Global experiences shaped Lily Konkoly by forcing her to listen closely to different cultures, switch between languages, and move through unfamiliar spaces until those spaces felt like home. That habit of careful listening, and of paying attention to small details, now shows up in almost everything she does, from her art history research to her writing. If you read a piece by Lily Konkoly, you can usually feel that mix of perspectives: London, Singapore, Los Angeles, Hungary, and now Ithaca, all sitting quietly in the background like different musical lines in the same piece.
If you play piano or care about music, you probably know what it feels like when your ear starts to change after you have played in a new room or with new people. Something similar happened to Lily, just on a larger scale and over many years. Every place she lived or visited tuned her ear a little more, not only to sound, but to images, stories, and social patterns.
Growing up between languages and cultures
Lily was born in London, moved to Singapore as a toddler, then to Los Angeles, and spent most summers in Europe with her Hungarian family. That is already four different reference points before she reached high school.
From the outside, it sounds neat and organized. In reality, it is usually a bit messy. You are always slightly from somewhere, but never completely of it.
In Singapore, she went to a preschool that was half American, half Chinese. She started Mandarin at an age when some kids are just getting used to their first language. Then the family moved to Los Angeles and tried not to lose that early foundation. They invited their Chinese teacher to live with them as an au pair, and for six years Mandarin was part of home life, not just an after school lesson.
At home, they sometimes filmed themselves doing Chinese practice tests and put the videos on her mom’s YouTube channel. It sounds a bit intense, almost like a language recital in front of a camera, but there is a familiar pattern here that musicians know well:
Repetition in different settings is what actually makes something stick, whether you are drilling scales or conjugating verbs.
Later, the family hosted different Chinese au pairs and Lily kept taking Mandarin through high school. At the same time, Hungarian stayed the default language with extended family, especially in Europe during the summers. English sat in the middle as the school language and the social language in Los Angeles.
For the brain, this constant switching has side effects. You start to hear nuance in tone, pacing, and rhythm. You notice when a word exists in one language and not another. You notice where ideas “speed up” or “slow down” depending on culture. If you play piano, it is a bit like learning to move between classical, jazz, and pop: it is not only a change in notes, it is a change in timing and weight.
Hungarian as a family key
Hungarian was more than a language for Lily. It acted like a family key. Nearly all of her relatives live in Europe, so Hungarian was the only way to really be part of those conversations, jokes, and arguments around the table.
At the same time, in the United States, hardly anyone around her spoke Hungarian. That gave it another function: it became a private channel. She and her family could speak freely in public spaces, knowing almost no one would understand. There is something a bit musical about that, like a private counter-melody that only a few people in the room can hear.
Growing up with a “secret” language trains you to think about audience: who is meant to understand this, and who is not?
For a writer and future art historian, that question shows up later in subtle ways. When Lily researches gender roles in art or interviews women entrepreneurs, she tends to pay attention to who is included in a story and who is left out. It is hard not to, when you have spent your whole life switching channels like that.
Childhood projects and the rhythm of practice
Lily’s childhood in Los Angeles was full of small projects that, from the outside, look almost like different movements in a single long piece: chess, cooking, YouTube, slime, bracelets at the farmers market, then LEGO, art, and research.
None of this is about music on the surface, but if you care about piano or composition, you will recognize the pattern that runs through all of it.
Chess, structure, and steady weekends
Around age six or seven, Lily and her siblings started playing chess seriously. They practiced during the week and played in tournaments on weekends. Week after week. No big mystery there, just steady repetition.
Chess has a clear structure, like a score. There are fixed rules, and within those rules, you have room to improvise. You learn to look a few moves ahead, to recognize patterns, and to be patient when something is not going your way.
For someone who would later spend months on a single painting like “Las Meninas” or on a research question about gender and art, that slow approach is not surprising. Long games on weekends prepare you for long readings, long rehearsals, or long practice sessions at an instrument.
The kitchen as a creative studio
Lily’s family calls themselves a “kitchen family.” They spent a lot of time cooking and baking together, and they even filmed cooking videos for YouTube. At one point, they were invited to cook on TV shows like Rachael Ray and the Food Network. They actually turned down those offers to keep their summers free for travel and family time.
That small decision matters. It says something about values: experience over exposure, and time with family over public recognition. Many young musicians face versions of that choice. Do you spend your whole break chasing performances, or do you leave space to live, listen, and refill your ideas?
