送交者: 匆匆过客 于 2005-7-21, 15:00:13:
回答: 从我看到的报道，中国就没有神童。 由 秦州刺史 于 2005-7-21, 13:53:28:
6-year-old's piano skills are on grand scale
By NORA ZAMICHOW
LOS ANGELES TIMES
If a genie ever granted him three wishes, Marc Yu knows what he would want:
He'd ask to play with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic, and he'd like to play at Carnegie Hall.
Marc plays Bach on the piano from memory. On cello, he glides through Vivaldi. He practices at least six hours a day.
He has memorized more than 15 works, including a piece more than 20 pages long. He has composed 10 short pieces.
Marc is 6.
His grandparents, emigrés from China, had wished that Marc would play soccer and video games and watched television. They had hoped he'd be, well, like other boys. And in some ways he is.
He loves spaghetti and meatballs. His favorite color is red. He likes to play hangman. He wears blue jeans and wire-rim glasses. When he thinks something is funny, he wrinkles his nose and flashes a wide, gap-toothed grin.
He stands 46 inches tall and weighs 40 pounds. His hands are too small to reach an octave on the piano. His legs are too short to reach the pedals -- he uses a special extender. But when he plays, music pours effortlessly from the piano.
Marc is a prodigy. He began piano at age 3 and cello a year later.
"In Marc's case, he could be the next household-name pianist," said Jeffrey Bernstein, director of choral music at Occidental College and assistant conductor of the Pasadena Symphony in Southern California. "Plenty of music majors at college don't have his facility at the keyboard. I believe anything is possible for him."
Bernstein met Marc when the boy and his mother, Chloe, began attending rehearsals of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony last fall. The 2-hour-and- 30-minute sessions usually ended at 10 p.m. Marc sat rapt. After a few rehearsals, he asked Bernstein for a copy of the score. One night, he played a Mozart piece for Bernstein.
"It blew me away," Bernstein recalled. "I never heard someone this accomplished at this age. It's startling."
History is punctuated by prodigies, children who perform at an adult level before age 10. Coached, everyone wonders, or born gifted?
"You really can't make a prodigy," said Ellen Winner, professor of psychology at Boston College. "Prodigies have a precocity and a rage to master -- a very intense drive, a passion."
Prodigies learn not just faster but more independently than peers, Winner said.
But for these gifted children, a parent's role is also critical. In Marc's case, his mother's life is so entwined with his that they have practically braided into one.
"I don't know where he begins and she ends," said Suzanne Duarte Jones, Marc's kindergarten teacher. "But he's definitely a driven little boy."
Most prodigies don't become famous adults. In their teens, child prodigies often face a crisis. They are no longer pint-sized musicians playing Mozart. Suddenly, peers have caught up.
"You're in a different world, and you're not as special as you once were," said Mac Randall, 33, a writer and former prodigy who started reading at age 2, writing with a typewriter at 3, and wrote his first play when he was 4.
For every former child prodigy like cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Sarah Chang, scores wash out. Some lead satisfying lives teaching or playing and others quit.