Amid the cacophony of instruments filling the fifth-floor of Murphy Hall with music, Nathan Salazar sits quietly at the grand piano in his private practice room. He opens sheet music to a Haydn Sonata, but as he begins playing with a delicate touch, it quickly becomes clear that he does not need the music.
Sometimes the pace of his fingers seems frantic, but music still emanates from the wooden Steinway as both his eyes and his fingers fly back and forth over the keys.
Humming portions of the melody to himself and putting his concert choir voice to work as well, he rocks back and forth with expression until the tricky fingering in one measure trips him up.
He shakes his head, muttering, "That sucks."
He plays the measure repeatedly, breaking it down and then building it back up, note-by-note, until it has reached his liking.
With only a few weeks remaining until the sonata needs to be perfect, that attention to detail is crucial.
Salazar wants to end his accomplished freshman year on the same high note with which he started it.
Winner of the Mary O. Fearing scholarship, which goes to the best incoming freshman pianist, Salazar's focus has now shifted to his jury, a 20-minute performance that is the equivalent of finals for a KU pianist.
It took three months to memorize the performance last semester, and Salazar said that even though he classifies himself as forgetful and his greatest fear is freezing onstage, he has "never had a train wreck."
"It happens, though," he said. "We're human. We're not robots."
It took complete memorization of hundreds of tiny details, but Salazar received an A on his jury last semester; he wants another. But that is only the latest development in Salazar's growth as a pianist.
Leonard Salazar remembers vividly the time his pregnant wife woke him from a deep sleep in the wee hours of the morning to ask when they should start their son on piano lessons.
"She must have just felt that he was going to be a musician," Leonard said of his wife, Carmen.
They waited eight years, starting Nathan on lessons in the fall of 1996, and it was only a few years later when he had outplayed anything his teacher could offer.
"His teacher approached us and said he needed someone who would challenge him more," Leonard said. "She realized he wasn't a regular student."
Salazar was anything but.
Born and raised in Los Alamos, N.M., Salazar's parents home-schooled him and instilled in him a faith and a drive to reach something better than what sometimes faces young Hispanic people in that area.
"Hispanic kids are just not pushed," Salazar said. "My cousins thought I was trying to be white. It was a bit of a culture clash."
He said he and his parents were sometimes seen as arrogant, but he does not think he has lost the love for his culture.
That flexible home-schooling schedule played a large part in Salazar excelling at piano. He said he practiced four hours each day throughout high school after his second teacher began putting him in competitions regularly.
"She put in front of him a vision of what he could do," Leonard said.
That teacher, Charlene Cox, said that as long as she had Salazar in a competition, "he worked like crazy."
That was a treat for Cox, who saw early on how gifted Salazar was.
"I told my former teacher that he was the student of a lifetime for a piano instructor," Cox said.
That was the reason why Cox said she could not stay out of the decision when it came time for Salazar to choose a college.
"She told me there were only four professors in the country I could work with," Salazar said.
The front-runners were at Rice and Kansas, but Salazar had already played at Kansas for Professor Jack Winerock, one of the Cox's selected few, during the International Institute of Young Musicians.
Rice intrigued Salazar, but he said it was too cutthroat for his tastes, and Kansas seemed like the perfect choice, partly due to the presence of Winerock.
"It's not necessarily where you work, but who you work with," Salazar said.
He meets with Winerock once a week for private lessons to fine-tune and polish his pieces.
"If he works hard, he could achieve some pretty substantial things," Winerock said.
Salazar said the obvious goal of piano performance majors was to be a concert pianist, but he realized only the absolute best in the world will reach that level.
"They don't put you here unless they think you can get somewhere," Salazar said. "But that doesn't appeal to me. I've always seen that my gift lies especially in working with someone."
Salazar wants to be an accompanist at the Santa Fe Opera, putting his choir background to work with his ability to sight-read music.
"I can play something on the spot, and singers like that," Salazar said.
His dad might like that idea, too.
Leonard said he, not his wife, was the one to have a problem with their son being far from home. Although Leonard said he usually speaks to Nathan about once a week, it is not always easy to stay in touch.
"If we don't call him, he doesn't call home," Leonard said. "Sometimes I have to track him down."
If Salazar is hard to find, it is because his schedule is full with piano practice and class, accompanying eight singers in the school of music and attempting to expose his floormates in Templin Hall to classical music.
"After about two minutes of it, everyone leaves," Salazar said. "But I'm still sitting there just riveted."
The adults in his life agree that Salazar just loves music.
"I hoped he would be an engineer, but he was born to be a musician," Leonard said. "Piano is like a natural extension of his personality."