(upbeat piano music) - I started taking piano lessons at age five.

I was taught by my mom pretty early on, she had to pass me off to another teacher.

So at age seven, I started taking piano lessons at MacPhail Center for Music with Timothy De Prey.

(upbeat piano music) My initial condition was, I'll take lessons with you, but I don't ever want to perform.

And he was very much like, "Okay, but we're probably gonna have you perform."

So he put me in a couple of recitals and I realized maybe this performance thing is not as bad as I expected.

The first recital I can remember performing in, I played, "Puff the Magic Dragon" and added a couple of improvisations of which I was very proud.

And after that recital, I looked at mom and I was like, "I wanna do this again."

(gentle music) I've been a tea drinker as long as I can remember.

My family is very connected to the United Kingdom and there is such a tea culture over there.

My favorite kind of tea, let's see, I'll grab the packet.

It's so good.

Wait, is that the one that you grabbed, Congest Away?

Yeah, it's so good.

My favorite kind of tea has fennel, peppermint, ginger, and licorice, and it is called Congest Away.

(upbeat piano music) I have synesthesia, which means that I experience things with more than one sense at a time.

So most notably, when I'm listening to music or playing music, I also visualize colors and shapes and textures almost as if I'm seeing the music itself.

So music is a form of communication to begin with, but it's even more than that for me because I'm not just communicating in terms of like, in terms of what you can hear, I'm also feeling and seeing and tasting and smelling everything that I'm putting out there and everything that I'm listening to as well.

(upbeat piano music) Tim put me in Crescendo, which is a sort of graduated leveling program at MacPhail, where as you learn more and more complicated songs, you rise through the ranks, perform at galas and recitals and stuff.

So I graduated from Crescendo a couple years ago and one of the people who attended the recital was Seymour Bernstein, who is a well-known pianist from whom I've had some masterclasses and stuff before.

After that recital and after the feedback I received and after the thrill of doing a solo performance, I was like, I kind of wanna do this full time, maybe pursue music education, maybe pursue music professionally.

So I started devoting more and more of my time to piano and to theater and just getting myself on stage and doing music as much as I possibly could.

♪ I'm singing in the rain ♪ Just singing in the rain ♪ What a glorious feeling I'm happy I guess ♪ My favorite part of performance is going on stage and performing and seeing other people smile or cry or laugh or whatever else they might feel during a performance.

And knowing that I made them feel something, that I touched their hearts.

(upbeat band music) (audience cheers and applauds) I love playing modern jazz and rag.

It's so vibrant, there's so much going on.

There's a lot of harmonic dissonance, which just, I eat that up.

I also really love playing pop songs because then I can play and I can sing, which is, two forms of music in one, which is just, it's twice the fun.

And this is Lament of Orpheus by Darren Korb from the video game, "Hades."

- [Interviewer] My favorite video game, by the way.

- Let's go!

(upbeat piano music) ♪ Hear, oh gods, my desperate plea ♪ ♪ To see my love beside me I am a spectrum child as we like to put it.

And I often struggle with overstimulation and mood swings and antisocial tendencies, sometimes not being great with people.

Music has been really therapeutic for that.

So when I feel overstimulated or when I experience a mood swing, I can go to the piano, I can start humming, I can elicit emotional responses from myself to help work through whatever I'm dealing with, it's like a self-regulatory system for me.

♪ Don't, don't look back ♪ Close enough that light we can see ♪ ♪ My doubt betrays the better of me ♪ ♪ Glance to the stern is all it would be ♪ ♪ That anguished shade shall haunt me ♪ ♪ Ever on ♪ Calm seas ♪ Winds alee ♪ But now the squall's upon us ♪ We're floundering ♪ Drowning ♪ Don't look back ♪ Don't look back ♪ Don't look back I have quite a large family and we are all quite rowdy.

Five siblings, lot of pets.

While we may fight, while we may have arguments sometimes, we're also, I mean, we're family, we're as tight as can be.

(upbeat music) I have been homeschooled my entire life and so have most of my siblings.

So not only are we living together and interacting with each other when we're at home, we're also learning together and being together when we're doing school and stuff.

So we're constantly interacting with each other.

Our mindset started out like, we might as well, we might as well just get through this, we might as well be friends just to make this easier.

And now it's like, I can't live without you guys.

It's the, okay.

As a musician and as a performer, I just wanna be performing music for the rest of my life.

I wanna be on stage making people happy, making people sad, making people excited.

I just wanna communicate beauty to people.

(upbeat piano music)