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Musical Prodigies
Musical Prodigies
Interpretations from
Psychology, Education,
Musicology, and
Ethnomusicology

Edited by

Gary E. McPherson

1
1
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 Acknowledgments

The first draft of each chapter was independently reviewed by the editor and at least two additional
reviewers who included a selection of other authors from the book and, where relevant, anony-
mous external reviewers.
I take this opportunity to thank the various representatives of Oxford University Press. I am
especially grateful to the OUP Commissioning Editor Martin Baum and his assistant Charlotte
Green for answering all of my questions and steering me in the right direction whenever I had a
problem. Their enthusiasm for producing this book is appreciated. I am also extremely grateful to
Viki Mortimer (Team Leader—Science, Medicine, & Higher Education) for the methodical man-
ner in which she administered the proofs and for making sure every chapter was accurate and
exactly how each author requested.
Throughout the process of compiling this book, I have been privileged to have worked with
Solange Glasser as my editorial assistant. Her sharp intellect, superb eye for detail, and generous
nature have made the process of collecting, reviewing, editing, and formatting each of the chapters
so much easier. Solange deserves very special praise for a job well done.
I extend my heartfelt thanks to each of the authors for agreeing to be involved. I am extremely
grateful to them for putting up with the endless correspondence and the many suggestions
from the reviewers. They deserve praise for their commitment to the project and the quality of
their work.
Now that all of the authors can see their chapters in the context of the whole book, I hope they
will agree that our journey together has been worthwhile. I also hope that our readers enjoy the
fruits of our labour.
Gary E. McPherson
July 2016
 Contents

List of Contributors╇ xi
Introduction╇ xxiii

Section 1╇ Theoretical frameworks

1 Analyzing musical prodigiousness using Gagné’s Integrative Model of Talent
Development╇ 3
Françoys Gagné and Gary E. McPherson
2 Two roads diverged in the musical wood: A coincidence approach to the lives
and careers of Nyiregyházi and Menuhin╇ 115
David Henry Feldman
3 Syzygies, social worlds, and exceptional achievement in music╇ 134
Robert Faulkner and Jane W. Davidson
4 Genetic influences on musical giftedness, talent, and practice╇ 156
Miriam Anna Mosing and Fredrik Ullén
5 Musicological reports on early 20th century musical prodigies: The beginnings
of an objective assessment╇ 168
Reinhard Kopiez and Andreas C. Lehmann
6 Early and late bloomers among 120 classical composers: Were the greatest
geniuses also prodigies?╇ 185
Dean Keith Simonton
7 The wunderkind composer╇ 198
Barry Cooper

Section 2╇ Aspects of development

8 Working memory in musical prodigies: A 10,000-╉year-╉old story, one million
years in the making╇ 223
Larry Vandervert
9 The brain’s rapid encoding of rule-╉governed domains of knowledge: A case
analysis of a musical prodigy╇ 245
Larry Vandervert
10 On the cognitive-╉developmental theory of the child prodigy phenomenon╇ 259
Larisa V. Shavinina
11 Transitioning musical abilities into expertise and beyond: The role
of psychosocial skills in developing prodigious talent╇ 279
Rena F. Subotnik, Linda Jarvin, Andrew Thomas, and Geesoo Maie Lee
12 Growing-╉up prodigies: The midlife crisis╇ 294
Jeanne Bamberger
viii Contents

13 Musical prodigies and motivation 320

Andrew J. Martin
14 Musical prodigies: Does talent need trauma? 338
Áine MacNamara, Dave Collins, and Patricia Holmes
15 Prodigies of music composition: Cognitive abilities
and developmental antecedents 358
Lena Quinto, Paolo Ammirante, Michael H. Connors, and William Forde Thompson
16 Development of timing skills 378
Thenille Braun Janzen, Paolo Ammirante, and William Forde Thompson
17 Igor: A case study of a child drummer prodigy 391
Simone Dalla Bella, Jakub Sowiński, Nicolas Farrugia, and Magdalena Berkowska
18 The career decisions of musical prodigies 409
Jae Yup Jung and Paul Evans
19 Musical prodigies within the virtual stage of YouTube 424
Freya M. de Mink and Gary E. McPherson
20 Synesthesia and prodigiousness: The case of Olivier Messiaen 453
Solange Glasser
21 Prodigious musical talent in blind children with autism and learning
difficulties: Identifying and educating potential musical savants 471
Adam Ockelford
22 Veridical mapping in the development of autistic musical savants 496
Laurent Mottron and Lucie Bouvet

Section 3 Individual examples

23 “Proofs of genius”: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the construction of musical
prodigies in early Georgian London 511
Rachel Cowgill
24 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart the child performer–​composer: New
musical–​biographical perspectives on the early years to 1766 550
Simon P. Keefe
25 Ludwig van Beethoven: An understated prodigy 576
Siân Derry
26 The “Second Mozart”: Mendelssohn and precocity revisited 603
R. Larry Todd
27 Teresa Carreño: “Such gifts are of God, and ought not to be prostituted
for mere gain” 621
Anna E. Kijas
28 A folk song prodigy? Considering the exceptional musical childhood of Chilean
folklorist Margot Loyola 638
Dan Bendrups
29 Glenn Gould: Conventional prodigy, unconventional professional 648
S. Timothy Maloney
 Contents ix

30 André Mathieu (1929–​1968): The emblematic case of

the “young Canadian Mozart” 667
Danick Trottier
31 Jack Teagarden’s Southwestern Sound: A musical prodigy and his field 685
Alex W. Rodriguez
32 “Little” Stevie Wonder: Motown musical prodigy 704
Gabriel Solis
33 “You can’t win, child, but you can’t get out of the game”: Michael Jackson’s
transition from child star to superstar 716
Jacqueline Warwick
34 Jason Becker: Musicality begets musicianship in a heavy
metal guitar prodigy 733
Michael Heffley
35 Justin Bieber, YouTube, and new media celebrity: The tween prodigy at home
and online 749
Tyler Bickford

