Full-time software engineer with astounding piano skills!

by Scott

I recently discovered the YouTube channel of Eric Liang and was deeply impressed by his commitment to piano music, even after receiving a Computer Science degree from Waterloo and now working full-time as a software engineer.

As a collaborative pianist, I get to hear and work with many talented young piano students needing concerto accompaniment. Although I never worked with Eric when he was a student in the 2010s, I heard him play back then, and knew his talent and skill levels were extremely high.

I lost track of Eric ever since he left Vancouver for University, and thought he might have given up piano. It was just in the last few months that I discovered that he in fact kept up piano and went off in a direction that most pianists, even professional, shy away from! He now plays only the most complex and difficult (and obscure) repertoire, and learns these pieces in unbelievably short amounts of time (in his videos, he logs how many hours each piece took to learn). In particular, Eric has been learning the music of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988), who has a cult status among modern composers as being one who pushes piano music to unimaginable extremes, with certain pieces taking several hours to perform, and taking up several hundred pages of music!

In his latest video, Eric is wearing one of our “Composers and their Works” shirts, of this particular composer. Although Sorabji’s music is difficult to understand on the first few listens, you can definitely grasp its difficulty and complexity right away!