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Child music prodigy 60 minutes11/28/2023 “From a very early age, maybe as early as two, put him in front of the best piano he could afford- which wasn’t much,” French told me over the phone. French can’t speak to what goes on in the mind of a prodigy, but he can comment on the work that forges one. His autobiography, Journey of a Thousand Miles, has been translated into 8 different languages, and was adapted for young adult readers under the title Playing With Flying Keys with the help of author Michael French. Now 31, Lang was also a well-known child prodigy, who won international awards and gave nationally televised performances before the age of 13. Lang Lang is a Chinese concert pianist whose accomplishments include performances with the Berlin Philharmonic, at the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2011 White House state dinner, and at sold-out shows in Carnegie Hall. Could the explanation be something simpler, though? Something that all prodigies share universally? These cases create the ongoing debate over inherent talent versus learned ability. Some prodigies begin their journey with a ruler on the back of a hand from a stern teacher, while others surprise their parents by picking out lullabies on a family piano, expressing a preternatural understanding of the instrument that no one seems able to explain. Geoff Colvin offers the examples of Mozart and golfer Tiger Woods – child prodigies thought to have “the gift” who, more concretely, had demanding fathers who doubled as their demanding teachers, and got them started by the time they were three years old.Īnd yet, we can’t throw Winner’s theory completely under the bus. In the cases of most child prodigies, it’s clear that this process is just begun at a much earlier age. Nnor did he find that there were less “innately-talented” players who could not equal the ability of more “innately-talented” players by practicing deliberately and consistently. As we strip away these potential arguments for the cause of prodigiousness, the real debate begins: Is it innate talent or can it be learned?Įricsson’s study of violinists at the Berlin Academy of Music found that there were no experts that just “showed up” without completing the requisite hours of training. While certain mental disorders can accompany prodigiousness, having A.D.D. Solomon quotes piano teacher Veda Kaplinsky of Julliard: “Genius is an abnormality, and can signal other abnormalities…Many gifted kids have A.D.D. They may have dyslexia and have difficulty learning to read, they may have serious problems with math, or they may have perceptual-motor problems leading to number reversals or difficulties in handwriting… Sometimes these children also have an inability to focus and attend, and they are classified as having an attention disorder.”ĭrew Peterson, another prodigy in Andrew Solomon’s story, didn’t speak until he was three and a half, just a few short years before he was playing at Carnegie Hall. Typically these children excel at abstract verbal reasoning and seem very bright and motivated outside of school, but they encounter serious problems with school tasks. The Nueva School has plenty of these children, and they receive a great deal of individual attention. “Academically gifted children are sometimes so uneven in their scholastic profiles that they are learning disabled in some domain. In her book Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, developmental psychologist Ellen Winner explores two such sets of unevenly gifted children: Students enrolled in Johns Hopkins University’s Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, who at ages 12 and 13 are able to score in the 700s in SAT math skills but show large discrepancies in verbal abilities, and children enrolled in The Nueva School for academically gifted children outside of San Francisco: Armstrong learned to count at 15 months, began composing music at age 5, attended college at age 9, and dabbles in things like physics, chemistry and mathematics for fun.įor every child in Armstrong’s mold, however, there are just as many whose abilities skyrocket in one specific field even while lagging behind the norm in others. Kit Armstrong, one of several children profiled in Andrew Solomon’s 2012 New York Times piece “How do you Raise a Prodigy?”, may be a classic example of a child who is “globally gifted”. It appears prodigiousness is not genetic, nor is it necessarily even a reflection of intelligence.
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