Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  When Kit was ten, he toured the physics research facility at Los Alamos with his manager, Charles Hamlen. A physicist took Hamlen aside and said that, unlike the postdoctoral physicists who usually visited, Kit was so bright that no one could “find the bottom of this boy’s knowledge.” A few years later, Kit won a residency at MIT, where he helped edit papers in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. “He just understands all things,” May said to me, almost resigned. “Someday, I want to work with parents of disabled children, because I know their bewilderment is like mine. I had no idea how to be a mother to Kit, and there was no place to find out.”

  May moved them to London to be with a piano teacher Kit liked, even though she had no working papers and couldn’t secure a job there. “I wasn’t happy about it,” May said, “but I felt I had no choice.” Kit soon met the revered pianist Alfred Brendel, and Brendel, who had never had a student, took Kit on. He refused payment for lessons, and when he learned that Kit was practicing at a piano showroom because May couldn’t afford a decent piano, he had a Steinway delivered to their flat. When Kit was thirteen, an English journalist who was fervently opposed to the promotion of children as performers went to one of his concerts. “His playing was so cultured, his joy in performing so obvious, his commitment as he stretched his small frame to reach the low notes so total, that my objections seemed mean-spirited,” the journalist wrote in the Guardian.

  May credits Brendel for Kit’s musicianship. “I still don’t have a good enough ear to be any help to Kit,” she said. “All I can do is remind him that he didn’t do anything to deserve being who he is.” May restricted Kit’s schedule and media exposure through his adolescence, allowing him to do only a dozen concerts a year. “But now, Mr. Brendel has said he is ready for a full concert schedule, and he’s eighteen, and it’s not up to me. I’d have preferred that he be a professor of mathematics. It’s a better life, without so much travel. But Kit has decided that mathematics is his hobby, and the piano is his work.” Kit is pursuing an MA in pure mathematics in Paris; he says he does it “to unwind.” I asked May if she ever worried that Kit, like many young people of remarkable ability, might have a nervous breakdown. She laughed. “If anyone’s going to have a nervous breakdown in this setup,” she said, “it’s me!” Like many parents of exceptional children, May scaled back her own ambitions. She had hoped for an important job after she earned her PhD in economics—the PhD she never completed because Kit came along. “As a parent, and as a Chinese mother, sacrifice is part of the game,” she said. “I would love to learn how to sacrifice joyfully, but so far I don’t have that ability. Here I am, middle-aged and riding around Paris on a bike, panting and out of breath. What happened? But I admit he’s given me a fascinating life.”

  • • •

  Prodigies are not covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act; there is no federal mandate for gifted education. But if we recognize the importance of special programs for students whose atypical brains encode less accepted differences, we should extrapolate to create programs for those whose atypical brains encode remarkable abilities. Daniel Singal wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, “The problem is not the pursuit of equality but the bias against excellence that has accompanied it.” Writing in Time in 2007, the educator John Cloud faulted the “radically egalitarian” values underlying the No Child Left Behind Act, which provides little support for gifted students. The 2004 Templeton National Report on Acceleration asserts that the school system is designed to hold back children of remarkable abilities. Once again, it falls to parents to advocate for their children’s needs, often in the face of a hostile or indifferent educational system. Leon Botstein remarked drily, “If Beethoven were sent to nursery school today, they would medicate him, and he would be a postal clerk.”

  The rhetoric of antielitism that has fueled American politics and its culture wars over the past generation reflects a bias toward extraordinary people who can pass for ordinary. This bias is portrayed as democratic, when it is often dishonest; it smacks of dreary assimilationism, echoing misguided efforts to make gay kids act straight. Many gifted children choose between being ostracized and going underground; many disidentify, attempting to seem less accomplished for the sake of peer approval. One survey of super-high-IQ students showed that four out of five were constantly monitoring themselves in an attempt to conform to the norms of less gifted children; in another study, 90 percent were unwilling to be identified as part of the “brain” crowd.

  It used to be believed that academically promoting prodigies damaged them socially—even though many were already ostracized for their abilities. Several parents joked about the fact that their children’s friends were in their seventies; Robert Greenberg said that Jay socialized primarily online, where no one knew his age. The Internet has given prodigies a society, just as it has other identity communities—a place where they can connect with like-minded people and underplay potentially alienating differences.

  In the 1990s, Miraca Gross studied children who were radically accelerated, starting college between eleven and sixteen. None regretted the acceleration, and most had made good and lasting friendships with older children. By contrast, gifted children stuck with age peers experienced rage, depression, and self-criticism. Today, most gifted programs keep children in an age-based setting some of the time and a skills-based setting the rest of the time. Neither affords a perfect fit. The mathematical prodigy Norbert Wiener wrote that the prodigy knows “the suffering which grows from belonging half to the adult world and half to the world of the children about him.” He explained, “I was not so much a mixture of child and man as wholly a child for purposes of companionship and nearly completely a man for purposes of study.”

  Two distinct kinds of young people are grouped under the prodigy rubric: the driven, single-minded baby virtuoso, and the youth who loves music in his bones and therefore has a better shot at a sustained career. The latter kids are more broadly intelligent, curious, often articulate, and possessed of a sense of humor and perspective about themselves. They pursue some semblance of normal sociability during adolescence and end up going to college instead of conservatory. Being pragmatic, smart, poised, and healthy is in their makeup, just as their musical enthusiasm and aptitude are.

  • • •

  Joshua Bell is good at everything. He is the most prominent violinist of his generation; placed fourth in a national tennis tournament when he was ten; is the all-time high scorer on several video games; is one of the fastest solvers of the Rubik’s Cube; holds an appointment in the MIT Media Lab; and is truly funny when he appears on the talk show circuit. He’s handsome, charming, and seems riveted by whomever he’s talking to, yet he also evinces the impenetrability of someone who wants privacy in the public eye. People meeting him for the first time are amazed at how accessible he is, and people who have known him forever, at how unknowable he is.

  Josh’s parents were not an obvious match; when they met, Shirley was fresh from a kibbutz, and Alan was an Episcopal priest. Alan left the ministry, earned a doctorate in psychology, and took a senior position at the Kinsey Institute for sex research in Bloomington, Indiana. “He was so nonjudgmental versus me,” Shirley recalled. “I knew the answers to everything.” Shirley is a strong presence with a disregard for boundaries. She wants to feed you, drink with you, play poker with you, sit up late talking. Dark, lithe, and pretty, she appears immensely powerful and touchingly vulnerable—willing to be honest with anyone else to the exact extent that she is honest with herself.

  Alan had been a choirboy and Shirley played piano; their children would all learn music. Josh was born in 1967. At two, he stretched rubber bands from knob to knob on a dresser, pulling out the drawers to vary the tensions and create different sounds when he strummed them; as an adult he joked that he had progressed “from credenza to cadenza.” He started violin at four, learning new music quickly. “It goes in one ear and it just stays there,” Shirley said. Music became a world they shared intimately, but h
is creativity was always tinged with sadness. “He would wake up in the night crying,” she went on. “My other kids, I could always hug and console. But with Josh, there was nothing I could do.”

  Josh became a local celebrity at seven, when he played the Bach Double Concerto alongside his teacher with the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra. His playing was elegiac, but lacked technical mastery. “My mother, even though she was invested and practiced with me, was not a great disciplinarian, and neither was my father,” he said. “I crammed for tests the morning of the test, and crammed for concerts the day before, and lived by the seat of my pants. I sometimes went days without touching the violin at all, sneaking out the back door of the music building when I was supposed to be practicing, playing video games all afternoon, and rushing back for my mother to pick me up.” In hindsight, he believes this lack of supervision was beneficial. “Doing nothing but music is not so good for your mental health,” he said, “and it’s not so good for the music, either.”

  The summer he was twelve, Josh attended Meadowmount, a summer intensive program for string players, where he had his first lessons with Josef Gingold, one of the twentieth century’s greatest violin teachers. The Bells asked him to take on Josh as a full-time pupil. “They were always supporting my education,” Josh said. “If my mother had been hands-off, I wouldn’t have developed as a musician—at least not in the same way.”

  Shirley read about a competition sponsored by Seventeen magazine for high school musicians; having skipped a year of school, Josh just barely qualified. Shirley was too fretful to accompany him there. “When I got the phone call that he won, I screamed,” she recalled. Then she sighed. “I loved having children. My kids became my life. But my youngest daughter was neglected. If Josh was performing on her birthday, we’d be at Josh’s concert. I was on tour with Josh when she was growing up and didn’t hear her screams inside. But gifted children have needs, too, and who’s going to meet them?” The problem was not just time allocation. “I received such tremendous joy from Josh’s music,” Shirley said. “Every success he had gave me pleasure. The other kids could see that, and it hurt them.” Josh has his own regrets about the effect his career had on his sisters, but feels that his mother’s involvement was so crucial “that there was almost no way around it.”

  As Josh began performing extensively, his mother worried about how he could sustain his momentum with audiences. “When he’s fourteen, it’s less of a miracle than when he’s twelve, even though he’s playing much better,” she said. Meanwhile, Josh’s situation at school became increasingly uncomfortable. “I had that tall-poppy syndrome,” he said. “Some teachers were threatened by anybody doing something out of the ordinary, and they made my life miserable.” He graduated from high school at sixteen. “It was unthinkable for me to stay home after high school,” Josh said. That meant Shirley’s role had to change.

  “It takes two for that kind of symbiotic relationship, and it takes two to handle the separation,” she said. She was pained that Josh did not want her to manage his affairs. He moved into a condo in Bloomington that his parents had bought, and Shirley went over to do his laundry, “to stay involved.” Josh recalled, “Managing my life had become my mother’s world. We made a separation. Then it started to feel more like we were two different people, and I could tell her about my successes, and we could behave like adults.” At twenty-two, he moved in with his first serious girlfriend, violinist Lisa Matricardi. “It lasted seven years,” he said. “Some of my reliance on my mother was transferred to Lisa—probably in an unhealthy way.”

  Josh earned an artist’s diploma at the University of Indiana in performance, music theory, piano proficiency, and German. He soon made his Carnegie Hall debut and at eighteen he won the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant; his corecipient that year was Ken Noda. He now headlines more than two hundred performances a year. Additionally, he leads the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Josh was among the first classical musicians to do crossover, making a modish VH1 video of a Brahms Hungarian dance. He has bowed his fiddle with bluegrass bassist Edgar Meyer and has collaborated with jazzmen Chick Corea and Wynton Marsalis. He has recorded with Sting, Regina Spektor, and singer-songwriter Josh Groban. Every one of Josh Bell’s albums has made Billboard’s Top 20; Romance of the Violin sold more than five million copies and was Classical Album of the Year. He has been nominated for several Grammys and has won one, and he owns a $4 million Stradivarius. “It allowed me to realize the colors I had imagined in the music I loved to play,” he said. “It was like meeting the girl you’re going to marry.” He likes the high life and is classical music’s equivalent of a rock star. But rock stars’ lives don’t look entirely glamorous up close. “Josh is so stressed, you can’t get his attention on anything,” his mother said, bemoaning that he started taking blood-pressure medication before he turned forty. I asked if the downside made her sad. “What gives me the greatest pleasure is when he calls me to ask my opinion about something, where I can still be a mother,” she said. “We have a real musical connection. I have to be careful not to be too intrusive, which is my nature. I don’t know him that well anymore.”

