Jiaxi Liu
“When I auditioned for the Louisville Youth Orchestra, my mother could not afford private lessons so she took a second job solely to provide for my musical instruction. This commitment to making music (and education, in general) possible, no matter the constraints on time and finances, continues to motivate me.”
- Program: 2009 Graduate Scholarship Recipient
- Hometown: Louisville, Kentucky
- Four-year College or University: Northwestern University
- Graduate School: Peabody Conservatory
- Academic/Career Pursuits: Arts / Music / Performance, Education / Academia, Sciences
- Other Interests: Film / Photography, Foreign Languages / International Study, Languages, Liberal Arts, Performing Arts / Theatre, Tutoring / Mentoring, Volunteer Work, Gastronomy
Biography
PROFILE: If ever there was a Scholar who embodied Jack Kent Cooke’s vision of a well-rounded person, capable of overcoming challenging conditions, it would be Jiaxi Liu (her first name means “jewel” and “hope”). Like Mr. Cooke, Jiaxi never took the easy way out. The harder the task and the bigger the challenge, the more this young piano virtuoso will bear down to get the job done. For example, she enrolled in Northwestern University's five year dual degree program, where she completed an interdisciplinary honors thesis in Linguistics and Piano Performance on the topic of comparing music with linguistic meaning. Following graduation from Northwestern in 2009, she is now pursuing an in depth graduate-level study of music performance and theory at Peabody. In her years in Evanston, she didn’t waste a moment as she served as a teaching assistant in the university’s Linguistics Department, and was a research assistant for an experiment on sleep deprivation.
ASPIRATION: Jiaxi’s musical and linguistics background will be intertwined in her future work. At the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore she’ll be furthering her understanding of “music performance and cognition.” Her ultimate goal may be to prove the correctness of the old adage: “Music is the universal language.”
MAKING A DIFFERENCE: In talking about an accomplishment that has made her proud, and made a difference, Jiaxi points to her honors thesis, “Comparing the perception of meaningful discourse structure in music and language” which took years to conceive, develop, and execute. With the support of her advisors, she submitted it to an international conference, the European Society of Philosophy and Psychology. “I never would have dreamed for it to be accepted, and as a paper! Now, I gladly look forward to my debut at presenting my work to a scholarly audience and hope to gain much from their questions, comments, and discussions.”
ACCOLADES: In addition to being selected to present her honors thesis in August of 2009 to the European Conference, Jiaxi also was awarded a Summer Language Grant from Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
INTERESTING FACT: For her high school senior English final, Jiaxi “swaggered” into the classroom in Louisville in her grandfather’s washed out jeans. To the beat of her partner’s trash-can drum, she rapped about pitiful yet pathetic Tess from Tess of the D’Urbervilles and how the lives of women have changed since her time. “My teacher and classmates were completely stunned to see the usually neatly-dressed me in baggy clothes, chains, and shades, nodding my head to the beat as I transformed to a speaker of African-American vernacular English.”
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Richard Shin
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