Yung has won top prizes at the Puigcerdà International Music Festival in Spain and the Bradshaw and Buono International Piano Competition in New York City. He has also performed in concerts in Philadelphia, Seattle, Spain and France.
“I had a chat with my department chair, professor Herendeen, about this opportunity during the College of Liberal Arts student awards ceremony,” Yung said. “He is always interested about students’ accomplishments in his department, and he asked me what my plans were after graduating in 2012. As I recall, I promised him that I would do excellent things, and I like to keep my promises.”
Yung is interested in engaging the world not only as a musician but also as a writer, editor and scholar. He is a nonfiction co-editor for Nomadic Voices Magazine and was the director of public relations for Glass Mountain, the undergraduate literary magazine at UH.
“You know, you start life by developing a list of things that you do. There’s this expectation that eventually that list of things becomes one thing, but that is just too silly,” Yung said. “We really need to have people who can engage the world contrapuntally—in many different ways at many different points in time.”
He believes that his experience, skills and interests have helped him achieve the greatest goals.
“It is an unfortunate thing that people nowadays believe in the fiction of the prodigy or the natural. It is an easy story to believe, but it is not true,” Yung said. “No one ever sees the thousands of hours that gets put in. They never see how early you get up or how late you go to sleep just to get things done. At the forty-eighth hour, when everyone else is tired, cranky and demoralized, you have got to be good as new and glad to be so.”
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