“The goal would be to be as diverse as I can,” says Yuen, who in the spring played with symphonies in North Carolina and Georgia. “I’m hoping to be a scholar, and I also like to perform. The end goal is to be a professor.”
He currently is a teaching assistant in both trumpet and music theory, working with music minors and majors. Dr. Jason Dovel, associate professor in the School of Music UK, works closely with Yuen, and notes that he is “very meticulous and caring about the students.”
Yuen discovered the trumpet at age 5. Growing up in Hong Kong, musical training was rigorous and focused more on the technical side. For the longest time, he just wanted to play trumpet in orchestras. He came to the U.S. and earned a Bachelor of Music degree and Master of Music degree in trumpet performance at Eastman School of Music. In between the bachelor’s and master’s degree programs he spent a year in a brass instrument workshop as an instrument repairman, a field that continues to intrigue him.
When he arrived at UK and began taking music theory courses, his goals expanded.
“Once I actually got into the doctoral coursework and got to work with the theory faculty here at UK, it really helped me to transform myself into thinking that teaching students and teaching them well is going to really equip them to be able to do whatever they want to do,” says Yuen.
Yuen now has three years of experience teaching theory classes. “That gave me a lot more motivation to actually pursue the [second doctoral] degree,” he says. “The teaching part of music theory gives me a lot of incentive to keep going.”
