Pianist Sean Terada Yang made his concerto debut with the Germantown Symphony Orchestra in Tennessee at the age of 16. In the past two years, he has won top prizes at multiple international competitions, including the National Federation of Music Clubs, Seattle, and Memphis International, and the Beardsley Piano Competition. Yang was also a recent finalist in the 2026 Young Texas Artists Music Competition. Now he can add Performance Today Young Artist-in-Residence to his growing list of accomplishments.
Interestingly, Yang did not initially set out to pursue music professionally. While growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, he played on his high school band’s drumline and was fascinated with science. When he went to college at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, Yang double-majored in piano and neuroscience; he had his sights set on going to medical school to become a doctor. Over time, he discovered more and more connections between the worlds of music and medicine and began participating in research projects combining these two interests. One project sought to examine the way human bodies move by observing pianists of different levels to give insight into why some players perform better or more consistently and differently than others; Yang served as a liaison between the pianists and the researchers.
Another project he is especially proud to have participated in was called Therapeutic Systems. It was a pilot program that brought personalized, live music to patients in the intensive care unit (ICU). Yang would literally roll an upright piano into a patient’s room and play for them beside. The study looked at the potential for music to improve patients' quality of life. It measured how patients would respond to music, specifically their heart rate responses, among others. He was involved in this program for three years, and he says the experience cultivated in him a strong desire to bypass the idea of “meeting audiences halfway” and instead take a more direct approach to bring music to their (the audiences') doorsteps. Yang told us that he believes that, like medicine, music can be healing; it can make us feel better and experience life better.
Yang holds two Master’s degrees from the University of Michigan in Piano Performance and Chamber Music and is now pursuing a Doctor of Music Arts degree at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music under the tutelage of Jon Kimura Parker.
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