Engineering Brothers Make UT Home
The timer on the piano was always set for 20 minutes. James Govednik would count down every second until it hit zero before racing outside to go play with his elementary school friends.
More than a decade later, Govednik can be found at the University of Tennessee’s Natalie L. Haslam College of Music spending nearly three hours a day seated at a Steinway & Sons piano. Hardly anything but his aerospace engineering classes can pull him away.
“It’s my source of de-stressing,” Govednik said. “I really wanted to take it to the next level since I have already come this far, and UT is helping me do that.”
Govednik and his older brother, Josef, grew up in Southern California as talented pianists touring around the state competing. They are both now studying in the Tickle College of Engineering while still pursuing their shared love for music.
Josef is a senior computer science major with a double minor in math and organ performance and James is a junior double majoring in aerospace engineering and piano. They split their time between studying engineering on one side of campus and practicing music on the other side of campus.
Finding the Right Keys
Josef blazed the trail to UT from Rolling Hills Estates, California. The former high school pitcher closely followed the UT baseball team. He noticed an Instagram post from former Vols ace Garrett Crochet about majoring in nuclear engineering. Josef started doing more research about UT and realized how much the university had to offer.
“What I found was a very supportive community that was also very rich in culture,” said Josef, a member of the 2025 Heath Integrated Business and Engineering cohort. “It’s an absolute gem of a location and has given me a new experience in a different part of the country that has fulfilled all of my academic and social expectations.”
James didn’t initially intend to follow his brother to Knoxville. He assumed he would chart his own course. However, the combination of academics and music UT offered easily won him over.
James practiced on his own during his freshman year. As a sophomore, he started working with Chih-Long Hu, UT’s Sandra G. Powell Endowed Professor of Piano.
“It really wasn’t that much different of a time commitment. In the grand scheme of things, I still spent more time on my engineering studies,” James said. “But I felt I had enough time to keep me up with the piano as well and I’m very glad I made the decision to get more guidance.”
Josef took a year off from piano when he arrived at UT to focus on his studies. But he soon discovered how essential music was to his happiness.
“I had never been at a lower point to be honest with you,” Josef said. “It was the first year that music was completely out of my life, and it was really hard. I knew I needed to get back into it.”
Instead of returning to the piano, Josef started playing the pipe organ under the guidance of UT’s Lecturer of Organ Edie Johnson. He’s played at services at local churches and appeared at Knoxville’s German Fest.
“The experience with Dr. Johnson has been fantastic,” Josef said. “My involvement with the university and the greater community has been profound. It’s really reinvigorated me.”
Summer Experiences
This past summer, Josef made his concert debut as a pipe organist at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles after spending nearly three months auditioning with an organ concerto.
“It was incredible. I had never played on an organ with a 64-foot pipe before. You could feel the rumble in your bones when you played,” Josef said. “We were there for a combined 13 hours and I was just soaking everything in the entire time.”
James spent two weeks in Kansas City performing chamber music for the first time. He did a Schumann piano quartet with two grad musicians and another undergraduate student from Ball State University.
“They brought in a lot of professors from the area, and I did two or three master’s classes where I learned how to coordinate myself with other violinists to make sure we all cooperate,” James said. “We worked on a piece for five days of rehearsals and then we had a series of concerts. It was a really cool experience because I had never done anything like that before.”
Sibling Revelry
The brothers started playing the piano at a young age. Before he could even walk, James noticed a keyboard stored in the family’s garage. It was a wedding gift to his parents that had been collecting dust. James pointed to the keyboard and was soon learning all the pre-sets.
The brothers began taking formal lessons by age 6 with Linda Govel, a well-known piano teacher and pianist in Southern California. Over the years, they have competed together at competitions and placed second in the duet category at the Knoxville Music Competition last year.
They both spent three weeks in the summer of 2023 in Poland studying classical piano and combined their music and engineering passions this past summer with an audio technician internship at Ardent Audio Production in Carson, California.
Their interests away from music are varied—Josef plays club baseball and is active in student leadership on campus while James prefers basketball and swimming—and their studies keep them separated for most of their hours on campus.
Because he’s an aerospace major, James usually fields the same question when people discover his musical talent.
“I get asked if I am going to play piano in space,” James said. “People have fun with it.”
Although the brothers support each other, there’s always been a sibling rivalry when it comes to their piano skills.
“It’s competitive more than anything. There was no friendly brotherly love when we were younger. It was all about who finished better at a competition,” James said. “But now that we are not doing the same competitions anymore, it’s changed. If we do that again, it might come back the way it was before.”
As they’ve gotten older, the brothers have become each other’s biggest fans. They can’t walk by a piano or organ without immediately sitting down and playing. Their shared passions of engineering and music has strengthened their relationship and pushed them to reach their potential.
“James is the best pianist I know, so that has been the brotherly standard the past few years,” Josef said. “If I am being really honest, seeing him do that well makes me want to see if I can rival him a little bit.”
“You can get better. I believe in you,” James encouraged his older brother with a laugh.