
My first formal lesson was at age 15 on piano, and I just loved it so much.

I started composing before I took formal lessons, and I began relatively late in life. Robert Yamasato: I, like Joshua, was pretty much self-taught.

The two of them share an unusual musical background. Narration: Since Joshua started at Berkeley in 2020, he has taken several classes with Robert Yamasato, a lecturer in music theory and musicianship. He has taught Joshua in four classes: composition, counterpoint, harmony and musicianship. (Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small) Robert Yamasato (left) is a lecturer in the Department of Music at Berkeley. I was like, “Oh, my God, there are so many.” I was like, “Oh, there’s a Yamaha in this one. The first day when I got my card and got access to these practice rooms, I felt like a kid in a candy shop. Joshua Kyan Aalampour: The whole concept of a practice room is so new to me. He’s playing a Steinway baby grand - a piano he loves. Narration: We’re in a practice room in Morrison Hall on campus. It’s very like, I don’t know what’s going to happen. … The right hand just, like, does whatever it wants. Like, when the left hand is doing something like this … Joshua Kyan Aalampour: I like improvising waltzes a lot of times. (Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)Īnne Brice: What do you like to play the most? What do you just automatically sit down and play when you’re not thinking about anything, you’re just going? “Composing is such a wonderful way to express emotion in ways that are not achievable with the spoken language,” says Joshua. All while taking at least 26 credits each semester so that he can graduate this May - two years early. He performs a new piece for TikTok every day. He teaches music to students around the world. He has performed his work at Lincoln Center, written a symphony and composed a score for a feature-length film. Narration: Four years later, at age 20, Joshua is a second-year music student at UC Berkeley. Joshua Kyan Aalampour: I would just play it for hours on end, and I’d forget that I’m in Jinan, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m in, like, 18th century Paris or something,” as corny as that sounds. Narration: After two weeks, Joshua composed his first piece, a three-minute bagatelle called “Reverie.” There are these videos on YouTube called Synthesia videos, or MIDI videos, where it shows this keyboard, and it has these little lasers going down so you see how a piece of music is played, instead of reading traditional music notation.

Joshua Kyan Aalampour: So, I set aside an average of about six hours a day. Joshua was home-schooled, so he had a lot of time during the day to practice. Narration: So, he went home, pulled out a little 61-key keyboard that his father had bought for $16, and set out to learn to play on his own.
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Joshua Kyan Aalampour: She brought up this point that I didn’t know how to read sheet music and was saying a bunch of things like, “You’ll never be able to do this and that.” So, I was like, “You know what? I’m going to try and learn the piano without learning sheet music,” which I thought was the best revenge idea ever at the time. When it was his turn, he walked up, sat down and the teacher asked him to sight-read a piece of music. But his parents really wanted him to, so he went to make them happy. Narration: Joshua didn’t even want to learn piano. (Photo courtesy of Joshua Kyan Aalampour) In 2011, when he was 10, his parents moved him and his two younger brothers to Jinan, China, to open an Italian restaurant. Joshua spent his early childhood in New Jersey.
