By Dr. Mercola
I had the pleasure of posting this video and I hope it brings you as much joy as I did when I watched it for the first time in 60 minutes. It is extraordinary to get a glimpse of someone as exceptionally talented as 12-year-old Alma. My only regret is that there’s no way to post this without making you watch a drug ad for the rest of your life, which I’m sure you realize I disapprove of. For some of you, this might be the only time you see these commercials, so let them entertain you.
Most of us are naturally gifted to some degree – something we do better or more easily than the average person. And then there are the real prodigies; Talented people don’t seem natural. Their gift is profound, and comes from where only God knows. Alma Deutscher, from Basingstoke, UK, is a perfect example of the latter.first
There are a lot of musical prodigies out there, but Alma beats most of them. She was able to name notes on the piano at the age of 2 and started playing the piano and violin at the age of 3. Within a year of tutoring, she played Handel’s sonatas on violin. Now she is considered a virtuoso of both instruments. By the age of 4, she had begun composing her own tunes, and by the age of 6 she had written her first piano sonata. Next is the violin and orchestra concerto at 9 o’clock.
In December last year, her soap opera, “Cinderella”, premiered at the Casino Theater Baumgarten in Vienna,2 city of music, performed by the Vienna opera group, Oh! pera – an unattainable dream even for many adult composers who have spent their whole lives perfecting their works. Alma, who wrote the music for each instrument and the lyrics, was 11 years old. The 2.5-hour opera, with a 237-page musical score, received a standing ovation.
Cinderella was reinvented by the 11-year-old prodigy
Many also marveled at her creative reinterpretation of the classic Cinderella story. Instead of being paired with her true love with a specially-sized lost glass slipper measuring just a minute – an idea Alma found “quite silly” – Cinderella was a gifted composer. and Prince Pining is a poet. The story is set at an opera production company run by an evil stepmother. The two stepsisters are divas with few talents and many disabilities.
Cinderella, with her natural talent for composition, was not allowed to perform. Meanwhile, the prince writes a love poem that ends in Cinderella’s hand. Unaware of the poet’s identity, she infatuated the words and set them to music. After having her composition stolen by her evil step-aunts, who went to great lengths to sing it at the prom, Cinderella finally gets a chance to perform for the prince.
The prince was mesmerized by the enchanting melody, and began to find out who wrote the music for his poem. As in the classic story, he travels the land in search of his soulmate, but instead of searching for the right foot to match the slipper, he sings a piece of the melody, knowing that only the composer Only real music can complete the song correctly.
So the prince fell in love with Cinderella not because of her physical beauty or her small feet, but because of her talent, and because “he understood her”, to use Alma’s explanation. In other words, he sees his soulmate as an equally talented person. “I don’t want Cinderella to be just pretty. I want her to have her own mind and spirit. And to be a little like me. So I decided that she would be a composer,” explains Alma.3 The sold-out “Cinderella” premieres in the US on December 16 at the Opera San Jose.4
Where does music come from?
Most interviews with Alma have the same question: Where does her music come from? In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley received the following response:5
“I don’t really know, but it’s actually normal for me to… go around and have tunes pop into my head. It’s the most normal thing in the world. For me, it’s weird to walk around and not have a tune pop into my head. So if I were to interview you, I’d say, “Well, tell me, Scott, how does it feel to not have a tune in your head?”
Usually, the music plays when she’s most comfortable, either playing outdoors with her sister or jumping rope. Her father, Guy Deutscher, a linguistics professor and an amateur musician, taught her to read musical notes, but questioned the influence of his role on her immense musical creativity. her, including scores for instruments she does not play.
He said to Pelley, “I think it’s me [that taught her to read music]. I hardly have to say [any]thing – and you know, her piano teacher used to say that ‘it was a little difficult for Alma; It’s hard to teach her because one always has the feeling she’s been ‘there’ before. “” Alma also said that she has “a lot of composers” on her mind, in a particular “country” that she has created in her imagination.
These imaginary friends provide her with emotional resources that her fledgling youth lacked. Each person has their own style of emotional composition. One of them, Antonin Yellowsink, helped her compose a “dark and dramatic” violin concerto. “[S]Sometimes when I’m having trouble with something, when I’m composing, I go to them and ask for their advice. And often, they come up with very interesting things,” she said.
