When Ben Casica-Patton ’25 was five years old, his mother enrolled him in piano lessons. He wasn’t having it.
“My mom just wanted me to learn an instrument, so I took piano,” Casica-Patton said. “Like a lot of children, I wasn’t really into it. She had to force me to practice, maybe 20 minutes a day, if even that.”
Before long, the Crawfordsville native was taking his talents to the Indiana State Fair, where he frequently found success performing jazz and blues music in piano competition. Motivated in part by such regional accolades, Casica-Patton kept at it, under the instruction of Wabash Glee Club’s own accompanist, Cheryl Everett. It wasn’t until he enrolled at Wabash that his aspirations skyrocketed.
In June 2022, another young pianist made headlines, when at age 18, South Korea’s Yunchan Lim became the youngest person ever to win the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.
“I liked the way he played, and it really inspired me to keep practicing and to pursue that level of excellence in music,” said Casica-Patton.
His next three years at Wabash, Casica-Patton devoted himself to his craft, continuing to take lessons from Everett, his first (and only) piano teacher. At Wabash, he served as section accompanist to the Glee Club, played in the pit orchestra for “Something Rotten!” and performed in multiple solo and group recitals. He even spent a semester studying at NYU Paris, taking music history and theory classes and absorbing the city where many of his favorite classical composers lived and worked.
“My rehearsal room was on the eighth floor,” Casica-Patton said. “You could see the Eiffel Tower, you could see Notre Dame, you could see the Arc de Triomphe. You could see everything from there.”
Now back on American soil for his final term, Casica-Patton is turning his sights to his final senior recital — an ambitious seven-piece program that includes Beethoven’s complete “Appassionata Sonata,” which Casica-Patton will perform (from memory) in its 24-minute entirety. The recital will also function as Casica-Patton’s audition video for a number of graduate programs.
Another highlight of the recital will be Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto on two pianos — Casica-Patton on the Bösendorfer and Everett on the Steinway.
“It’s a really technically difficult piece,” Casica-Patton said. “Trying to line up every single moment with another piano who’s also playing really difficult music is really challenging.”
Not only will the duet be an impressive display of talent from both artists, it also represents the culmination of the relationship between them, 16 years in the making.
“I’m really looking forward to the beautiful sound that he and I can make together,” said Everett. “Neither one of us can really do this piece alone. It takes both parts. To me, that’s the culmination of how Ben’s developed as a musician.”
A far cry from those days of being forced to practice for 20 minutes, Casica-Patton is putting everything he can into preparing for his final Wabash performance. Since the beginning of the spring semester, he’s spent nearly every day hunkered down in the rehearsal spaces of the Fine Arts Center, coffee and snacks strewn about, losing himself in the music.
“I try not to keep track of how long I practice per day and just focus on if I achieved anything,” Casica-Patton said. “During my last senior recital, I was keeping track of how many hours I was practicing, and it was frustrating sometimes when I felt like I got nothing done. I’ve been trying to focus more on actually accomplishing things — practicing, listening to other people play the pieces and trying to develop my own interpretation of the pieces.”
Aside from her daily practice to perform in the piano duet, Everett also has a role to play in preparing Casica-Patton for his performance by building on the skills she has developed in him for the last 16 years.
“We’re no longer developing the skills, so we come to a point where we focus on performance.” Everett said. “There’s a tremendous amount of pressure when you’re carrying the whole program by memory, and I feel like my obligation as a teacher is to have dialog with Ben about staying physically well the week of the performance and about the mental stress that may set in.”
On Monday, April 28 at 7:30 p.m., all of Casica-Patton’s hard work and dedication will be freely on display in Salter Hall, the conclusion decades in the making.
“He started as a little kid who didn’t say much, and he’s grown into a true musician with his own voice,” Everett said. “As an adult now, he’s able to communicate emotions and feelings over the stage lights that he couldn’t do when he was little. It’s very gratifying to me to watch a student stay with their lessons long enough to develop that depth that comes with wisdom.
“It’s a teacher’s dream to have a student like Ben.”