What Does Prodigy Mean and Do They Have Elite Musical Talent?

Estimated reading time 5 minutes

Introduction

Do you have a musical prodigy on your hands? Do you need information about how your musical child or student learns? Musical giftedness can emerge as early as one to two years old and usually appears before age six. It’s characterized by a rage to learn. Keep reading What Does Prodigy Mean and Do They Have Elite Musical Talent? to get examples of this shocking musical ability.

What Does Prodigy Mean: Definition

“What Does Prodigy Mean?” A prodigy is a child who shows extraordinary ability for his or her age. They can be found in many disciplines (e.g., math, art, music, chess, etc.) – any domain of learning that has clear rules.

Ellen Winner asserts:

The more formal and rule-governed the domain, the more likely it is to yield gifted children. (Gifted Children 5)

As you can see, there are many domains that foster giftedness. However, in this post we’ll focus on musical talent.

When the teaching and all other factors are kept equal, gifted children will still learn things faster and more easily than typical learners:

A prodigy doesn’t just gain proficiency – they gain a degree of skill that goes far beyond other children of their age.
Gifted children can be mildly or moderately advanced, but a prodigy will display exceptional skill.
Also, they’ll often have an intuitive grasp of how music works and can teach themselves.

What Does Prodigy Mean: Signs, Aptitudes, and Outcomes

“What Does Prodigy Mean?” Here are the signs, aptitudes, and outcomes that indicate musical giftedness.

Earliest Signs

First, Kimberly McCord has said that currently there aren’t any good measures that can predict musical giftedness. Second, gifted children usually aren’t globally gifted.

Alice M. Hammel states:

Until recently, many educators assumed that students who are intellectually gifted are equally capable in every academic situation. This premise is only appropriate for some students.

Many students are gifted in only one area or in a small number of areas. This is also true for students who are twice exceptional. (Exceptional Music Pedagogy 28)

Twice exceptional music students are children who are both extremely talented and have learning disabilities. For more information:

What Are Some Signs of a Twice Exceptional (2E) Child?

According to Winner, these are the earliest clues to look for:

The earliest clue is a strong desire to learn music.
They sing early. In fact, they can sometimes sing before they can speak (which was the case with Handel).
In addition, they can sing with accurate pitch by around age two. By contrast, typical learners won’t gain accurate pitch until around age five.
They have enhanced musical memories and can sing or play a song after one listening, which Mozart could do.
Also, they can improvise soon after they start learning an instrument.
However, sight reading ability isn’t reliably linked to musical giftedness.
Likewise, absolute pitch (aka perfect pitch) isn’t consistently correlated to musical giftedness either.

Aptitudes

Jean Bamberger notes that gifted children will shift between different ways of conceptualizing music:

Felt Path: The felt path refers to how musicians kinesthetically feel their way through a piece of music.
Imagined Sound: The imagined sound is when the children hear the music in their heads.
Musical Score: This refers to children’s interactions with the sheet music.
Musical Structure: This is the students’ intuitive grasp of the form, melody, harmony, and rhythm of a piece of music.

Winner goes on to say:

Bamberger noted that teachers shift continually among comments that highlight music as felt path, as a set of notations, as sound, and as structure. The gifted children she observed shifted their attention readily with the teacher.

Bamberger has argued that such easy shifting from one mode of representation to another is a significant sign of musical giftedness. (98 – 99)

In addition, Bamberger felt that when “figural knowledge” (i.e., the felt path and imagined sound) are challenged by the introduction of more formal instruction, the students can experience a (so to speak) midlife crisis. Therefore, care must be taken when teaching a musically gifted child.

Outcomes

Being a musical prodigy doesn’t assure adult success. Winner argues that there are four potential outcomes:

Quitting: The student loses interest or burns out. Parents and teachers must be careful not to burn out the child with too big a workload. (Though, often it’s the child who pushes for more work.)
Expert: The musically gifted child grows up to be an expert in music. While they will be creative, they don’t exhibit domain changing levels of creativity.
Domain Changers: These musical prodigies turn into adults that have a level of creativity that has a lasting impact on their domain of knowledge (e.g., Mozart). These prodigies are often rebellious and push the envelope.
Late Bloomers: The term later bloomers refer to musicians who don’t discover their talent until young adulthood. Late bloomers aren’t identified as prodigies in childhood but go on to become undeniably creative adults (e.g., Bruckner and Stravinsky).

Winner expands on what it means to be a later bloomer:

Often these children discover their domain in college, where they are first introduced to it. They then take off, looking much like prodigies who discover their domain in childhood.

These individuals typically master their domain virtually on their own, refusing to conform to the demands of the college curriculum, or even dropping out of college, as for example, in the case of Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft… (282)

In other words, late bloomers didn’t get the opportunity to discover their talent until after childhood, but otherwise behave like child prodigies.

What Does Prodigy Mean: Let’s Meet Some Prodigies

Now let’s see some gifted children in action:

The first video has a girl gifted in improvisation.
The second video has a boy who can play back whatever he hears.
I have included commentary after each video.

Video: Improvising Musical Prodigy

In this video, you’ll see a musically gifted child who has been given four notes to make a motif. Then, she uses this motif to improvise a composition.

Winner states:

Most musically gifted children learn to play an instrument, and soon after they begin, they show “musical generativity” [i.e., the ability to improvise music]. (97)

Video: Musical Prodigy Who Can Copy Whatever He’s Heard

By his own words, this child can play back whatever he’s heard. According to Winner, the ability to imitate music is a sign of musical giftedness.

Also, this child appears to have absolute pitch:

Notice his mom plays notes on the keyboard when he’s facing away so he can’t look.
However, he can still find the correct pitches by sound.
Nevertheless, not all musical prodigies have absolute pitch.

Winner asserts:

However, perfect pitch is not consistently associated with musical giftedness… by age four Mozart could tell when violins were a quarter [step] out of tune… Wagner did not have perfect pitch, and neither did Tchaikovsky, and many lesser composers did. (95)

What Does Prodigy Mean: Final Thoughts

Here’s a summary of What Does Prodigy Mean and Do They Have Elite Musical Talent?

A musical prodigy is a child who shows extraordinary ability for his or her age.
Early signs include a strong desire for music, early singing, early accurate pitch, enhanced musical memory, and improvisation.
Outcomes can include quitting, becoming an expert, becoming a domain changer, or becoming a late bloomer.

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