Author Index 769

Subject Index 777
 List of Contributors

Paolo Ammirante completed a master’s degree in music performance at the University of Toronto
before completing his PhD in music cognition at Macquarie University in Sydney. He is cur-
rently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Science of Music, Auditory Research and Technology
(SMART) Lab at Ryerson University in Toronto. His research interests include sensorimotor syn-
chronization and its neural correlates, vibrotactile perception, and melodic universals.
Jeanne Bamberger, a student of Artur Schnabel, has performed in the US and Europe as a piano
soloist and in chamber music ensembles. She attended Columbia University and the University of
California at Berkeley, receiving degrees in philosophy and music theory. She is Professor Emerita
of Music and Urban Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently
Visiting Professor in the Department of Music at the University of California Berkeley. Her books
include The mind behind the musical ear (Harvard University Press, 1995), Developing musical
intuitions: A project-​based introduction to making and understanding music (Oxford University
Press, 2000), and, most recently, Discovering the musical mind: A view of creativity as learning
(Oxford University Press, 2013). Bamberger’s research focuses on cognitive aspects of music per-
ception, learning, and development. Her interdisciplinary stance leads her to an interest in inves-
tigations of learning among young children and their teachers in other domains as well as music.
Dan Bendrups completed undergraduate studies in music, history, and Spanish at the University
of Melbourne, and a PhD at Macquarie University, Sydney. His doctoral research investigated
music as a force for cultural sustainability and renewal on Easter Island, and he has engaged
in further research across Australasia, South America, and the wider Pacific. He is currently a
member of the Research Education and Development Team in the La Trobe University Graduate
Research School, and is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the Sir Zelman Cowen School of
Music, Monash University. He was the inaugural chair of the International Council for Traditional
Music Regional Committee for Australia and New Zealand, and has produced over 40 schol-
arly outputs in ethnomusicology and popular music studies since 2001. His academic work also
extends into the domain of practice-​led artistic research, and he edited (together with Graeme
Downes) Dunedin soundings: place and performance (Otago University Press, 2011), which was
the first book to focus on practice-​led music research in New Zealand.
Magdalena Berkowska has a master’s degree in psychology from Kazimierz Wielki University,
Bydgoszcz, Poland. She is currently completing a PhD in psychology in the Department of
Cognitive Psychology, University of Finance and Management, Warsaw, Poland. Her research
concerns the measurement of singing proficiency in the general population, with a particular
interest in cases of poor-​pitch singing.
Tyler Bickford holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from Columbia University. He is Assistant
Professor of Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies in the Department of English at the
University of Pittsburgh. His articles and reviews have appeared in Popular Music, Ethnomusicology,
Journal of Folklore Research, Journal of Consumer Culture, Current Musicology, and several edited
volumes. His research focuses on children, popular music, and new media, and includes intensive
ethnographic fieldwork among US schoolchildren. He is currently writing a book about the chil-
dren’s music industry.
xii List of Contributors

Lucie Bouvet studied psychology at the University of Grenoble and completed a PhD at the
Neurocognition and Psychology Laboratory, Grenoble. She performed post-​doctoral research
at the Center of Excellence for Pervasive Developmental Disorders in Montreal and at the
Neuropsychology and Auditory Cognition team in Lille. She is currently an associate profes-
sor at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès. She is interested in the musical abilities of autistic
individuals and more specifically in the acquisition, development, and genetics of special abilities
like absolute pitch. Her research aims to understand the link between the specific autistic way to
process information and the acquisition of savant abilities in autism.
Thenille Braun Janzen completed her PhD in psychology at Macquarie University (Australia) in
cotutelle with the University of São Paulo (Brazil). Her PhD thesis examined the role of temporal
expectancy, expertise, and training, on mechanisms underpinning timing and motor control.
She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Music and Health Research Collaboratory
at the University of Toronto (Canada). Her research concerns music cognition and movement,
and music and rehabilitation. Her latest projects investigate the effects of Rhythmic Auditory
Stimulation as an adjunctive treatment for neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Dave Collins holds a PhD in sport psychology from the University of Surrey and is Professor of
Coaching and Performance at the University of Central Lancashire and a director of Grey Matters
Performance Ltd. He is also a Fellow of the Society of Martial Arts, the Zoological Society of
London, and the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences, an Associate Fellow of the
British Psychological Society, and an ex-​Royal Marine. He has over 150 peer-​reviewed publica-
tions and 40 published books/​book chapters. From an applied perspective, he has worked with
over 60 world or Olympic medallists as well as professional sports teams, dancers, musicians, and
executives in business and public service. His current research interests include performer and
coach development, cognitive expertise, and the promotion of peak performance across different
challenge environments.
Michael H. Connors studied psychology, philosophy, and religion at the University of Sydney,
before completing a PhD in cognitive science at Macquarie University. He is a research associate
at the Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, and at the Dementia Collaborative
Research Centre, University of New South Wales. He has published on delusions and neuropsy-
chiatric disorders, and he has won several awards for his research using hypnosis to create a labo-
ratory model of delusions. Independently of this work, he has also maintained an active interest in
studying expertise from a psychological perspective and has published research on chess experts.
He is currently studying medicine at the University of Sydney.
Barry Cooper is a professor of music at the University of Manchester, England. He is best known
for his research on Beethoven and has written or edited seven books on the composer, the most
recent being Beethoven: An extraordinary life (Oxford University Press, 2013). He has also pub-
lished a scholarly performing edition Beethoven: The 35 piano sonatas (Oxford University Press,
2007), with extensive commentary, proclaimed “Best Classical Publication” of the year by the
Music Industries Association. His completion of the first movement of Beethoven’s unfinished
Tenth Symphony has attracted widespread international attention. His other writings include
Child composers and their works: A historical survey (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), monographs on
English Baroque keyboard music and on music theory in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries,
three catalogs of musical source material, and numerous journal articles and reviews.
Rachel Cowgill studied music at Goldsmiths College, before completing a master’s degree and
PhD in Historical Musicology at King’s College, London. She is Head of Music and Drama at
the University of Huddersfield, having previously taught at the University of Leeds, Liverpool
 List of Contributors xiii

