Music lovers have surely already seen the young man with dark hair playing the piano at events at the Forum. Gojus Kanes, a boarding student at Steinmühle, loves this instrument—and it shows. Last school year, he took on the challenges of the “Jugend musiziert” competition, first at the regional level, then statewide. He placed third—and anyone familiar with the competition knows that’s no small feat.

 

Three hours of practice a day

Gojus has been at Steinmühle for a good year now. He has made the Steinmühle boarding school in Marburg, Central Hesse, his home and is happy about it: “I like it here.” In public, he tends to keep a low profile and defines himself through his piano playing. He has devoted three hours a day to this art since he was 13.

 

Piano Performance and Presentation at the Competition

At the Steinmühle concerts, a variety of works are performed. One composer he personally admires is Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis from Lithuania. “He’s considered the national composer there,” Gojus explains, describing how he traveled to that country himself, following in Ciurlionis’s footsteps to transcribe his piano music—a task that wasn’t all that easy. Gojus Kanes also dedicated his presentation to Ciurlionis at the “Jugend musiziert” state competition in Schlitz, which required not only a musical performance at the piano but also a verbal presentation before the four-member jury. The student presented his knowledge of the composer on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth, which was all the more interesting given that Ciurlionis left behind not only passionate musical works for posterity but also paintings—from the early days of abstract art—through his concurrent career as a painter.

 

Significant research effort

“You can find practically no works by this artist online,” Gojus had noticed during his research. Untitled pieces, cataloged late, and suppressed in terms of distribution—these were the reasons for the great effort the boarding school student had to expend to obtain information and to be able to dedicate his piano performance and lecture to the Lithuanian national composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis.

 

Possible career goal: Something related to music

This makes his outstanding placement in the “Jugend musiziert” competition all the more wonderful and well-deserved. Charlotte Schmidt-Schön from the Marburg Music School had encouraged him to participate; “I’d never done anything like that before,” he says. It remains to be seen whether Gojus will enter other competitions, and his career goals are also still up in the air. He knows that making a living through music is rather difficult. But he doesn’t completely rule out the possibility that the piano could play a role in that.

Angela Heinemann