Neither of Aliya Alsafa’s parents played an instrument. But they did have a keyboard in their living room. “It was like decoration,” Alsafa, ’26, says. “No one ever touched it.” Alsafa, though, was fascinated with its sounds from a young age. In response, her mom signed her up for piano lessons at age 3. Apt and eager from the start, Alsafa was soon taking classes at the Music Institute of Chicago, two hours from her home in Joliet, Ill. By her teen years, her family had moved to New York City so she could attend the precollege program at Juilliard. Her playing would take her to stages around the world, earn her elite distinctions such as inclusion in the Lang Lang Young Scholars Program, and necessitate practicing up to 10 hours a day.
Then came “the biggest fork in the road I think I’ve encountered in my life,” she says. Should she attend a conservatory and attempt to be a concert pianist, or turn in a new direction? “I needed to take a chance to broaden my horizons,” she says. “I came into Stanford thinking I really wouldn’t do music anymore. Maybe I’ll just keep it on the side and play for friends.”
It wouldn’t turn out that way exactly. Alsafa majored in computer science, an interest that started from watching her dad code. (Next year, she’ll remain on campus to earn a master’s in CS with a specialty in AI.) She also co-captained the K-pop dance team, XTRM. But piano remained central to her life. Alsafa co-founded the Stanford Keyboard Studies Committee and the Stanford Piano Society for, respectively, students and fans of the piano. She joined AI research efforts to model the stresses that piano puts on hands—particularly smaller hands like her own. And she continued to play. In April, Alsafa—a music minor—won the music department’s Blew-Culley-LaFollette Prize for piano performance. “None of it is pressured or expected,” she says. “That’s probably the healthiest relationship with music that I’ve ever had.”
“Being passionate about something like piano helps you find the beauty in other fields, even if it’s not related.”
“I always say a prayer before I go on stage, and that’s very grounding for me. Every time I perform feels more like a gift and an opportunity than something scary, or life or death.
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“Feeling the energy in the room, feeling other people’s energy, too, really helps me bring out different colors and different emotions in the piece.
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“The first thing that I fell in love with Stanford-wise was computer science. I just loved systems and cybersecurity. It’s so interesting to think that there are people trying to dismantle all these things that you’ve worked for, and you have to outsmart them.
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“Because I am putting myself into many things, like CS and music and dance, there’s less pressure in any one area.
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“When I listen to classical music, it feels like work because I can’t help but analyze it.
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“I listen to pop music, to hip-hop, rap, and funk. I love Coldplay. Their music is very interesting and hits a sweet spot in between catchy pop and very thoughtful composition.
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“I’m in a girl band called Girlband. We do covers. It is easy to play these songs, because it’s, like, four chords and the same rhythm. It’s really what you make of it, though. You can have so much variation in texture and dynamics and slight differences between choruses if you want a different effect. It makes you think about music as more of a fluid thing.”
Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford. Email him at sscott3@stanford.edu.