Hope University, and Cardiff University. Currently she chairs the National Association for Music
in Higher Education (UK) and is a vice-​president of the Royal Musical Association. She edited
the Journal of the Royal Musical Association (2007–​2012), and co-​edits the book series Music in
Britain, 1600–​2000 for Boydell & Brewer. Her interests are wide-​ranging, encompassing aspects
of gender and identity in music, Italian opera, Mozart reception, and British music and musical
cultures. Recent publications include co-​edited collections on The arts of the prima donna in the
long nineteenth century (Oxford University Press, 2012), with Hilary Poriss, and Music and the
idea of the north (Ashgate/Routledge, 2017), with Derek Scott and Dave Russell.
Simone Dalla Bella studied cognitive psychology at the University of Padua, Italy, completed a
PhD in cognitive neuropsychology at the University of Montreal, Canada, and received a habilita-
tion degree from the University of Warsaw, Poland. He also obtained a master’s degree in piano
performance from the Conservatory of Music of Mantua, Italy. He is Professor of Movement
Sciences at the University of Montpellier 1, France, a junior member of the Institut Universitaire
de France, and an associate member of the BRAMS laboratory, Montreal. Currently he is director
of the Rhythm and Synchronization Team in the Movement to Health Laboratory (EuroMov),
Montpellier, France. His research interests concern the neurosciences of music and rhythm, with
a particular focus on music disorders in the general population (tone deafness and beat deaf-
ness), and rhythm perception and production mechanisms in the general population, professional
musicians, and patients with brain damage (e.g. with Parkinson’s disease).
Jane W. Davidson studied music, dance, and education in the UK, before studying for a mas-
ter’s of music at Université Laval in Canada and City University London, and a PhD at City
University London. Later in her career she obtained a postgraduate certificate in counseling
(Keele University) and a master of arts in dance (University of Leeds). She is currently Professor of
Creative and Performing Arts and Head of Research at the Faculty of the Victorian College of the
Arts and the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. She is also Deputy Director of the Australian
Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She has served as President
of the Musicological Society of Australia and been Vice-​President of the European Society for
the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Her research interests are broadly in the area of musical perfor-
mance studies, embracing development through to reflective performance practice.
Freya M. de Mink studied musicology, gender studies, and piano performance at Utrecht
University and the HKU University of the Arts. She was a visiting research trainee at the Centre
for Musical Performance as Creative Practice and Cambridge University in 2012, and presented
her earliest findings on gender aspects in online music videos during an exchange visit to the
Technical University Berlin in 2009. Her master’s research thesis, “Musical prodigies: past, pre-
sent and future perspectives on exceptional performance and creativity,” was nominated for the
Utrecht University Best Graduate Thesis Award 2014. The thesis demonstrates an interdiscipli-
nary approach to musical performance at the intersection of musicology, media studies, psychol-
ogy, sociology, and biology.
Siân Derry trained as a pianist at Birmingham Conservatoire. After graduating in 2005 with
the BMus course prize, she completed a MMus in Musicology. Her dissertation explored
the extent to which developments in piano manufacture influenced Beethoven’s writing
for the instrument. In 2007 she was awarded a Harold Hyam Wingate Scholarship to com-
plete doctoral research at the University of Manchester, under the supervision of Professor
Barry Cooper, with a thesis entitled “Beethoven’s experimental figurations and exercises for
piano.” Recent articles include “Piecing Together a Mystery: Beethoven and his Fingering Indications
for the Fourth Piano Concerto Op. 58” (Bonner Beethoven Studien, 2014) and “The Origins of
xiv List of Contributors

Beethoven’s Twenty-Third ‘Diabelli’ Variation” (Arietta: Journal of the Beethoven Piano

Society of Europe, 2014). She has worked as a research associate for an AHRC-funded cultural
engagement project on music education histories in Manchester, and is currently a lecturer
in music at Birmingham Conservatoire.
Paul Evans is a lecturer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia, where he
lectures in music education, motivation, and educational psychology and conducts research on
motivation, particularly in music learning from childhood through to young adulthood. He stud-
ied music education at UNSW with honours research in emotional responses to music, before
completing a PhD in music education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign, USA.
His doctoral research reported on a 10-​year longitudinal study of the motivation of children and
adolescents for music learning, which has since evolved into a research program examining self-​
determination theory, self-​regulated learning, and values and beliefs about motivation in music,
school, and other domains.
Nicolas Farrugia grew up in a musical family, and was initially trained in the violin, classi-
cal percussion, and music theory. He later studied the vibraphone, and has been performing
regularly with jazz and rock ensembles on drums and vibraphone since 1999. He obtained a
PhD in electronic engineering from the Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France. He is cur-
rently a postdoctoral researcher in the cognitive neurosciences of music, with a focus on
rhythm perception and production, as well as musical imagery. His research is performed at
Goldsmiths, University of London, in the Music Mind and Brain group, and the Max Planck
Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany. His projects include
clinical work on the effect of rhythm in the rehabilitation of Parkinson’s disease, as well as
research on brain oscillations, musical performance in drumming, and spontaneous musical
imagery (the “earworms” phenomenon).
Robert Faulkner graduated from the Royal Academy of Music, London, and went on to study
music education at the University of Reading, before completing a master of arts in music psy-
chology and PhD from the University of Sheffield. With extensive experience at every level of edu-
cation from kindergarden through tertiary and adult education in the UK, Iceland, and Australia,
he has worked as a teacher, lecturer, consultant, and researcher. Until 2013, he was Associate
Professor in Music and Early Childhood Education at the University of Western Australia, where
he currently holds an adjunct research position. He has been Deputy Chair of the Icelandic
Music Examinations Board and served on the national executive of the Musicological Society of
Australia. His research interests focus broadly on music education and psychology, with a special
interest in music practices in Iceland. Currently, he is Director of Music at the Methodist Ladies’
College in Perth, Western Australia.
David Henry Feldman studied history at the University of Rochester, was trained as a school
teacher at Stanford University, and took a master’s degree in human development at Harvard
University and a PhD in child development and psychology at Stanford University. He is currently
Professor and Chair of the Eliot–​Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development
at Tufts University, following appointments in Psychology at Yale University and Educational
Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and was Scholar of
the Year for the National Association of Gifted Children in the US for his book on prodigies,
Nature’s gambit. His work has focused on cognitive developmental theory and research, with a
long-​standing interest in extreme giftedness and creativity. He has also been interested in how
natural potential is expressed through domains like music, chess, and mathematics, as well as how
these domains have themselves developed.
 List of Contributors xv