Will be Alma more original than second Mozart
Many people compare Alma to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791),6 one of the few childhood prodigies even comparable to Alma’s talent. While flattering, however, Alma insists she’d rather “prefer being the first Alma than the second Mozart.” That said, she has a great relationship with the famous composer and musician, and “would love” to have him as a teacher.
The question is whether Alma will not teach Mozart a thing or two. During a concert in Israel, Alma performed one of Mozart’s piano ensembles with a cadenza – an ensemble piece in which the orchestra is silent, allowing the soloist to perform his own music. me. But in this case, Alma did more than just perform Mozart’s solo. She created her own.
“It was something that I composed because, you see, it was a very early Mozart ensemble and the cadenza was very simple. She told Pelley. “And I made a pretty long piece with lots of different keys that do a lot of things in the motif of Mozart,” says Alma. “So you improved Mozart’s cadenza?” Pelley asked, and she replied, “Well, yes.”
Robert Gjerdingen, a music professor at Northwestern in Chicago who has acted as “a consultant to Alma’s education,” had the following to say about his star patron:
“It’s kind of a comet passing by and people look up and just say, ‘Wow.’ I sent her some exercises when she was six, seven years old where I expected her to crash and catch on fire, because they were tough. It’s back, like listening to a mid-18th century composer. She’s a native… It’s her first language – she speaks Mozart. She speaks in the style of Mendelssohn… She’s fighting in the big leagues. And if you win the pennant, there will be immortality.”
Many benefits of music
As for why she composes, Alma says her inspiration is to “make the world a better place” and she believes great music can do just that. She is certainly correct. Music is a form of emotional communication, a kind of emotional language, and like emotions, it can have a huge impact on psychological and even physical health. For example, music has been found to:
- Helps you exercise harder, while also making it easier for you
- Helping Alzheimer’s patients reconnect with those around them, recall past life events, and reduce agitation associated with dementia
- Allows patients with Parkinson’s disease to move more freely.7 Music seems to provide an external rhythm that bypasses malfunctioning signals in the brain
- Improve your mood; calms nerves; relieve stress and/or invigorate and energy
- Facilitate connection and unity among people. Despite individual differences in musical preferences, classical music has been shown to elicit a very consistent pattern of brain activity in most listeners. Areas that are activated include those involved in movement, planning, memory, and attention. This brain activation creates a kind of unifying force that synchronizes and unifies people8
What happens in your brain when you listen to music?
When you listen to music, more is going on in your body than simple auditory processing. Research shows that music activates activity in the nucleus accumbens, the part of the brain that releases the feel-good chemical dopamine and is involved in forming expectations. At the same time, the amygdala, which is involved in emotional processing, and the prefrontal cortex, where abstract decisions can be made, are also activated.9
Based on brain activity in certain regions, especially the nucleus accumbens, captured by an fMRI image while the participants listened to music, the researchers were able to predict how much listeners were willing to pay. spend on music you’ve never heard before. As you might suspect, songs that trigger activity in the emotional and intellectual regions of the brain demand a higher price tag.
Interestingly, the study’s lead author notes that your brain learns to predict how different tracks will open using pattern recognition and prediction, skills that could be key. key to our evolution. As reported by Time:ten
“These predictions are culturally dependent and based on experience: someone raised in Western rock or classical music would not be able to predict the path of an Indian raga, for example, and opposite. But if a piece of work develops in a slightly novel way and still matches the brain’s predictions, we tend to like it a lot. And that, saying [lead researcher] Salimpoor, ‘is because we have done a kind of intellectual conquest.’
In other words, music can influence brain mechanisms that are key to our evolution. The ability to recognize patterns and generalize from experience, predicting what might happen in the future – imagination in short – is something humans do better than any other animal. . It’s what has allowed us (assisted by a much less glamorous thumb) to take over the world. “
Alma’s future passion projects are writing a book, turning it into a movie, and writing musicals. I hope you will take the time to watch the outstanding 25-minute documentary about Alma Deutscher and discover her musical talents. You will not regret it. Then, if you want to know more, you can listen to some performances of “Cinderella” in the 1.5-hour recording above. May she inspire you to help make the world a better place every day.
