Musically Savants🎶

Savants? Gifted? Prodigy? Autistic? Those are the words I bumped into these days..

As a musician myself, I never thought that there was a wide range of terms to identify a child with insanely high musical abilities until I read Ellen Winner's book. I admire her passion and dedication to the field of gifted education, thus, her book titled "Gifted Children Myths and Realities." This book contains a rich knowledge about giftedness that I cannot stop adoring, and right now, I choose to talk about one of the sections in her book that discusses the Savant phenomenon, which not a lot of people understand yet; well, that includes me.

I will start by explaining how she differentiates savants, gifted people, prodigies, and autistic people with different symptoms. Generally, a prodigy is someone with the highest level of skill in a particular domain who has no impairments in other domains of life. Now, the confusion might appear between gifted and savant. To make it easier, you may refer to this table.

Savant	Gifted	Prodigy
Obsessed with one domain of gift	Obsessed with one domain of gift	Obsessed with one domain of gift
Unstoppable drive to exercise their special skill	Unstoppable drive to exercise their special skill	Unstoppable drive to exercise their special skill
Need a little encouragement, support, and instruction to discover the structure of their domain	Need a little encouragement, support, and instruction to discover the structure of their domain	Need a little encouragement, support, and instruction to discover the structure of their domain
Severely impaired in all domains besides their domain of gift	Just not that interested in other domains	Might be good in other domains
Usually, in the low-range level of IQ	Usually in the high-level or average IQ	Usually in the above-average, high-level IQ
Have never altered their domain in any way, which may also be a function of their low IQs	Might grow and flourish with the support of the environment	May become a creative adult who makes innovations in their domain
The abilities are limited to these domains: Visual Arts (usually realistic drawing), Music (mostly pianists), Rapid "Lightning" Mental Calculation, Calendrical Calculation	The abilities are not entirely domain-specific, which involves some other form of intelligence as well	The domain of abilities might refer to Gardner's human intelligence

Now that we can see different aspects of these children, I will explore musical savants' development in depth. As I discuss this topic, one thing to remember is that savant is usually impaired in other domains outside their gift. At the same time, gifted might have their superior domain without retarded in other domains. A quick example that I can give is that musical savants are most likely found as pianists rather than violinists, for example. This is because the piano allows a one-to-one mapping of key sound since the keys are arranged in a coherent, linear, spatial organization.

The development of musical savants is similar to that of musical prodigies, which are;

• At one or two, they can sing in perfect pitch and rhythm and sing many long and complex songs.

• Show interest in and emotional reaction to music at an early age. For example, one three-year-old sat raptly through a three-hour opera on TV yet could not sit through one program of Sesame Street.

• Play many songs on the piano in any key by three.

• Pick out melodies on the piano from Sonatas they have heard by age four.

• Reproduces music from memory without missing a note

The symptoms associated with musical savants are perfect pitch and a high level of solfege that causes them to play by ear, like the songs from the Hungarian Gypsy of jazz improvisation. They are often born prematurely and blind.

I was as shocked as you were when I read the word "blind." Ellen Winner's theory is pretty bold. To ease that shock, she wrote an example of a child named Blind Tom.

At four, he could play any piece of music performed on the piano, with all accents and rhythm correctly, after having heard it only once. That song is a Mozart Sonata. Yet, he never received any formal instruction in music. At age eleven, he could play twenty-page compositions he had only heard once. By adulthood, he had hundreds of repertoire in his memory, which extended to other auditory information besides music; he could repeat a fifteen-minute overheard conversation without error. One time, he sang back a German and French song, which, of course, he could not understand. With his ability to improvise, he could play an accompaniment to music that he had never heard before and improvise the tunes.

Generally, savants are as talented as gifted or prodigy. However, their abilities are restricted. These are some other things for you to understand about musical savants (I promise these are the last!);

• Their memory is structure-based rather than imitating purely like a tape recorder. Research says they can easily recall traditional diatonic-scale classical music rather than a semi-atonal composition like Bartok's.

• They have high-level skills in improvisation and composition

• However, no savants have become known whose major activity is composing

• Savants have been described as playing in a wooden mechanical style, with no feeling. However, they actually take delight in playing and have strong preferences for certain types of music over others.

• Savants, like autistic people, may experience emotion but have difficulty expressing and communicating their feelings.

• Most of them cannot read music notation.

Well, now you know! All of my writings above are based solely on Ellen Winner's Gifted Children Myths and Realities (1996).

A little cup of my thoughts to end this post,

It is fascinating to understand these terms, which I once thought were all the same. Not all children with a high-level or low-level IQ are only autistic. There are a lot of aspects beneath. Whether you are a teacher, parent, musician, or just someone with curiosity, I still believe every child deserves to be acknowledged for who they are. Understanding this will help us examine different approaches to creating an inclusive world.

Thank you for reading! Until next time.