This gets even weirder when you consider how heat and humidity are such staples of the franchise. Especially in a pre-Second Impact world, when the weather would have fluctuated more normally.

Humidity fluctuations wreak havoc on instruments, pianos especially. The pianos would have to be frequently tuned and maintained by music department staff, in order for them to sound as perfect and reliably in-tune as Gendo recalls. If Gendo was just playing any random piano he found, it wouldn’t have sounded as perfect as he remembers.

So either Gendo was a music student, who somehow got caught up in the lives and work of students in very different departments… or he was a science student, like he was in the TV series, who also regularly snuck into the music department to play their pianos.

There’s also a third option: That Gendo was a musician, but not a very good one. Maybe his ear was so bad or undeveloped that he couldn’t tell that the pianos he was playing were out of tune, so he remembers them sounding perfect every time. 

Maybe all of Evangelion could’ve been avoided if Gendo tried to charm Yui by pulling out a guitar and saying “Anyway, here’s Wonderwall”

Was University Gendo a music student in the Rebuilds? I know he wasn’t in the TV series, but 3.0+1.0 shows how piano was a lifelong love for him. He also monologues about perfectly in-tune piano strings, but he would only have access to such well-maintained pianos if he was a music student.