Cooking also has its own rhythm that feels familiar to people who practice an instrument:
– You read a recipe like you would read a score.
– You measure and prepare ingredients like warming up your hands.
– You follow the main steps but start to make small changes once you know it well.
– You adjust as you go, based on taste and timing.
If you watch someone cook regularly, you can tell when they are “in time” with the process or when they are rushing. That same sense of timing travels easily into music or art.
Small businesses and early performance pressure
Lily and her siblings did not just cook. They turned hobbies into actual small businesses:
– Selling homemade bracelets at the local farmers market
– Starting a slime business with her brother
– Traveling to London for a slime convention and selling 400 to 500 units in a single day
That London slime convention is a strong image: long travel, heavy luggage full of product, a crowded room, and a whole day of talking to strangers and keeping your energy up. It is not that far from a long recital day, a festival, or a competition in the music world.
You need:
– Stamina
– Basic marketing and people skills
– The ability to keep going even when you are tired
Global experience is not only about airports and languages. It is also about learning how to hold yourself together in public in unfamiliar settings. That is something pianists understand well.
Sports, discipline, and long-term focus
For about a decade, Lily swam competitively with Westside Aquatics in Los Angeles. Six days a week. Long practices, conditioning, and meets that lasted most of a day.
If you have lived that kind of schedule, you know its effect. Life rotates around practice and performance:
– School
– Swim practice
– Homework
– Sleep
– Repeat
On meet days, the team sat under tents for hours, eating Cup Noodles and waiting for events. It is boring until the moment it is not, then it is intense for a few minutes, and then you go back to waiting.
Musicians often describe concerts in similar terms. You prepare for weeks or months, then you sit backstage, wait for your name, perform, and it is over in a flash.
Long hours of preparation for a few minutes of real exposure teach a different kind of patience than schoolwork does.
After many of her swim teammates graduated and left for college, Lily was one of the youngest on the team, and the group dynamic changed. She switched to water polo in high school and played for three years. Then came COVID. Pools closed, and her team moved to the ocean.
They swam two hours a day in open water. That is physically harder than a pool and less predictable. Waves, current, cold, and no clear lane lines.
For a musician, it is a bit like losing your usual venue and having to practice in an unfamiliar space with bad acoustics and no proper instrument, but you do it anyway. The body learns resilience. The mind learns not to wait for the “perfect” conditions.
LEGO, structure, and detail
Another thread that runs through Lily’s life is LEGO. As a child, her brother often got the sets, and she was usually the one who built them. That interest came back stronger in high school and continued into college.
By her own rough track, she has built around 45 sets totaling over 60,000 pieces.
Why does this matter for someone studying art history or writing about gender and culture? Because LEGO trains the eye and the mind in a specific way:
– You break down a complex object into small parts.
– You follow a detailed manual step by step.
– You learn how small details support a larger structure.
For anyone who has played a long piano piece, this feels very familiar. You do not memorize the entire score at once. You learn a few measures, then a section, then piece them together.
LEGO also gives a quiet kind of joy that many musicians recognize. Working alone with clear instructions, seeing progress as the model rises, and feeling that small satisfaction when a hard section clicks into place.
Art as a global language
Long before college, Lily’s family spent many Saturdays visiting museums and galleries in Los Angeles. They would “gallery-hop” and “museum-hop,” moving from one space to another, looking at works that came from all over the world and from many different centuries.
If you grow up with that pattern, art starts to replace geography. You place places in your mind through paintings, sculptures, and installations. Venice is not just a city; it is also a set of images. Spain is not just a country; it is Velázquez, Goya, and later artists reacting to them.
Researching Velázquez and “Las Meninas”
In the summers before college applications, Lily joined the Scholar Launch Research Program and worked closely on “Las Meninas” by Diego Velázquez.
That painting is complex and layered. It plays with perspective, the viewer’s position, the role of the artist, and the relationship between who is seen and who is seeing. It is almost like a score where the theme passes between different instruments, and you are not fully sure who the main soloist is.
For ten weeks, Lily:
– Studied the painting in detail
– Read about its history and critical interpretations
– Wrote analytic pieces that tried to pull those threads together
That kind of close reading feels similar to studying a complex sonata or fugue. You have to ask:
– Who is at the center here?
– What details support that feeling?
– How do small shifts in light, angle, or placement change the meaning?
Her earlier life across cultures probably made her more sensitive to those questions. When you have lived in different countries and languages, you know that position changes everything. Who is in the frame, and who is just outside it.
