When Steven Damouni first sat down to learn piano, he probably didn’t expect to end up teaching it.

“I originally started because a friend was playing, and I guess I wanted to beat him,” Damouni said. “He’d already been playing two years, so I practiced a bunch.”

Damouni, who is now a graduate student working toward a master’s degree, will perform a final graduate student recital on Thursday at 8 p.m. in Kimbrough Hall.

Before coming to Pullman, Damouni said he was studying at Seattle University and was working toward an engineering degree.

“They’re really different, but it seems engineering fits in with music,” he said.

Despite taking music classes only on the side at Seattle U, Damouni said he began to devote extra time to playing his piano as the school year went on.

“Eventually I was just doing it more and more until it became my major,” he said.

Since Seattle U didn’t have a piano program and his parents were moving across state, Damouni said he decided to attend WSU.

Jeff Savage, associate professor at the WSU School of Music, has worked with Damouni since he arrived as a freshman, and said he enjoys playing a wide range of music.

“He has chosen a very complex repertoire and has spent enough time studying it that his recital will be of a very high caliber,” Savage said.

Some of the pieces Damouni chose to include in the recital were created by well-known composers like Chopin, Mozart and Bach.

“The craziest piece I’m playing is two movements of the Concord Sonata by Charles Ives,” he said.

Damouni said Ives pulled from multiple genres to build the sonata and even sampled parts from pop songs composed in the 1920s.

“The thing that makes his music unique is that he uses different styles that aren’t classical in a piece that’s clearly classical,” Damouni said.

WSU School of Music associate professor Karen Savage said Damouni had the first movement of the challenging sonata piece memorized- a rare feat.

“He is playing exceptionally difficult, dramatic music,” she said.

After graduation, Damouni said he eventually hopes to teach undergraduate students at a university, like he does here now as a teaching assistant.

“It’s fun to get people to play piano when it’s not what they’re used to,” he said.

The graduate recital is free for anyone to attend.