From Hong Kong to accounting to teaching piano, UNM music student Loraine Ho has come a long way.
On Sunday, Ho will be performing her senior recital on the piano at Keller Hall. Ho will play an assortment of songs, including music by UNM professor Falko Steinbach, Claude Debussy, Franz Schubert and Frédéric Chopin, ending with a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach.
“Because I am majoring in music education, I wanted to choose the pieces to show different types of music in different periods, kind of like giving a short education to the public,” Ho said.
Ho said her goals after graduating are to teach music to school children. She said she wants to teach because she feels that middle school and elementary-aged children have a lot of potential to grow and become better people through learning music.
“Not only in music, but in practicing social value, core value to become a better person, to be focused, concentrating,” Ho said. “(Learning music) helps to be thoughtful in making decisions in their lives, in academics, and to be responsible to their practice and to themselves.”
Ho hails from Hong Kong, China. She said she started playing the piano when she was 7 years old. By the time she was a teenager, she had to decide whether or not to study music in college. She said she decided to study accounting at Iowa State University because it would help pay the bills more than music would.
Studying accounting was not the end for Ho, though. After graduating with her bachelor’s degree, she began to give children piano lessons.
“I wanted to do something different that’s more meaningful to life,” Ho said. “I don’t feel meaningful at all in accounting — I don’t feel they need me at all. I could be replaceable because I’d just be there and sit in front of a computer punching numbers eight hours every day.”
Later, she married her husband and consequently gained U.S. citizenship.
“That changed my thoughts about my career,” Ho said. “I could choose — do I really want to do accounting? Or, I could change to another career by teaching music to young students?”
Ho said her husband got a job in Santa Fe after 10 years in Iowa. That’s when she started studying for her bachelor’s degree in music education at UNM. She said the main instrument she focuses on is the piano, but her secondary instrument is the voice.
Ho said she has been student teaching this semester because it is her last semester as an undergraduate. By the end of the semester, she will have shadowed at least two music school teachers.
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She still teaches a couple of students piano in addition to her student teaching work and studies.
As for herself, Ho said she practices around four hours a day in little chunks — or at least she tries to. Sometimes, when she cannot fit four hours into a day, she said she works to make up the lost time during the weekend.
Her recital is free to attend and will be held at Keller Hall on Sunday at 4 p.m.
Ariel Lutnesky is a freelance reporter for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
