Let’s chat about Music — The child prodigy

Is it wise to push 5 year old Johnny or Jane onto the concert platform?

AI Generation. Small child at a large piano

For some reason, friends and acquaintances frequently send me video clips of very young children playing (usually) the piano. The quality of the playing extends from “Twinkle, twinkle little star” played solo with both hands, to difficult pieces with full orchestral accompaniment.

Naturally, there are lots of oohs! and ahs! and other comments of amazement. People love to be amazed by something out of the ordinary, something cute, and these video clips have a tendency to spread like wildfire.

It is my personal view that these have the potential to cause harm to the child, and I would like to share a few thoughts, urging caution, in this regard.

We live in fiercely competitive times, and the race to make a career as a performing musician is as competitive as motor racing, where only a very few will emerge victorious and make a name for themselves. So, the question is, how young, at what age, should one start on this path?

I need to be very careful to explain exactly what I am referring to here.

Every music student, regardless of age or ablility must have the opportunity to perform the music that they have mastered for other students, their parents and family, the parents and family of the other performers and interested guests. These are less formal concerts arranged by the teacher or the music department where the child is a student. Many orchestras have Youth festivals where children of junior school (and, separately, senior school) may have an opportunity to play with the orchestra.

These are controlled events with direct supervision by the teachers concerned and are not intended to be professional.

I have no concerns with these. I also have no concerns when parents excitedly make a video to share with their friends and family who could not be there on the day, or as a record of the event.

I do have concerns when the child is pushed forward in a professional setting and presented as exceptional, as a star, as a prodigy.

Or when these videos are loaded to social media and monetised.

Many of these children are not having formal instruction from a qualified teacher. Nearly all of them have hyper-inflated CV’s written by parents who are guessing or exaggerating.

Or, it could be the case that teachers may have the contacts to make this happen and ambitious parents are often very keen to make this happen. Have these considered the emotional implications for the child?

Some young persons have the emotional maturity and genuine musical gifts to deal with this. Most do not. As a (now retired) professional music teacher with many years of experience, I can tell the difference easily, but the average concert goer might not be able to.

There are several issues here.

The first is that the ability to learn music by observation and play it back accurately is not at all rare. I could also do it as a child, and I’ve had several children that I taught who had this ability. “Playing by ear” often becomes a stumbling block if too much is made of this gift. It is purely instinctual and is not backed up by technique, understanding or knowledge. In only rare cases do these students progress because everything comes too easily, and when it doesn’t, they give up. Many of these children grow up struggling to read music as they have seldom had to. Learning to read music is not easy for any learner, but gifted children often become bored and therefore progress can be very slow, resulting in frustration. So I ask myself, does this child have an understanding of what it is they are doing, or is it simply copying?

A second concern is when the hand is insufficiently developed and too small for the size of piano keys. As soon as a child has sufficiently developed hands to deal with the adult size and weight of a concert piano keyboard, music lessons could (and probably should) commence. In pianos we have no quarter or half sizes as string instruments have. Work arounds learned at this age are almost impossible to eradicate. Many of the children playing in these videos are learning bad habits and reinforcing these by engaging incorrect and weak muscles and twisting their hands into unnatural positions to get to all the notes and press with sufficient loudness. From my personal experience, teaching and observation, these bad habits are incredibly difficult to un-learn and have the potential to persist well into adulthood. Many a promising career has been spoilt by poor hand control and coordination, which we refer to as technique.

The third is that while this talent is not all that rare, what is extremely rare is parents with the money and influence to obtain a teacher with the influence needed to push this child in front of an audience and orchestra.

The fourth is the ability to provide, at home, a quality instrument that matches the child’s talent. More good pianists than I can tell you about have had their talent ruined with a combination of a poor instrument and the resulting poor techniques learned because the instrument cannot deliver. I had a very good illustration case of a young girl with this talent who gave up because she could not reconcile what she had played on her piano with the one I taught on. The tuner told me that her piano was two semitones flat and could not be raised owing to a cracked frame. A pre-requisite for this type of talent is perfect pitch. So she reproduced all her pieces at the pitch she heard, not the correct pitch. She couldn’t reconcile, her parents couldn’t (wouldn’t) get a better piano, she gave up in frustration.

The fifth is that I have a problem with teachers for whom getting a good reputation on the back of talented children is more important than the development of the child’s talent. It often happens that the concert item is also the only piece the child knows. It stands to reason that the very best teachers should be found for gifted children. For reasons that I will describe elsewhere, this is no easy task. What one needs to remember is that a teacher may also be on that road to have a reputation and a name as a great teacher. And what better way to do that than by presenting gifted students publicly?

The sixth is that these children quickly learn that they are “special”, “better than other children”, “gifted”, “talented”, need to be mollycoddled and catered to. An inflated sense of their own worth … well you know what sort of adults these have the potential to become.

For most people, the only times in their lives when they have the time and the freedom to explore everything that interests them and arising out of that, the freedom to pick and choose what they would like to do, is childhood and retirement.

If the child focuses and becomes really good, they may become the next Lang-Lang or Evgeny Kissen, but they will seldom have had the time to be good at anything else. Sports, games, sciences, and life lessons normally learned during childhood may be bypassed.

If they don’t focus (much more likely, because after all we all have to have balance in our lives) they will probably eventually learn the very hard lesson that they are not so special as we led them to believe, that they are just ordinary people. And that’s a very hard life lesson.

Is it fair to the child to set them up in this way? Isn’t the objective of childhood to become a responsible, functional adult? How is pushing them into it pre-maturely actually helpful?

And, last question, who exactly is having fun here? The child? Or his parents and teacher? Or all those adults who think this is “amazing” and come away thrilled with yet another circus act?

Sorry my friends and readers. Very touchy subject here, on which I have strong feelings, having observed far too many cases of frustration and disappointment.