfection and more about how our practicing and preparation serves our audience and community. We prepare more effectively, without letting personal ambitions and expectations get in the way.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
The most exciting part of DUO Stephanie & Saar, to me, is that we are unafraid to program whatever we want on stage- whether it is Bach transcriptions on four hands, orchestral transcriptions of Stravinsky on two pianos with percussion, jazz paraphrase of Dizzy Gillespie, the complete two piano music of Meredith Monk along with readings of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, etc. If it is a great project to us, we will try and program it. People tell us all the time that in order to get more successful and move up to the next level of our career, we need to brand more, we need more focus in our programming and need to become “specialists” at something to get more recognition. Sure, I think it’s a great idea. But life is too short, and there is way too much fantastic music out there to perform for me to become a specialist in one particular composer/genre. So it’s our job to make our programming and presentation appealing and fun, but not limiting. This is a challenge, and very exciting!

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The 3 most important skills that I advise musicians to develop in the beginning stages of their career are: 1. People skills are a must, 2. Artists must stay open-minded and approach novel ways of thinking and 3. Develop all skills that come your way, whether it is in your field or not.

1. People skills: The only skill you cannot read in a book and perfect through class/seminars. Only by interacting with people, collaborating on projects and sharing ideas can we develop the necessary skills to strengthen our community.
2. Open-mindedness: Never close your mind to a Eureka moment. Open-mindedness induces unexpected Eureka moments. You never know when they will come!
3. Develop all skills: I’m always amazed how often I have to tap my foreign language skills (fluent in Mandarin Chinese, functional in French) while touring. Saar has had to speak to the audience either in Spanish, Hebrew or German more than several times. Every audience loves an intro in their native tongue. Being a great photographer is such a plus; I wish I took photography classes. Not every concert venue provides professional photography; pictures, however, still speak a thousand words!

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
Saar and I have done 6 complete cross-country drives (!!!), one of our eastbound trips we listened to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman is an Israeli-American sociologist, and he won the Nobel Prize in Economics for this book. This book is the most influential book I have ever read. The book is about the numerous experiments he conducted to understand and analyze how we think, how incredibly agile and lazy our minds are at the same time and many of the thinking pitfalls that we stumble into. Every time I stand in line and am frustrated — or rehearsing into the 5th hour — I think of Kahneman’s concept of Ego Depletion. Understanding how we think is how we will fight the battle of our own inner demons.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Gijón International Piano Festival, Lewis & Clark College

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