Françoys Gagné studied psychology at the University of Montreal, where he obtained his PhD in
psychology in 1966. After gaining full professorship status in 1972, he completed most of his pro-
fessional career in the department of Psychology at l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM).
From the late 1970s to date he has devoted his research activities to the field of talent develop-
ment, particularly identification measures and academic acceleration. He has gained international
renown through his theory of talent development: the Differentiating Model of Giftedness and
Talent (DMGT), recently updated as the Integrative Model of Talent Development (IMTD). He has
received many professional prizes, including the prestigious Distinguished Scholar Award (1996)
from the National Association of Gifted Children (USA). Since his retirement from UQAM
in 2001, he has maintained regular publishing projects and numerous international keynoting
activities.
Solange Glasser began her tertiary education in 1999, studying violin performance and musicol-
ogy at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, Australia. She published her honours thesis
under the title “Music, the brain, and amusia”: the first of her explorations into the neuromech-
anisms of music and creativity. In 2004 she was accepted into the musicology program of the
University of Paris IV, Sorbonne, where she successfully completed a licence and master’s in
musicology, publishing her master’s mémoire under the title “La synesthésie équivoque d’Olivier
Messiaen” (“The ambiguous synesthesia of Olivier Messiaen”). She went on to complete a one-​
year diploma in orchestral conducting at the Municipal Conservatorium of Paris XIX, under the
supervision of Emanuel Jaeger. She is currently enrolled in a PhD at the University of Melbourne,
Australia, where she is studying the effects of synesthesia and absolute pitch on musical abilities.
Michael Heffley earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Oregon in 1977 and worked as a
journalist specializing in music—​mostly jazz—​while also working as a jazz musician in the Pacific
Northwest throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He later took graduate degrees in music/​arts admin-
istration (MA, Antioch University, 1993) and ethnomusicology (PhD, Wesleyan University, 2000).
He has published widely (Journal of American Music, Northeastern University Press, Jazzinstitut
Darmstadt, Grove Dictionary of American Music, Chamber Music, Signal to Noise) and presented
papers at conferences as an independent scholar of international jazz and intercultural improvised
and experimental world music. He is the author of The music of Anthony Braxton (Greenwood
Press, 1996) and Northern sun, southern moon: Europe’s reinvention of jazz (Yale University Press,
2005). He was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 to produce a third book on Asian and
Asian American voices and influences in the music of his special purview.
Patricia Holmes is a Graduate and Fellow of Trinity College of Music. Following a career as a con-
cert pianist in both solo and chamber music, she gained an MA in the psychology of music at the
University of Sheffield followed by a PhD from City University. She is currently Senior Lecturer
at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, responsible for postgraduate courses in psy-
chology of performance and instrumental and vocal pedagogy. Her research interests reflect her
wide experience as a concert performer and center on the cross-​disciplinary study of various
aspects of elite concert performance, including imagery, investigation of psychological charac-
teristics contributing to the development of expertise, and the significance of timbre as a means
of communication. Recent publications include a paper that draws on social sciences, music psy-
chology, and aesthetics to advocate qualitative phenomenological methods of research in music
performance.
Linda Jarvin studied cognitive psychology and individual difference at the University of
Paris V—​Descartes, France, where she received her doctorate in 1998 before completing a
postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University, USA. She was on the research faculty at Yale’s
xvi List of Contributors

department of psychology from 2000 to 2006, when she moved to Tufts University, USA.
She is currently the Dean of Paris College of Art, France, and an adjunct professor at Tufts
University. Her research interests and publications focus on applied educational research and
assessment, spanning a range from alternative forms of standardized assessment in the USA
to the development of culturally adapted assessments of cognitive performance in the devel-
oping world. She seeks to understand how individual potential can be best served in different
disciplines and cultural contexts.
Jae Yup Jung studied commerce (with majors in accounting and finance) at the University of
Sydney and education at the University of New South Wales at the bachelor level, before complet-
ing a PhD at the University of New South Wales. He is currently an Australian Research Council
DECRA fellow and a senior lecturer in the School of Education, University of New South Wales.
He is a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the Society for
Vocational Psychology (SVP), and the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC). He
conducts research on the decision-​making of gifted and non-​gifted adolescents on topics such
as careers, university entrance, and friendships, usually incorporating motivational and cultural
perspectives.
Simon P. Keefe, graduate of Cambridge, Boston, and Columbia Universities (PhD 1997), is
James Rossiter Hoyle Chair and Head of Music at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of
three books, including most recently Mozart’s Requiem: Reception, work, completion (Cambridge
University Press, 2012), which received the 2013 Marjorie Weston Emerson Award from the
Mozart Society of America for the best book or edition published in 2011 or 2012, and is a life
member of the Academy for Mozart Research at the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Salzburg.
He has edited a further six volumes on Mozart, the concerto genre, and eighteenth-​century music,
all for Cambridge University Press, and is general editor of the Royal Musical Association mono-
graphs series.
Anna E. Kijas received her master’s degrees in library and information science from Simmons
College and in music from Tufts University. She is Senior Digital Scholarship Librarian at Boston
College, and currently serves as the coordinator of the Digital Humanities Round Table for the
Music Library Association. In 2011, she was awarded the Music Library Association’s Walter
Gerboth Award in support of her research on pianist and composer Teresa Carreño (1853–​1917).
Her main areas of research include music criticism and reception studies of women musicians
during the 19th and early 20th centuries. She has given national and international presentations
about her research and the application of digital tools and methods to research in music and
history. She is currently working on a digital project, Documenting Teresa Carreño (http://​docu-
mentingcarreno.org/​), which explores Carreño’s performance career through primary sources
and visualization tools.
Reinhard Kopiez received a degree in classical guitar from the School of Music in Cologne, and
a master’s degree and PhD in musicology from the Technical University of Berlin. He is profes-
sor of music psychology at the Hanover University of Music and Drama, Germany, and head
of the Hanover Music Lab. His latest journal publications concern psychological research on
the relationship between music performance and handedness, historiometric analyses of Clara
Schumann’s repertoire, and audiovisual music evaluation. He is co-​editor of the German standard
handbook on music psychology (Musikpsychologie. Das neue Handbuch, Rowohlt, 2008). From
2001 to 2005 he was president of the German Society for Music Psychology (DGM). From 2009
to 2012 he was president of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM).
He is currently editor of the journal Musicae Scientiae.
 List of Contributors xvii

