A Study of Intrapersonal & Environmental Catalysts Affecting the Talent Development of a Gifted Young Musician in Singapore
Subject-Case study
Ling (not her real name) was hailed by the TIME magazine as one of Asia’s “Small Wonders” and a “bona fide prodigy” when she was only ten years old. The case study focused on the musical experiences of fourteen-year-old Ling, who is an accomplished young pianist of Singapore-Chinese descent. Ling was chosen because she is regarded as one of the region’s most promising young pianists (‘Singapore’s talented children’, 5 Dec, 2003; ‘Small wonders’, 10 Feb, 2005). Ling is talented in music and excels academically. Raised in Singapore in a family of three siblings, she is the elder twin of two younger brothers. In the preliminary surveys, Ling was asked to give a profile of her academic and musical achievements. Ling was ranked among the top 1% in Singapore in an international Math Competition sponsored by Australia’s University of New South Wales and is a high scorer in the Year 2004 Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE)[1]. She was also selected for the Gifted Education Program (GEP) [2] in Singapore and scored a math/verbal average of 700 in the SAT exams. Her musical endeavors are equally stellar. Ling was accepted to a prestigious local music conservatory at the age of thirteen, making her the youngest music undergraduate in Singapore. This selective university admittance, no doubt, put her well within the top 1% of the talent threshold in the DMGT. On top of this, she has won numerous awards in piano competitions, including a first prize in a prestigious international piano competition. The odds of outdoing many promising young pianists around the world in a piano competition would probably be even smaller, and this easily puts Ling higher on Gagne’s metric-based talent threshold (Gagne, 1993), probably in the 1:10,000 division of the “exceptionally talented” (Gagne, 2004, p. 130) among pianists. Ling is currently studying piano under Dr Thomas Hecht and composition with Dr John Sharpley. Other internationally acclaimed teachers and pianists who had taught her include Evengy Koroliov, Norma Fisher, and Martin Roscoe.
