Note: A NEW, REAL photo of David that he gave me, FINALLY!! An event unto itself - the genius, and my associate on many MP3 projects, for us all to see! I'm so proud, I'm speechless, and for me, that's a miracle!
The CMR Spotlight
Dr. David S. Siu
Note: A NEW, REAL photo of David that he gave me, FINALLY!! An event unto itself - the genius, and my associate on many MP3 projects, for us all to see! I'm so proud, I'm speechless, and for me, that's a miracle!
David Siu, M.D. was born on October 21, 1974 in Hong Kong. He began learning to play the piano around 2nd grade, but became quickly discouraged after his piano teacher made him practice the same piece for 3 months. David feels this early experience sensitized him to any type of music played over and over again ("not only pop, but good old classical warhorses like Beethoven and Brahms.") He also studied the violin for 2 years. Around 6th and 7th grade he began learning music theory (harmony and basic counterpoint), and that allowed him to progress quickly to learning new pieces, and sight-reading anything he could get his hands on ("I shudder to think of how I mangled Franck's Violin Sonata piano part in those days.") He claims he was then motivated purely by the cerebral content of the music, and that technique didn't interest him at all.
David's family emigrated to the United States during the seventh grade, settling in Cleveland. David studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music Preparatory Department under Olga Radosaljevich ("she totally destroyed whatever 'technique' I had 'learned' and rebuilt it with Hanon, Haydn sonatas, Mendelssohn Songs without Words, and (ugh!) the Czerny School of Velocity. That was a good thing for me, in retrospect, and I look back on my struggling under her yoke as necessary to furthering my musical background.") In high school he also played viola in a student orchestra, which greatly helped contribute to his current knowledge of instrumentation.
He attended Harvard College from 1992-1995, obtaining a degree in Biochemical Sciences. At Harvard he found several outlets to continue participating in music-making, including playing keyboards in student productions of The Fantasticks and A Little Night Music. In the latter production he played a synthesizer to recreate the sounds of unavailable instruments, such as the celesta, glockenspiel, bells or harp. He believes this is when his interest in MIDI began. He also sang in the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus and participated in two Lowell House Opera presentations (Rossini's The Italian Girl in Algiers and Verdi's La Traviata), and he believes these experiences initiated his current interest in choral music.
The future Dr. Siu is now enrolled in Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine as a 3rd year student. Armed with a new Powerbook 280, as well as having a lot of free time at Case during the first 2 years ("probably too much!"), was all the motivation David needed to begin exploring the World Wide Web, and sequencing MIDI files. "I've always loved to follow scores along with the CD playing, and I started to sequence pieces that I would have conducted in my previous lives. Of course, during my early sequencing days I had only the puny Quicktime software and the Powerbook's sound output, so I made lots of mistakes while clicking the notes into Finale. That all changed during the summer of 1996 when I bought a desktop Performa and a cheap synthesizer (Yamaha PSR-320), and when I found out about MidiGraphy, which allowed me to make much more musical gestures and details that I was able to do with Finale."
David's prolific output so far includes orchestral, vocal, chamber and keyboard music by JS Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Verdi, Wagner, Bruckner, Brahms, Tchaikowsky, Dvorak, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Chabrier, Faure, Janacek, Debussy, Dukas, Nielsen, Satie, Vaughan Williams, Rachmaninoff, Holst, Ravel, Bartok, Stravinsky, Ibert, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Poulenc, Shostakovich, Barber and Britten. His primary interest lies in late Romantic, Impressionistic and early 20th Century works. Now involved in the demanding clinical clerkship phase of his medical training, David has limited his MIDI activities to the weekends. He is currently working on the Roman Carnival Overture by Hector Berlioz.