What is the future for Kit Armstrong?

What is the future for Kit Armstrong?
…………………………………………Leechard
(Quest No.8238e 　　　　2011 0912 Monday)


Kit Armstrong is a very special child. Now he is 19, a brilliant piano player and composer, and a mathematician, his research in algebraic geometry and topology has taken him way past PhD level.

He might be a double genius. At the age of 5, he had completed his studies on higher secondary math. And at the age of 3, when his mother first brought him a piano keyboard, he could sit there playing all day without stopping. His mother needed to feed him by the side of the piano.

Talents are always a puzzle for us. How can they do things we can never do?

And the biggest compliment came from the renowned pianist Alfred Brendel. He had retired from performance, but taken Kit as a student. Brendel said talents have a ten-fold learning speed. A documentary film by Mark Kidel under the title “Set The Piano Stool on Fire” recorded their interesting encounter.

Banjamin Kaplan was piano teacher for Kit in Royal Academy of Music when he was 11 years old. Banjamin sain, he can learn a formidable eight-page Debussy piece by heart in 45 minutes, without touching the piano. (Indepent.co.uk, 20 February 2011, “Kit Armstrong, Playing by numbers”.)

There were quite a few podigies around the world. Menuhim, Kissin, Barenboim, Anne-Sophie Muttter, were all superstars by the age of 13. And some of them get lost quite easily. The American violinist Michael Rabin, feted as a teenager, in emotional free-fall in his 20s, dead at 35. (See “At three he was reading the Wall Street Journal” by Stephen Moss, The Guardian, 10 November 2005)

And the problem is, how many of the talents will finally become useful, and how many wasted.

I have a higher expectation for talents. I expect they can bring us human beings hope and future. However, ever after Mozart was gone, no one could fill up the gap in music. None of the talents have such impact as Mozart had done to human being.

Talents have difficulties even growing up, not to say that they can help us the human race to walk on to future.

Whenever there are new names appear, there will be much expectation again. And people are giving them much pressure, if they wish to stand up and gain approvals.
　
People are talking how to “protect” genius now. Talents are fragile and easily broken.

But the point is not protection.

The point is why some seeds are never able to grow up.

If you have a good seed, then the next issue is the soil. If seeds were felt upon rocks, or deserts, or rubbish heaps, they will surely die. Good seeds will come up once for a while, but if we have no soil at all, then all the seeds are wasted.

The important thing is to have a good soil. And that means a better culture. We can have a better culture by cultivating ourselves. And every one can do that. We must prepare ourselves first, and cherish every seed we have, then the future is for us. Mozart was a seed grown on an old culture of more then one thousand years. Now our culture had been ruined for so long a time. We might know what to do first.

(One last word here: Seeds do have feet. They are human being, and human can walk. If you found there is no soil, then it is time to go. Don’t let the temporary brightness darken you eyes.)
　　　　




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