Geesoo Maie Lee is the Program Officer for the Center for Psychology in Schools and Education
(CPSE) at the American Psychological Association. She helps manage projects generated by
the Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education and several task forces involved in the
application of psychology to teaching and learning. The Center also focuses on performance and
achievement of children and adolescents with special gifts and talents in all domains such as sci-
ence, the performing arts, and sport. Maie is a member of the CPSE team which conducts work on
talent development in STEM funded by the National Science Foundation and work on high per-
formance psychology funded by the American Psychological Foundation. She completed her BA
in psychology at American University and is enrolled in a master’s degree course in organizational
sciences, focusing on organizational management, at George Washington University.
Andreas C. Lehmann has been Professor of Systematic Musicology and Music Psychology at the
Hochschule für Musik (School of Music) Würzburg, Germany, since 2000. He is associate editor
of the music cognition journal Musicae Scientiae, and was president (2006–​2013) of the German
Music Psychology Society (DGM) from 2006 to 2013. He is currently vice-​president of the DGM.
He has published a number of book chapters, journal articles, and books. Together with John
A. Sloboda and Robert H. Woody he was the co-​author of Psychology for musicians: understanding
and acquiring the skills (Oxford University Press, 2007), and he co-​edited the German standard
handbook on music psychology Musikpsychologie: Das neue Handbuch (Rowohlt, 2008). His main
areas of interest are expertise research, empirical music education, and performance research.
Áine MacNamara holds a PhD from the University of Central Lancashire where she is currently
a senior lecturer in elite performance. Her research interests are broadly focused on talent devel-
opment and elite performance in sport and other domains. Her main research is focused on the
development of talent across performance domains and the application of this research in applied
settings. Her work in this area involves collaborations with national governing bodies of sport in
the UK and Ireland as well as research collaborations across a number of institutions. Her work
has been published in peer-​reviewed journals in sport, music, and education as well as in more
than 10 book chapters.
S. Timothy Maloney is the Head of the Music Library and an adjunct professor of music at the
University of Minnesota. Previously he was the Director of the Music Division at the National
Library of Canada, where Glenn Gould’s archives were under his care. He has spoken and written
extensively about Gould, curated exhibitions of Gouldiana that travelled nationally and inter-
nationally, created the award-​winning Glenn Gould Archive website, and in 1982 played first
clarinet in the chamber orchestra that recorded Richard Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll under Gould’s
direction.
Andrew J. Martin, BA (Hons), MEd (Hons), PhD, is Professor of Educational Psychology at the
University of New South Wales. He specializes in motivation, engagement, achievement, and quan-
titative research methods. He is also Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Education at
the University of Oxford, Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the
University of Sydney, Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, and President of
the International Association of Applied Psychology’s Division 5 Educational, Instructional, and
School Psychology. He is associate editor of the British Journal of Educational Psychology and on
the editorial boards of four journals, including two international journals (Journal of Educational
Psychology and Contemporary Educational Psychology).
Gary E. McPherson studied music education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, before
completing a master’s degree in music education at Indiana University, a PhD at the University
xviii List of Contributors

of Sydney, and a Licentiate and Fellowship in trumpet performance through Trinity College,
London. He is the Ormond Professor and Director of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at
the University of Melbourne, and previously held a position as the Marilyn Pflederer Zimmerman
endowed chair in music education at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA. He
has served as National President of the Australian Society for Music Education and President of
the International Society for Music Education. His research interests are broad and his approach
interdisciplinary. His most important research examines the acquisition and development of
musical competence, and motivation to engage and participate in music from novice to expert
levels. With a particular interest in the acquisition of visual, aural, and creative performance skills,
he has attempted to understand more precisely how music students become sufficiently motivated
and self-​regulated to achieve at the highest level.
Miriam Anna Mosing completed a bachelor’s degree in biopsychology and a master’s degree
in neuroscience at Maastricht University, The Netherlands. She then continued with a research
PhD in behaviour genetics at the University of Queensland and the QIMR Berghofer Medical
Research Institute in Australia. Since the end of 2011 she has been working as a post-​doctoral
research fellow at the Neuroscience Department and the Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics
Department, Karolinska Institute, Sweden. Miriam’s research interests are manifold, including
cognitive ability, practice effects, aging, well-​being, (mental and physical) health, and quality of
life, using interdisciplinary approaches to quantify the interplay between genes and environment.
Currently her research focuses on two broad areas: (1) practice effects on musical ability and
cognitive transfer, and (2) birth-​weight effects on mental and physical health as well as cognition
throughout life and into old age.
Laurent Mottron was born in France, and has lived in Quebec since 1990. He is a full profes-
sor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Université de Montréal, and holds the Marcelle
and Rolande Gosselin research chair on cognitive neuroscience in autism. As a clinician, he
founded the specialized autism spectrum disorder without mental retardation clinic at the
Rivière des Prairies Hospital, Montreal, and the pervasive development disorder centre for
excellence of l’Université de Montréal. As a researcher, continuously funded by the Canadian
Institutes of Health Research since 1997, he has published with his group about a hundred
scientific articles about the cognitive neuroscience of autism. His most significant results
relate to visual and auditory perception and intelligence in savant and non-​savant autism,
investigated by brain imaging and cognitive tasks. The enhanced perceptual functioning
model, which he developed with the Montreal group, is now one of the leading theories for
interpreting cognitive and functional MRI data in autism. He is also actively involved in the
defense of autistic rights and image in the media and in science.
Adam Ockelford studied at the Royal Academy of Music, London, before embarking on a career
that has embraced performing, composing, teaching, researching, writing, consultancy, and man-
agement. His PhD drew together thinking from music theory and music psychology, in inves-
tigating how music intuitively makes sense to us all. Today, his research interests are in music
psychology, education, theory, and aesthetics—​particularly special educational needs and the
development of exceptional abilities; learning, memory and creativity; the cognition of musical
structure; and the construction of musical meaning. He has over 100 publications to his name,
including 20 books. He is Secretary of the Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research
(SEMPRE), Chair of Soundabout, an Oxfordshire-​based charity in the UK that supports music
provision for children and young people with complex needs, and founder of the AMBER Trust,
a charity that supports visually impaired children in their pursuit of music.
 List of Contributors xix