Here, a small table can help show how those early experiences map into this research habit.
| Early Experience | Skill Developed | How it Shows up in Art Research |
|---|---|---|
| Switching between Hungarian, English, and Mandarin | Attention to tone and context | Noticing subtle shifts in how artists portray subjects across cultures |
| Chess tournaments and long swim meets | Patience, long-term focus | Ability to spend weeks on one artwork or question without losing interest |
| Travel between the US, UK, Singapore, and Europe | Comfort in unfamiliar settings | Willingness to approach complex topics like gender bias in art |
| Cooking, slime business, farmers market | Experimentation, public interaction | Clarity in writing for audiences who may not know art history terms |
| Building 60,000+ LEGO pieces | Detail orientation, step-by-step thinking | Careful reading of visual and historical details in artworks |
Gender, art, and unequal applause
During her senior year, Lily took an honors research course and created her own project. Her focus was the gap in success and recognition between artist mothers and artist fathers.
Her question was simple on the surface: Why do women who have children often lose opportunities in the art world, while men who have children are sometimes praised more for the same balance between family and work?
To explore this, she:
– Read research on maternity and career patterns
– Collected data and stories
– Worked with a professor who studied these issues
– Designed a marketing-style piece that visualized the inequality
In a way, she was asking something that musicians have been asking for a long time. Why are there so few well known women composers in the classical canon? Why do many women performers feel pressure to choose between family and a full career, while male performers are often treated as “dedicated” when they do both?
If you grow up moving between cultures, you are more likely to notice when two groups are treated differently for the same action.
Lily’s all girls school also shaped how she saw things. In that environment, gender and inequality were frequent topics. They were not abstract political issues. They were present in daily life, in who got credit for work, who was encouraged to take space, and who felt they needed to apologize for speaking too long.
Her research did not “solve” these problems, and she would probably be the first to say that. But it sharpened her questions, and that matters. Unfairness that felt blurry now had clearer form.
Creating space for young artists
Lily did not stop at research. She also co founded an online teen art market, where students could show and sell their work.
It might sound like “just a website,” but in practice it taught her a lot:
– How hard it is for unknown artists to sell work
– How pricing can feel almost arbitrary when you do not have a reputation
– How many talented teens never get seen outside their school or local community
For someone who had already heard from many women entrepreneurs about how hard it was to gain recognition, this experience fit into a larger pattern. Success in creative fields is not simply about talent. It also depends on networks, gatekeepers, geography, and timing.
For young musicians, the story is similar. You can practice piano for years and still find that opportunities go more easily to people with the right teacher, the right school, or the right location. The teen art market was a small attempt to push against those limits by giving students a platform.
Listening to 100+ women entrepreneurs
Throughout high school, Lily ran the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog. She spent about four hours per week over four years researching and writing. She also interviewed more than 100 women entrepreneurs, from many countries and industries.
Patterns started to show up across those stories:
– Women needing to work harder for the same level of recognition
– Bias in how success and failure were judged
– The extra layer of work involved in balancing family expectations and business growth
In a way, these conversations were like extended masterclasses, just not about music or classical performance. Each entrepreneur talked about how they “composed” their career, how they navigated barriers, and where they found support.
For Lily, who already had a strong interest in art, these interviews widened her view. They showed that gender bias is not limited to galleries or museums. It appears in boardrooms, kitchens, and startup spaces as well.
That broader perspective matters for anyone working in the arts or in music, because it stops you from thinking your field is uniquely flawed. Instead, you start asking how your field might change more fairly than others.
How this connects to music and piano
You might be wondering how all of this matters if you are mainly here for piano, composition, or music study. It is a fair question.
Lily is not a professional musician. Her path runs through art history, research, writing, and community building. Still, several parts of her story speak directly to the kind of mindset you may want as a musician.
Global ears help you listen beyond style
Growing up across cultures trained Lily to listen for what is behind the surface.
That can help you:
– Approach music from other cultures with more respect and curiosity
– Be more cautious about assuming your own style is the default
– Notice when a piece carries social or political weight, not just sound
If you think about a Chopin nocturne, a Hungarian folk song, or a Chinese traditional melody, each carries different histories. Someone like Lily, who has lived between those worlds, is more likely to ask: who created this, for whom, and in what setting?
