Piano Guidance
Piano Guidance
Photo: Thirdman
Matthew Whitaker has been rocking crowds with his improvisational piano playing for most of his short life. He may be blind, but a neuroscientist has found Whitaker's visual cortex goes into overdrive when he plays.
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If h is positive, the graph will shift right. If h is negative, the graph will shift left.
Read More »“He was playing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’ But he was playin’ it with both hands,” Moses Whitaker said. “Matt was playing the chords and the melody of the song at the same [time.] He hadn’t had a lesson or anything. And he was three years old. So my question was, ‘Okay, who showed him how to do that? Somebody had to show Matthew how to– how to play this song.’ And nobody showed him.” Matthew Whitaker was born at 24 weeks. He weighed 1 pound 11 ounces. His parents were told he had less than a 50% chance of survival. One of the many complications he faced was retinopathy of prematurity, a disease which can lead to blindness. “I think at the time I didn’t think he was gonna make it,” May Whitaker said. “So it was, you know, just very scary.” Whitaker’s parents watched helplessly as he braved 11 surgeries to try and save his sight. After two anxious years, they decided they didn’t want him to endure any more. Even if it meant he’d be permanently blind. “We just felt like he was going through too much,” Moses Whitaker said. “We were going through too much. Because the doctors weren’t seeing it was getting any better. We just said, ‘You know what? That’s enough. We’ll just deal with it as it is.'” Doctors told the Whitakers that Matthew may never speak, but the challenges didn’t end there. “They said that he might not crawl,” Moses Whitaker said. “And he might not ever walk. