Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  At Mannes, Natasha rapidly emerged as a star. “My teacher wants me to be aware of exactly what I am doing,” she told me when she was twenty. “That can destroy spontaneity. If you are aware that you are going to take a risk, and the risk is going to be this, then it is not a risk anymore. Playing should be a hundred percent intuition and a hundred percent logic.” Her younger brother, sitting with us, said sarcastically, “What a logical statement!” Natasha rejoined, “But very intuitive at the same time. When I play, I use my brain and I breathe and everything like that. But I’m not—” Natasha was at a rare loss for words.

  “—thinking of yourself,” her mother finished. Natasha nodded. “That’s why I worry, because she loses weight, she forgets to eat because she is playing the piano.”

  Natasha shook her head. “The rest of life is so distracting.”

  In 2005, she was invited to perform a benefit concert for the Prince of Wales with Sting. “She made friends with Madonna,” her mother said. “I didn’t make friends with her,” Natasha protested. “She told me, ‘You classical musicians are too stuck-up. You really should think about wearing hot pants.’” The New York Times, which had declined to review her debut, wrote of a subsequent performance, “Youth, in her case, denotes freshness but also the rawness of new-cut wood. She delved into the score and emerged with all kinds of new notes and passages one felt one hadn’t heard before.” Despite these successes, Natasha remains unpretentious. “Everybody is calling me and telling me, ‘Your daughter is so down-to-earth,’” Natalie said. “First it was ‘You must be proud of your daughter.’ Now, ‘Your daughter is so down-to-earth.’ This is a very American compliment.”

  • • •

  Some people can name any note they hear with the effortlessness with which most people can name a color. The phenomenon of absolute pitch has been identified in only about one in a thousand to one in ten thousand people. The rest of us function on relative pitch—the ability to hear the intervals between notes. So almost anyone can sing “Happy Birthday,” but only a few people can say whether it is being sung in E-flat. In those who have absolute pitch, the exact identity of the notes is unmistakable. One researcher described how a woman played a scale on the piano for her three-year-old daughter and named the notes; a week later, their oven chimed, and the daughter said, “Does the microwave always sing an F?” Another child complained when one of his toys, its batteries running low, played a quarter tone flat.

  Some people who don’t have innate absolute pitch can train themselves to recognize notes. Study may teach them to produce a G, for example, and they may be able to calculate other notes from there. This ability appears to be latent in a much higher percentage of the population. Since the measure of absolute pitch was traditionally the ability to name notes, there was no way to detect the ability among people who had not been educated to know the names of the notes in the first place. David Ross, a psychiatrist at Yale, found that some people who didn’t have the training to name notes could tell when a band performed a favorite song a half step lower. Daniel Levitin, a psychologist at McGill, found that a surprisingly large number of people can produce the first tone of their favorite pop song. Another researcher demonstrated that many people can pick out the correct dial tone.

  Absolute pitch does not always enhance musical ability. A singer described her struggle when other singers in her choir go flat by a quarter tone. Her natural impulse is to sing what is written in dissonance with the others. Another musician described how his youth-orchestra conductor said, “You’re so intent on playing an F-sharp that you’re not paying attention to what else is going on. An F-sharp is a different note if you’re playing in D major, where it’s the third, than if you’re playing in G, where it’s the leading tone.” The boy had to learn to suppress his absolute pitch to become a musician.

  Like so many other aberrations, musicality can be mapped physiologically. People with absolute pitch have an enlarged planum temporale in the auditory cortex of the brain. Violinists have an enlargement of the area of the brain that controls movement of the left hand. The parts of the brain that control motor coordination and language are greater in volume or metabolism among many musicians, suggesting that music is both athletic and linguistic. It is unclear, however, whether these characteristics are the basis of music ability, or the result of repetitive practice.

  • • •

  Robert Greenberg is a professor of linguistics. His wife, Orna, is a painter. Though neither is particularly musical, their infant son Jay would listen with rapt attention to the tunes on a Mother Goose recording, and whenever it stopped, he would cry, and they would have to play it again. At two, he began playing the cello; at three, he invented his own form of musical notation. Within a few years, he had a scholarship at Juilliard. “What would you do if you met an eight-year-old boy who can compose and fully notate half a movement of a magnificent piano sonata in the style of Beethoven, before your very eyes and without a piano, in less than an hour?” wrote Samuel Zyman, who teaches composition at Juilliard.

  At fourteen, Jay explained on 60 Minutes that he has constant multiple channels running in his head and simply transcribes what he hears. “My brain is able to control two or three different musics at the same time, along with the channel of everyday life and everything else,” he said. “The unconscious mind is giving orders at the speed of light. I just hear it as if it were a smooth performance of a work that is already written.” Supporting such a prodigy is a full-time job. “We had to go into debt and make sacrifices in our careers, but not because we were stage parents,” Robert said to me. “It’s because those changes were essential for our son’s well-being, mental health, self-confidence, and ability to find mentors and friends.”

  The neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen has proposed “that the creative process is similar in artists and scientists, that it is highly intuitive, and that it may arise from unconscious or dreamlike mental states during which new links are created in the association cortices of the brain.” Jay’s descriptions of his compositional process support such observations. When asked how he found a musical idea, Jay said, “It comes to me. Usually it chooses the most inconvenient moment to do so, when I’m miles from the nearest sheet of paper or pen, let alone a computer containing music software. For instance, I’m walking and I hear a certain cadence played by two oboes, a bassoon, and a didgeridoo. So I go home, and from that I take more ideas for other melodies that will eventually come together to form a complete piece.”

  By the time Jay was fourteen, he had a recording contract with Sony Classical. His liner notes for a recording of his Fifth Symphony and Quintet for Strings give some insight into his oblique mind: “The Fantasia was the last movement to be completed, excluding a few minor technical revisions to the Finale; it is also the most structurally perfect movement in the piece, as it follows a mathematical function, y = 1/x2. The graph of this function is based around the asymptotes of the x- and y-axes; from very close to, but still not quite, zero, it ascends slowly but steadily between the integers of x = 1 and x = 0 to almost touch the y-axis, which it once again fails to reach; this is mirrored across the axis. The Quintet describes the three facets of the human psyche according to Freudian theory: the superego, or conscience that restrains the rest of the piece (the Adagio); the ego, in touch with reality, and fulfilling the old adage that ‘to those who feel, life is a tragedy; to those who think, it’s a comedy’ (the scherzo); and the id—the impulsive and instinctual, unconscious and ultimately most gratifying (the Prestissimo).” You would never guess from this how lyrical his music is or how gripping it can be.

  Jay’s manner is diffident, often to the point of rudeness; if you say little, he appears bored; if you say much, he evinces disdain, as though to say that his energy and yours might be better spent in other pursuits. One journalist told me that interviewing him was “like dropping stones down a well.” His father said, “He loves to hear the music performed live; it nourishes him. He hates the part w
here they want him to come up on the stage. Schubert doesn’t have to go onstage; why should he?” Jay’s misanthropy has an aura of triumph, as though it were proof of an authenticity that more socially adept musicians presumably lack. “He does better with adults, but many adults are afraid of that precociousness and feel threatened or upset or intimidated,” Robert said. Jay clearly has a deeper humanity than he lets the public see, and he’s more likable in his music and even on his blog than in person. In his mix of reflective aptitude and arrogant naïveté, he is not altogether unlike Ari Ne’eman, the autistic man who was classified as both gifted and disabled. “My music does express my feelings, even if I’m not conscious of it,” Jay said. Many people rely on music to communicate their emotions to others; Jay relies on it to manifest his emotions to himself.

  • • •

  Throughout much of history, prodigies were thought to be possessed; Aristotle believed that there could be no genius without madness. Paganini was accused of putting himself in the hands of the devil. The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso said in 1891, “Genius is a true degenerative psychosis belonging to the group of moral insanity.” Recent neuroscience demonstrates that the processes of creativity and psychosis map similarly in the brain, each contingent on a reduced number of dopamine D2 receptors in the thalamus. A continuum runs between the two conditions; there is no sharp line.

  Norman Geschwind, the father of behavioral neurology, observed that prodigies often have a mix of abilities and challenges including dyslexia, delayed language acquisition, and asthma—“pathologies of superiority.” These can be severe. One family told me that their son could identify more than fifty pieces of music when he was two. He would call out, “Mahler Fifth!” or “Brahms Quintet!” At five, the boy was diagnosed with borderline autism. Their pediatrician’s instruction was to break the burgeoning obsession by taking away music completely, which they did. The autism symptoms abated, but he lost his affinity for music. Some researchers claim that musical predisposition is a function of an autistic-type hypersensitivity to sound. According to the Israeli psychiatrist Pinchas Noy, music is the organizing defense of such children against the clatter that assaults them. A number of the musicians described in this chapter likely meet clinical criteria for autism-spectrum disorders.

  The association between genius and madness makes many parents wary of prodigious children. Miraca Gross, an Australian expert on gifted children, posits that they have more resilience than other children, while extremely gifted children have less resilience. Zarin Mehta, president of the New York Philharmonic, said that he and his wife say to each other, “Thank God we don’t have such talented children.” The prodigy pianist Elisha Abas, who burned out at fourteen but has made something of a comeback in his mid-thirties, said, “Sometimes the shoulders of a child are not big enough to handle his genius.”

  Anyone who has worked with prodigies has seen the wreckage that can ensue when someone is asynchronous, which is the condition of having intellectual, emotional, and physical ages that do not align. It is no easier to have an adultlike mind in a child’s body than to have a childlike mind in a mature body. Joseph Polisi, president of Juilliard, said, “Normal young children pick up the fiddle or go to the keyboard, and they’re transformed before your eyes. It’s frightening.” His colleague Veda Kaplinsky added, “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 with two sides of a kid, they’re so quick to acknowledge the positive, the talented, the exceptional; they are in denial over everything else.” Musical performance is a sustained exercise in sensitivity, and sensitivity is the tinder of fragility. The parents of so many exceptional children must be educated to see the identity within a perceived illness; the parents of prodigies are confronted with an identity and must be educated to recognize the prospect of illness within it. Even those without a sideline diagnosis need to mitigate the loneliness of having their primary emotional relationship with an inanimate object. The psychiatrist Karen Monroe explained, “If you’re spending five hours a day practicing, and the other kids are out playing baseball, you’re not doing the same things. Even if you love it and can’t imagine yourself doing anything else, that doesn’t mean you don’t feel lonely.” Leon Botstein said bluntly, “Aloneness is the key to creativity.”

  Suicide is an ever-present risk. Brandenn Bremmer had prodigious musical abilities, finished high school at ten, and told an interviewer flatly, “America is a society that demands perfection.” When he was fourteen, his parents left the house to buy groceries and returned to find he had shot himself in the head, leaving no note. “He was born an adult,” his mother said. “We just watched his body grow bigger.” Terence Judd performed with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at twelve; won the Liszt Piano Competition at eighteen; and committed suicide at twenty-two by throwing himself off a cliff. The violinist Michael Rabin had a breakdown and “recovered,” only to die from a fall at thirty-five, his blood full of barbiturates. Christiaan Kriens, a high-profile Dutch prodigy in violin, piano, conducting, and composing, shot himself in the head in later life, leaving a note saying he felt he could not sustain a career in music.

  Although Julian Whybra, in his writings on the emotional needs of gifted children, described “the growing problem of suicide among intellectually gifted children,” others maintain that there is no research to show that such children are less emotionally hardy than others. That is not to say that brilliance is irrelevant to suicide. Some people may be spurred to suicide by their abilities, while others resist suicide because of similar abilities. Genius is both a protection and a vulnerability, and geniuses commit both more and less suicide. That the numbers average out the same does not imply that such rates are ontologically identical. The nuances of this dialectic—what drives some people to suicide keeps others from it—have not been adequately explored.

  When these suicides do occur, parents tend to get blamed—and some do push their children to the breaking point. The presence of the stage mother, or the demanding father who is never satisfied, runs through the professional literature. Some parents are focused on helping their kids, and others, on helping themselves; many don’t recognize a gap between these objectives. Some parents see the dream so vividly that they lose sight of the child. Robert Sirota, president of the Manhattan School of Music, said, “Mothers had their little boys castrated in Renaissance Italy to give them a music career, and the psychological mutilation of today is equally brutal.” Mental health, independence of thought, and intelligence become particularly important as buffers of extraordinary aptitude that has nothing to do with them. Failed prodigies must forever carry the poisonous memory of themselves as promising. The narrative of prodigies is constantly pushed toward triumph or tragedy, when most must find contentment somewhere in between. The violinist Jascha Heifetz once described prodigiousness as being “a disease which is generally fatal,” and one that he “was among the few to have the good fortune to survive.”

  The crudest and most straightforward form of exploitation is financial. In “The Awakening,” Isaac Babel describes the subculture of prodigies in prewar Russia, where they represented a possible path out of poverty for their families. “When a boy turned four or five, his mother took the tiny, frail creature to Mr. Zagursky. Zagursky ran a factory that churned out child prodigies, a factory of Jewish dwarfs in lace collars and patent leather shoes.” The prodigy pianist Ruth Slenczynska wrote in Forbidden Childhood of the beatings she endured: “Every time I made a mistake, he leaned over and, very methodically, without a word, slapped me across the face.” Her 1931 debut, when she was four, met rave reviews. She remembers Rachmaninoff saying to her, “In one year you will be magnificent. In two years you will be unbelievable. Would you like some cookies?” One day, she overheard her father say, “I teach Ruth to play Beethoven because it brings in the dollars.” She crumpled; when she gave up piano, “I was 16, felt 50 and looked 12.” He
r father threw her out; his parting words were “You lousy little bitch! You’ll never play two notes again without me.”

  The Hungarian pianist Ervin Nyiregyházi was closely studied throughout his childhood by a psychologist who documented his early life in detail. Ervin’s parents never encouraged him to learn to dress himself or cut up his own food. He was given a diet superior to that enjoyed by the rest of the family. He did not attend school. His parents harnessed his genius to gain privilege; they were invited to present him to European royalty. Later, Ervin said, “I was like a calling card. By the time I was five, I realized I was in a world of strangers.” His father had numerous affairs with Ervin’s patrons; his mother squandered the money her son earned.

  When Ervin was twelve, his father died, and his mother turned Ervin’s chief joy into a gruesome chore. “My mother hated me,” Ervin said. He hated his mother in return and once praised Hitler for exterminating her. Like many people whose early talent is overpraised, he showed the wounded narcissist’s mix of arrogance and desperate insecurity. “Whatever obstacles were put in my way, I just gave up,” he said. He married ten times and divorced nine. For a while he was homeless. Though he lived to old age, he performed only occasionally, with mixed results; without his mother to play for or against, he had no motive for authentic expression.

  • • •

  Lorin Hollander’s father was associate concertmaster to the legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini and shared his boss’s temper. “I was a battered child,” Lorin said to me. “If I played something that wasn’t how he wanted it, I’d be knocked or punched off the piano seat.” After his triumphant debut in 1955 at eleven, Lorin’s life began to accelerate. “I was already playing fifty concerts a year when I was fourteen, and making a recording a year. At sixteen, I started to have severe depressive episodes, and I also started to lose control of my right hand and arm.” Fifty-two years after his first performance at Carnegie Hall, he said, “The stage fright, often stage terror, was debilitating. I didn’t know that I had a choice, that there was anything else in life. Nothing I did was up to my standard. That standard was not only technical perfection, but that every note be imbued with the complete palette of human emotions, of spiritual questioning, of the search for beauty.”