Lena Quinto completed her PhD in psychology at Macquarie University on the strategies that
performers and composers use to convey emotion in music. Her publications address the collabo-
rative and multimodal nature of music performance and composition, and her recent research
has examined facial expressions of emotion in both musical and non-​musical contexts. She is an
Honorary Associate of the Department of Psychology at Macquarie University, and is currently
studying medicine at the University of Sydney.
Alex W. Rodriguez is a writer, improviser, trombonist, and doctoral candidate in the Department
of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He completed a Master of
Arts degree in jazz history and research at Rutgers University, where his research focused on
early jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden, and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music from
Amherst College, with a specialization in trombone performance. At UCLA, he co-founded the
Department of Ethnomusicology’s intercultural improvisation ensemble, the Omni-​Musicality
Group, and was Assistant Director of the UCLA Jazz Orchestra. He has served as editor-​in-​chief
of Ethnomusicology Review and contributed jazz coverage to NPR Music, and has performed jazz
and popular music throughout North and South America. His current research focuses on jazz
clubs around the world and the creative improvised music communities that sustain them, with
case studies in California, Chile, and Siberia.
Larisa V. Shavinina studied psychology at Kiev State University, Ukraine, where she also obtained
her master’s degree and PhD. She is a professor at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, Canada.
Her research program focuses on the study of the child prodigy phenomenon and high ability,
broadly defined, including intellectual giftedness, scientific talent in the case of Nobel laureates,
innovative abilities (especially individual innovation in the case of outstanding innovators with
long-​standing records of breakthrough innovations), innovation education, innovation-​based
economy, entrepreneurial giftedness, managerial talent, and the role of wisdom and intuition
in innovation. She edited the bestselling International handbook on innovation, The interna-
tional handbook on giftedness, The Routledge international handbook of innovation education and
Silicon Valley North: A high tech cluster of innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as co-​editing
CyberEducation and Beyond knowledge: extracognitive aspects of developing high ability.
Dean Keith Simonton received his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Occidental College
and then earned his master’s degree and PhD in social psychology from Harvard University.
He is currently Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. He
has produced more than 470 publications, including 13 books. His honors include the William
James Book Award, the Sir Francis Galton Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Study
of Creativity, the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Achievement in Psychology and the
Arts, the Theoretical Innovation Prize in Personality and Social Psychology, the George A. Miller
Outstanding Article Award, the E. Paul Torrance Award, and three Awards for Excellence in
Research from the Mensa Education and Research Foundation. His research program concen-
trates primarily on the application of historiometric methods to the study of genius, creativity,
leadership, talent, and aesthetics. He most recently edited the Wiley–​Blackwell Handbook of genius.
Gabriel Solis studied early music at the University of Wisconsin–​Madison before completing a PhD
in musicology and ethnomusicology at Washington University, St. Louis. He is Professor of Music,
African American Studies, and Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign,
USA. He has held fellowships from the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and
the Madden Fund, and his books and articles have won awards from the Association for Recorded
Sound Collections and the Society for Ethnomusicology. His interdisciplinary work covers a wide
xx List of Contributors

range of topics, but is focused on historical ethnomusicology and the construction and signifi-
cance of race in music.
Jakub Sowiński received a master’s degree in psychology from the Faculty of Psychology at the
University of Finance and Management in Warsaw, Poland, where he is currently completing his
PhD in psychology. The research conducted for his PhD dissertation concerns sensorimotor tim-
ing abilities in the general population and in individuals with musical giftedness.
Rena F. Subotnik is Director of the Center for Psychology in Schools and Education at the
American Psychological Association. One mission of the Center is to generate public awareness,
advocacy, clinical applications, and cutting-​edge research ideas that enhance the achievement
and performance of children and adolescents with gifts and talents in all domains. Her recent
publications reflect her scholarship on applications of psychological science to gifted educa-
tion, talent development in specific domains, and psychological strength training for academi-
cally gifted children and youth. She has been supported by the National Science Foundation,
the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the American
Psychological Foundation, the Association for Psychological Science, the McDonnell Foundation,
the US Department of Education Javits program, and the Spencer Foundation for research on and
services for gifted adolescents.
Andrew Thomas was awarded his DMA from the Juilliard School in 1972. In the course of
his development as a composer, he studied with Karel Husa, Nadia Boulanger, Luciano Berio,
Elliot Carter, and Otto Luening. He has served on the Composition Faculty in the Juilliard
Pre-​C ollege Division from 1969 to date, and was Director of the Division from 1994 to 2006.
As a composer, pianist, and conductor, he won grants from the National Endowment for
the Arts, as well as Distinguished Teacher Citations from the White House Commission on
Presidential Scholars. Since 2000, he has taught and performed in Hong Kong, Beijing, and
Shanghai, as well as at the Guangxi Arts College in Nanning, PRC, where he has studied and
composed extensively for Traditional Chinese Orchestra. He has also taught widely in South
Korea, conducting the Prime Symphony Orchestra, the Suwon Philharmonic Orchestra, and
the Korean Symphony Orchestra. In addition, he has performed, taught and recorded in
Poland, Venezuela, and Australia.
William Forde Thompson is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, Macquarie
University, and runs the Music, Sound and Performance Lab. He is the founding Director
of the Centre for Elite Performance, Expertise and Training, and Chief Investigator in the
Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders. He is Editor
of the Encyclopedia of Music in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (SAGE, 2014) and author of
Music, thought and feeling: Understanding the psychology of music (Oxford University Press,
2nd edition, 2014).
R. Larry Todd was educated at Yale University, where he received his BA (summa cum laude),
MPh, and PhD in musicology. He is Arts and Sciences Professor of Music at Duke University, where
he has taught for several decades. A recipient of fellowships form the Guggenheim Foundation
and National Humanities Center, he has published extensively on the music of the Mendelssohns,
as well as essays on topics ranging from Obrecht to Haydn, Robert and Clara Schumann, Liszt,
and Webern. His biography Mendelssohn: A life in music (Oxford University Press, 2003) was
named best biography by the Association of American Publishers (the German translation, Felix
Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Sein Leben, seine Werke received a Deutscher Musikeditions Preis), and
his biography Fanny Hensel: The other Mendelssohn (Oxford University Press, 2010) was awarded
 List of Contributors xxi

