Nico Muhly's story
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Thoughts from Andrew
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Prodigies Chapter VIII
Many parents dream of having accomplished children, but children who manifest genius at a young age may prove utterly confounding. They are likely to suffer from asynchrony: having an intellectual age at odds with their emotional age. As a result, with no real peers, such children may be desperately lonely.
Some families neglect such brilliance in an attempt to bestow the comforts of "a normal childhood"; others pressure their children to perform and thus poison the children's relationship to art, and sometimes to themselves. Prodigies can be damaged by either error. Yet some grow up largely unscathed and produce music that contributes substantially to the beauty of the world.
"I didn't want to teach him. Such imagination can be very fragile. But his mother said, 'Clever and faithful helper, don't worry. He is interested…
On his way to kindergarten one day, Drew Peterson asked his mother, "Can I just stay home so I can learn something?" Sue was at a loss. "He…
"Genius is an abnormality, and abnormalities do not come one at a time. Many gifted kids have ADD or OCD or Asperger's. When the parents are confronted…
Robert Sirota, president of the Manhattan School of Music, said, "Mothers had their little boys castrated in Renaissance Italy to give them a music…
"Young people like romance stories and war stories and good-and-evil stories and old movies because their emotional life mostly is and should be…
"I understand why my parents turned against me. We all hate what we don't understand." —Jonathan Floril
"If my father had pressured me like this and I had not done well, it would have been child abuse, and I would be traumatized, maybe destroyed. He…
"He's not a normal child. Why should he have a normal childhood?" —Chloe Yu on her son Marc
"He has an issue with intimacy. He doesn't want anybody on his back. I know, because he doesn't want me on his back. He's totally free, joking, and…
"It was a trio. The bass player is sixty-five, the drummer is maybe fifty-eight, and I'm nine, and I'm the leader. I didn't pay attention to the…
"I want to give people pleasure. I love the phrase preferable to silence. Is this piece of music preferable to silence? We're in the business of…
Small children go from nonverbal to verbal in two years, and to literate in five more. They can master several languages at the same time. They learn…