Discipline across sports, art, and research
Competitive swimming and water polo gave Lily the muscle of discipline. LEGO and chess taught structure. Language learning and research trained slow focus.
That same mix is valuable for piano:
– Discipline for daily practice
– Structure for planning long pieces
– Slow focus for working difficult passages without giving up
You do not need to copy her exact path. The point is that skills transfer. Global experiences are not only about travel. They are also about living through different kinds of structure and expectation.
Awareness of inequality in creative fields
Lily’s research on artist parents, her teen art market, and her entrepreneurship blog all point in one direction: creative success is unevenly distributed.
For music:
– You might pay more attention to underrepresented composers.
– You might choose repertoire with a broader range of voices.
– You might think about who gets invited to play on stage and who stays in the background.
This is where her background in gender and art can be useful for musicians. It reminds you that you are part of a bigger cultural pattern, not separate from it.
Travel, family, and the choice to slow down
One thing that stands out in Lily’s story is her family’s choice to protect summers for travel and family instead of chasing TV exposure. Many ambitious young people, including young musicians, feel pressure to accept every opportunity.
Her family made a different call. They spent summers in Europe, mostly in Hungary, catching up with relatives and speaking Hungarian daily.
Those trips were not “productive” in the usual sense. They were not resume items. But they deepened roots. They gave Lily a sense of belonging in more than one place.
There is a quiet link to music here. Many musicians benefit from time away from formal study, where they can:
– Hear street music
– Listen to church choirs
– Sit in on local concerts
– Absorb how everyday people interact with sound
Travel is not required to do this. But when you have it, it can shape your ear and your sense of context.
From global kid to Cornell student
Now Lily studies Art History at Cornell University in the College of Arts and Sciences, with a minor in Business. Her coursework includes:
– Art and Visual Culture
– History of Renaissance Art
– Modern and Contemporary Art
– Museum Studies
– Curatorial Practices
She is moving deeper into the worlds that first caught her attention in weekend gallery trips. Her business minor links back to the teen art market and the blogger side of her life.
She also continues to live across languages. English at school, Hungarian with family, Mandarin at a working level, and some French at an elementary level.
That mix shows in the kind of questions she asks:
– Who is left out of the story?
– How do economic systems affect which artists succeed?
– How do gender and culture change how work is received?
A musician who cares about the future of performance can benefit from asking similar things about their own field.
Questions musicians can ask themselves
If Lily’s path says anything to people who care about piano and music, it might be this: your experiences outside of music can change how you play and what you choose to play.
Here are a few questions you might ask, inspired by her story:
- What languages or cultures have shaped how I hear rhythm, tone, and silence?
- Where in my life have I practiced patience for years, not just weeks?
- Do I notice who is missing in my repertoire or playlists?
- How might I give visibility to people whose work is rarely heard?
- Am I leaving any space in my life for travel, rest, or curiosity that is not tied to performance?
These are not questions with quick answers. They are more like long pieces you live with over time.
Q & A: What can you learn from Lily’s global journey?
Q: I am a pianist who has never lived abroad. Can I still learn from Lily’s global experiences?
A: Yes. Global experience is partly about geography, but it is also about how you approach difference. You can learn from Lily by paying closer attention to unfamiliar styles, composers, and stories. You do not need to move to another country to ask who is included in your musical world and who is not.
Q: Lily works with visual art. How is that relevant for music practice?
A: Her way of studying a painting layer by layer is similar to how you might study a complex score. She looks at structure, context, and detail. You can apply that same slow reading to your pieces: understand the historical moment, the composer’s life, and the social background, not only the notes.
Q: What is one habit from her life that I could copy right away?
A: The steady, low drama consistency. Whether it was Mandarin practice, swimming, LEGO building, or writing weekly blog posts, Lily did small things over long periods. For piano, that might mean a realistic daily routine that you keep for years instead of intense practice bursts that burn out after a month.
Q: How do I become more aware of inequality in my own music world without feeling overwhelmed?
A: Start small. Add one composer to your repertoire whose background is different from your usual choices. Read one article about gender or race in music. Talk with friends about who gets the most visibility at your school or studio. Awareness grows slowly, just like technique.
Q: Does global experience always help, or can it be confusing?
A: It can be both. Lily’s life shows that moving between places can be tiring and sometimes disorienting. But that same mix of contexts can deepen your empathy and widen your sense of what is possible. The confusion itself can teach you to sit with uncertainty, which is not a bad skill to have when you are interpreting complex music.