The other passion
Some musical geniuses have geeky secrets.
I may not have understood that if I hadn’t met Jose Feghali. (Read his profile I wrote)
Feghali, winner of the 1985 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, played last month at Bass Hall. His fingers don’t only promenade the keys of the piano like a runner on the track. His passion extends beyond music. He has a secret romance with something else – technology.
“I’m a geek,” confesses the pianist who has graced more than 800 venues worldwide with his performances.
The pianist, who is also a professor at Texas Christian University, locked himself in a room for an entire weekend to prove a programmer wrong about his own software. This programmer had told Feghali that the software probably was not capable of working with uncompressed audio, which produces the best possible sound quality. But Feghali played with the software’s code, which is open for anyone to modify, and he figured out that changing the buffering from 1,000 bytes to 5,000 bytes per second would result in a better sound output.
Voila! It worked.
This is merely one example that artists are creative people who can just create about anything.
Creativity is using your imagination and thoughts to explore the unexplored and bring into existence that no one has ever created. It doesn’t have to be in your field of expertise. Life is all about getting out of your comfort zone, experimenting, exploring. Frustration haunts people when they don’t realize their goals, but there is joy in awe-inspiring accomplishments. It takes determination.
Feghali didn’t only spend nights and days working on his piano skills, but also lived the life of an owl just to see his technological innovations work.
“Once something doesn’t make sense to me, it drives me nuts,” the curious professor said. “It keeps me awake all night.”
And, if you ask what he has done, here is the list: As a kid, the Brazilian native opened up televisions and other electronic appliances to figure out how they worked. As a teenage student in London, he assembled his first home computer, a Sinclair ZX81. He then helped the Cliburn Foundation, which runs the Cliburn International Piano competition and advocates classical music, to convert tapes from their archives to digital CDs. And now he is engaged with Internet2 technology, which is an advanced network application and technology used for education and high-speed data transfer. He has used the Internet2 and Conference XP to conduct classes between TCU and Cleveland Institute of Music and London’s Royal Academy of Music.
Remember the line from the Beatles’ song: “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.” Feghali proves it. And if we look around us, we might find many people who have dedicated their lives for a purpose, but at the same time they have other passions that direct their lives.
You want me to name another?
J. Mack Slaughter Jr. (Read his story here) : He had a career in a boy band, and a TV and movie career in Hollywood. But the Fort Worth native is studying to become a doctor. He has established a nonprofit organization to integrate his first passion, music, and his medical profession.
Feghali and Slaughter are the few people who have made me realize that you, me and all of us have that secret passion that we need to discover. It could completely be off-track from our profession but could complement that. Feghali is using his love for technology to teach. Slaughter is using his music to help patients relieve stress.
It makes me think: Is journalism my sole purpose in life? I’m putting my thinking hat on.
This was originally published in The Dallas Morning News.