  When I related that conversation to Josh, he was indignant. “She knows me very well,” he said. “Even now, I trust her opinion more than anyone’s. When I’m planning a recital program, I still run it by her. I still want her approval after a concert. It really bums me out if I play what I thought was my best and she says she preferred the last time I did it.” Josh had a son with his ex-girlfriend Lisa in 2007 and spoke about how Lisa and the baby were “basically one, which is normal with a mother and baby. When you’re fifteen and your mother is still so enmeshed, it’s unhealthy. When I was in my twenties, my mom was still doing my taxes.” He did not consult her about his decision to father a child. “Her approval or disapproval still has such power,” he said, “it’s best not to let her in when it comes to some of the important things.”

  Like most parents of kids with horizontal identities, Shirley fears that her child is lonely. “He has an issue with intimacy,” she said. “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 very funny in public. It’s humbling to be in his presence. I mean, what’s going to come out of his mouth? I’m always waiting to hear. But deep down, he’s a little bit of an enigma. I think that’s why people are drawn to him, because they can’t know him. Neither can I. I couldn’t comfort him when he was an infant, and in some ways, that’s never changed. I think that’s part of the nature of his genius, and it breaks my heart.”

  • • •

  The advent of sound recording in 1877 had sweeping social consequences, making music ubiquitous even for those who could neither play it nor afford to hire performers. There is nothing exclusive about hearing music today; it requires no greater skill than the ability to turn on an iPod, and no more expense than the money to buy a radio. The magnificent performances once heard only at court may now be experienced in the supermarket, in a car, or at home. Like Sign before the cochlear implant and painting before photography, live performance had a different urgency before the phonograph. For musicians interested in live exposure, these technological changes can feel limiting; for those interested in wide distribution, they can be thrilling. Although the causal relationship is more oblique, new science is clouding the future prospects of musical prodigies as surely as it is threatening the Deaf and gay cultures and the neurodiversity perspective on the autism spectrum. The arguments about adaptation and extinction are as relevant here as to many so-called disabilities.

  Despite the ever-increasing number of superlative musicians, audiences who know how to listen are dwindling—because of the jarringly alien qualities of much later-twentieth-century music, the surge in antielitism, the escalating cost of concert tickets, the elimination of childhood music-education programs, and the technology-spurred dispersal of media users into small, narrowly focused groups. This crossing of arcs echoes the
experience of other identity groups that are gaining acceptance just as medicine threatens to eliminate them. We have disembodied music, as so much else, in modern life. The exploitation of prodigies is part of the reembodiment of music. If you see Marc Yu perform, for example, you see a miracle child, which is very different from merely hearing his capable playing online. Justin Davidson said, “An eight-year-old communicating something live in the concert hall is bringing everything he is to that moment. A big part of that is eight-year-oldness. That’s what people are reacting to. There is no abstract performance beyond what the performer does. How can you tell the dancer from the dance? You can’t. And it’s artificial to try.”

  • • •

  Conrad Tao, another American-born prodigy frequently identified as Chinese, is older than Marc Yu and younger than Kit Armstrong. His scientist parents emigrated from China in the early 1980s to do graduate study at Princeton. When the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred in 1989, shortly after their daughter was born, they decided to stay in the United States a little longer. Had they gone back, they would have had to conform to the one-child rule; “Conrad is a product of the fact that we stayed,” his mother, Mingfang Ting, explained. She became a research scientist, creating predictive computer models of climate change at the University of Illinois, and his father, Sam Tao, worked as an engineer at Alcatel-Lucent. Both were focused on accomplishment, but neither of them on art. “Growing up during the Cultural Revolution, we sang patriotic songs, and that’s all the music we had,” Mingfang said. She and Sam perceived music as a luxury, one they wanted to offer their children. When Conrad was eighteen months old, a family friend set him on the piano bench and began playing; Conrad kept pushing him aside and finishing the tunes. The friend said, “If you can’t make a musician out of this child, it’s your fault.” Conrad played so incessantly that his parents worried he might damage his fingers, and the teacher advised them to lock the piano.