the Nicholas Slonimsky Prize from ASCAP. A concert pianist, Todd has recently recorded, with
Nancy Green, the complete cello and piano works of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn for JRI
Recordings.
Danick Trottier is a professor in the Department of Music at the Université du Québec à Montréal
(UQAM) and researcher in the Development of Music Audiences in Quebec (DMAQ) at the
Université de Montréal. He holds a PhD in musicology from the Université de Montréal and
the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. From 2008 to 2010, he com-
pleted postdoctoral research at Harvard University with a fellowship from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Since 2010, he is a member of the sci-
entific committee of Les Cahiers de la Société Québécoise de Recherches en Musique. He has pub-
lished articles in journals such as Circuit, Dissonance, Filigrane, Intersections, Les Cahiers Debussy,
Perspectives of New Music, Speculum Musicae, and Volume! La revue des musiques populaires. With
a particular interest in the field of sociomusicology and music history, his research focuses on top-
ics such as the musical avant-​garde, music competition, homage works, and pop music in Quebec.
Fredrik Ullén has a PhD in medical science from the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, and a mas-
ter’s degree (solo piano) from the Royal College of Music, Stockholm. He is currently Professor of
Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet. He is also an
active concert pianist, represented on around 20 CDs, and a lifetime fellow of the Swedish Royal
Academy of Music. His research focuses on neural mechanisms of expert performance, with a
special focus on musical expertise, and uses a combination of techniques from experimental psy-
chology, behavior genetics, and neurobiology. Specific research interests include skill learning,
brain plasticity as a consequence of long-​term training, creativity, intelligence, and motivational
factors that influence practice.
Larry Vandervert is a retired college professor and has published and edited works in psychol-
ogy, the neurosciences, innovation, giftedness, and science in general. His major research interest
is in how, through practice, the cognitive functions of the brain’s cerebellum constantly improve
both mental and behavioral performance. In his publications he has applied the findings of recent
brain-​imaging studies to creativity, the development of child prodigies, and the evolution of lan-
guage. In his publications on the development of child prodigies he has proposed that the cerebel-
lum acts as a “master computational system” in heightening and streamlining their attentional
processes which, in turn, accelerates their learning. He has further proposed that the rapid evolu-
tion of the human cerebellum put the potential for these processes in place at least 50,000 years
ago, and that, with the advent of significant rule-​governed culture, child prodigies began to appear
at least 10,000 years ago. He has been a Fellow of the American Psychological Association since
1992 (retired), now writes under the egis of American Nonlinear Systems, and currently lives in
Spokane, WA, USA.
Jacqueline Warwick earned a doctorate in musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles,
under the supervision of Susan McClary and Robert Walser. She is an associate professor at the
Fountain School of Performing Arts, Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia, Canada. She is the
author of Girl groups, girl culture: Popular music and identity in the 1960s (Routledge, 2007), and
she served as senior editor, responsible for entries on popular music since 1945, for the Grove dic-
tionary of American music (2nd edition, Oxford University Press, 2014). She is currently preparing
a book called Musical prodigies and the performance of childhood, forthcoming from Routledge.
 Introduction

My career has been devoted to studying children’s musical development, and I have been blessed
to observe the musical education of many highly gifted young musicians. But among all of the
children I have met, taught, and studied across three decades of research, there is one young girl
who stands in stark contrast to all the others. Her name is Tiffany Poon, and I have vivid recol-
lections of the first time her parents invited me to hear her play just after she had turned seven.
I remember being astonished that such a young girl could be able to perform with such superb
artistry and technical maturity as a pianist.
What made Tiffany so different from the thousands of other children I have heard over the
years? How can her remarkable abilities be explained, and how was she able to perform at such a
young age with such a high level of maturity on the piano?
In bringing together the team of researchers who have worked on this publication, I have
attempted to draw together what is known about extraordinary musical accomplishment during
childhood, and in so doing, address the dearth of scientific literature that is available on musical
prodigies, as compared with studies that seek to explain other areas of human accomplishment
such as expertise, talent, and genius.
Far more research will be needed to assemble a complete understanding of how very young
children are able to engage with music at the highest artistic level, yet within this volume readers
will find a multitude of clues that will help shape their thinking about how children like Tiffany
are able to earn the label “musical prodigy.”
Until now, no single resource had attempted to bring together such a varied range of disciplines
to study the phenomenon of the musical prodigy, nor attempted to cover such a diverse range
of topics. The 35 chapters which comprise Musical Prodigies: Interpretations from Psychology,
Education, Musicology, and Ethnomusicology are organized into three sections: Theoretical frame-
works, Aspects of development, and Individual examples. They comprise interpretations from the
disciplines of psychology, education, musicology, and ethnomusicology. Each retains the style and
referencing from the author’s area of research.
Theoretical Frameworks includes seven chapters which survey issues that define and characterize
prodigious abilities and development within the domain of music. I am grateful to Françoys Gagné
for taking the lead in Chapter 1. Thanks to his theoretical models, he offers an innovative in-depth
analysis of the phenomenon of musical prodigiousness. Each of the successive sections, inspired by his
Differentiating Model of Giftedness and Talent structure, seeks to provide answers to questions such as
where does the phenomenal developmental growth seen in the early development of musical prodigies
originate, and what nourishes it. Also addressed are a number of misconceptions and inaccuracies in
the literature, including the different uses of terms such as gifted, talented, and prodigious. A major
focus of this near-book-length chapter is to pinpoint the most important facets that distinguish musical
prodigies from other professional musicians, and explain their extremely rapid musical development.
In Chapter 2, David Henry Feldman explains why two of the 20th century’s most remarkable
musical prodigies—​Ervin Nyiregyházi and Yehudi Menuhin—​had such different careers and lives.
Nyiregyházi’s life was one of obscurity and poverty, while Menuhin had an illustrious career that
spanned many decades. Applying the coincidence framework, this chapter enables readers to iden-
tify and understand the very different lives and careers of these two remarkable musical prodigies.
Robert Faulkner and Jane W. Davidson (Chapter 3) extend this conception through their analyses
xxiv Introduction

