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How can a child, scarcely toilet-trained, jump fully-formed into what seems to be a highly adult activity. It is an enduring mystery. Making music requires an array of skills and emotional equipment that you couldn’t imagine possible in a toddler. Yet, it happens surprisingly often. Let’s see what music making requires and see why the world’s most famous musicians are able to start when they’re still almost babies.

A bit of the score "Adeste Fidelis", a late 18th century composition by John F. Wade Notes, a necessity for learning a piece, must become a part of the musician by the time he or she performs.

First, music is very physical activity.

Whatever instrument you are playing, you are relying more than anything on your fingers, the ability to manipulate all of them at the same time and at high speed almost without thinking. Then come the arms, sometimes the whole body. Players of wind or brass instruments require steady breathing and strong embouchure — a technical word meaning the combination of facial and lip muscles used to blow into their instruments. It’s rare for child prodigies to play wind and brass because they are physically so undeveloped. They can handle finger movement, but not high-pressured huffing and puffing.

From 1913 "The Etude" magazine Franz Liszt was able to sight-read anything to performance standard.

Second is the ability to read music…

…although the prodigy usually begins by imitating what he or she hears, playing by ear as we say. Reading music is like learning to read a new language. It is very methodical and appeals particularly to mathematicians because of its precision in articulating complex rhythms and the numerous notes found on the average piano. It helps for the musician to be able to read music as fluently as you would a story in a book, in fact playing the music while you are reading. In music, this is called sight-reading. For the serious musician, sight-reading is important because it allows you to play through vast amounts of the musical literature so you can find pieces that particularly appeal to you.

Third is practice.

However good you are at sight-reading, and some are very good — Franz Liszt, the celebrated pianist and composer of the 19th Century was able to sight-read anything to performance standards — there will generally be passages of technical difficulty that require constant practice. Practice requires immense discipline, and professionals are known to practice up to 8 hours a day, you could say a normal working day for them! Fortunately, our child prodigy in the early years finds things so easy that practice though important is not a burden. Interestingly, prodigies tend to go through a crisis in their teens or later when they have to supplement their natural gifts with disciplined practice. The famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin, one of the 20th century’s most celebrated prodigies, experienced such a crisis and some say he never played again so well as when he was young boy in shorts, although he continued to dominate the Western music scene until his death at the age of 83.

Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, from the Collection of the Library of Congress The great 20th century pianist and child prodigy Artur Rubinstein loved to show off his talent for live audiences

A young Glenn Gould (circa 1944) with his dog and budgie. In his mid-thirties, due to stage fright, Gould began playing only in the recording studio

Fourth is memory.

You need music in front of you to learn a piece, but by the time you perform you’ve long since thrown it away. That said, a few famous musicians use music particularly when it’s a newly composed piece, in which case it is generally complicated and hard to remember. The printed sheet of music must disappear because it’s physically impossible to concentrate on performing if you’re continually looking up at the music — the notes must have become part of you. Memory is tricky because everyone does it differently. Some remember through physical association, remembering how the fingers and body moved and reacted during practice. Some can remember and hear the sound of the music in their head and simply reproduce it on the instrument. Some have photographic memories and can visualize the pages of music, page by page. Most of us try these tricks and struggle. I find memorization very hard. I once memorized a piece by Schumann, a mid-19th century composer, that was 50 pages long. A month later I had forgotten half of it. The top performers have permanently in memory hundreds of hours of performance.

Fifth is stage performance.

This is the ability to get up in front of hundreds of people and calmly enjoy playing them music. Some people have no difficulty doing this, for example extroverts who can’t wait to project their musical experience on a captive audience. The great 20th century pianist and child prodigy Artur Rubinstein was one of these. Even as a member of the audience, as I witnessed once, Rubinstein would perform for his admiring friends evaluating the performance during the intervals in a voice loud enough for all to hear. Others suffer terrible nerves otherwise known as stage fright, unable to believe that they will perform satisfactorily or even remember the notes they are supposed to play or even in extreme cases the piece. Vladimir Horowitz, previously mentioned, was an introvert and twice absented himself from the concert platform for several years due to lack of confidence. The great Bach interpreter, Glenn Gould, walked off the concert platform forever in his mid-30s and only played again in the recording studio.

Sixth and most important by far is musicality.

This is the innate ability to express love, despair, humor, anger and the multitude of other human emotions through simply playing music. Musicality is knowing that music is simply a reflection of our human existence. Music is more than notes played on instruments; music captures the very spirit of our lives, communicating the agonies, ecstasies and sometimes the plain ordinariness of our existence to anyone willing to listen. If this were not the case, you would find no musicians.

So how does the child prodigy manage, as a toddler having virtually no experience of life as we know it? This is a deep mystery with only one possible answer. It is that all of us have the basic human emotions programmed into our body and soul from the very moment of conception. And a few lucky ones, the prodigies, find that music allows them to release and communicate these emotions without thinking and without any initial instruction.