of how wide-​ranging conditions can come into alignment to produce a unity of direction or purpose
in the form of syzygies that support musical development. The biological basis of music and recent
genetic research on music-​related skills forms the basis of Chapter 4 by Miriam Anna Mosing and
Fredrik Ullén. Even though this form of research is still in its infancy, possible genetic influences on
musical achievement and abilities are currently being explored and documented.
In the very early years of the 20th century, some important insights were forged when Carl
Stumpf, working in Berlin, developed the earliest objective diagnostic approaches to understanding
perceptual–​cognitive achievement in children. Using case study examples of three musical prodigies—​
Pepito Arriola, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Ervin Nyiregyházi—​Reinhard Kopiez and Andreas C.
Lehmann (Chapter 5) show that these seemingly unrelated studies originated within the Berlin research
network. Stumpf ’s test instrument could still be useful today. Dean Keith Simonton (Chapter 6) extends
this interpretation by showing how the most eminent and prolific classical composers were able to
exhibit greater creative productivity and longer-​lasting works as a result of precocious development; in
essence, he describes how early bloomers bloomed more and were able to maximize their lifetime out-
put (what Simonton refers to as “more bang for the buck!”). Applying a musicological interpretation,
Barry Cooper (Chapter 7) provides a chronological list of 137 child composers born before 1900 to
show that success as a child composer actually bears little relationship to later success as an adult com-
poser, even though almost all child composers continued composing in later life. Their posthumous
reputations rest almost entirely on their success or otherwise as adults.
Fifteen chapters dealing with specific Aspects of development form Section 2 of the volume.
Larry Vandervert (Chapters 8 and 9) provides an evolutionary explanation of how human work-
ing memory has developed across the last million years, and particularly, with the advent of rule-​
governed symbol systems, over the past 10,000 years, and how the human brain’s cerebellum and
prefrontal cortex collaborate to enable accelerated attentional control of a type that distinguishes
musical prodigies. Acting as a “master computational system” the cerebellum is able to encode
detailed sequences of rule-​governed events in working memory and movements in order to
anticipate future circumstances and their performance requirements, which we see played out
in the extraordinary cognitive abilities of precocious children. According to Larisa V. Shavinina
(Chapter 10) musical prodigies see, understand, and interpret everything around them by con-
structing an individual intellectual picture of the world which is different from that of other chil-
dren. In a similar vein to Vandervert, she explains how children’s mental development can be
accelerated during sensitive periods that lead to faster growth of the child’s cognitive resources
and their construction into a specific framework of cognitive experience.
Rena F. Subotnik, Linda Jarvin, Andrew Thomas, and Geesoo Maie Lee (Chapter 11) explore the
role of psychosocial skills in developing prodigious musical performers, especially in terms of certain
transitions across three stages of musical development: how abilities develop into competencies, com-
petencies into expertise, and expertise into scholarly productivity/artistry. Importantly, these authors
highlight how prodigies differ from their normally developing peers in the skills and abilities with
which they enter pre-​college conservatory training programs, plus the support they need and typically
receive from their teachers. Applying a different interpretation, Jeanne Bamberger’s work in the mid
1980s (Chapter 12) focused on the personal crises that can occur among prodigies during their critical
transition from early musical prodigiousness to adult artistry. In this updated and expanded contribu-
tion of a landmark publication from the mid-​1980s, Bamberger shows how young precocious children
can have access to a cluster of multiple and well-​integrated musical structures that can come apart, and
even come into conflict, during the transition into adolescence.
Motivation obviously plays a critical role in shaping any form of talent, so must be addressed
and carefully managed during the development of any musical prodigy. For this reason, Andrew J.
Martin (Chapter 13) summarizes seminal motivational theories to explain how motivation
 Introduction xxv

can facilitate development, in addition to the impeding and maladaptive factors and processes
that pose potential barriers during the development of a musical prodigy. In Chapter 14, Áine
MacNamara, Dave Collins, and Patricia Holmes focus on whether talent development can benefit
from, or even need, a variety of challenges to facilitate superior adult performance. The central
issue in this contribution is how young talented musicians build and acquire the confidence, resil-
ience, and psychological characteristics needed to achieve at a high level and overcome adversity.
Focusing on music composition, Lena Quinto, Paolo Ammirante, Michael H. Connors, and
William Forde Thompson (Chapter 15) show how the compositions of prodigies reflect a range of
cognitive, emotional, and empathic skills that differentiate them from typically developing musi-
cians as well as from other prodigies. They provide a framework for studying accelerated progres-
sion and expertise more generally, and discuss the application of this framework to prodigies of
music composition.
The development of timing, a prerequisite for all forms of musicianship, is discussed by Thenille
Braun Janzen, Paolo Ammirante, and William Forde Thompson in Chapter 16. Drawing on
extraordinary cases of rhythmic prodigies who seem to violate the natural process of develop-
ment, the authors argue that timing expertise develops on different levels of analysis, from the
capacity to keep time with the beat to the more fluid and continuous movements involved in
performing on an instrument. Timing skills are discussed further in Chapter 17 with respect to a
remarkable case study of a drummer prodigy—​Igor. Simone Dalla Bella, Jakub Sowiński, Nicolas
Farrugia, and Magdalena Berkowska show that Igor’s ability to move together with the beat of
auditory simuli may be a key process in explaining his precocious rhythmic abilities and, more
generally, may act as a marker of this form of exceptional musical skill.
Whether a musical prodigy will embark on a career in music provides the basis for insights into
career-​related decisions surveyed by Jae Yup Jung and Paul Evans (Chapter 18). Consideration
of these factors is especially important given that many prodigies never go on to have successful
careers in music—​nor should they given that their early extraordinary abilities would not neces-
sarily bind them to the field of music for the rest of their lives. Understanding how the general
public typically classify and define musical prodigies as compared with scientific explanations
forms the focus of Chapter 19, by Freya M. de Mink and me. Analysing a selection of YouTube
examples of musical prodigies opens up the discussion of some of the stereotypes and myths of
the “musical prodigy” phenomenon, especially with regard to adult conceptions of childhood and
notions of popularity and commercial success.
From the distinctive perspective of synesthesia, Solange Glasser (Chapter 20) documents the
musical development of one of the 20th century’s most renowned and prolific composers—​Olivier
Messiaen. Glasser’s insights show how synesthesia can act not only as a catalyst for prodigious
development, but also a determining force in the prodigy’s choice of domain of expertise.
In what ways are savant prodigies similar to musical prodigies? In Chapter 21 on prodigious
musical talent in blind children with autism and learning difficulties, Adam Ockelford shows
how an exceptional early cognitive environment resulting from blindness, autism, and learning
difficulties can predispose children to develop an obsessive early interest in sound and music that
can have a profound impact on early musical development, and sometimes lead to savantism. We
can read Ockelford’s description of Derek Paravicini and the other children he has worked with
over a period of more than 30 years, and note in particular that his chapter does not refer to any
of these children as musical prodigies, but rather as “musical savants” who possess prodigious
musical talent. Laurent Mottron and Lucie Bouvet (Chapter 22) complement this view through
their explanation of how music, like numbers and written language, represents an opportunity
for autistic children to exercise nonhierarchical and nonstrategic mapping between elements that
have the same relationship and structure.
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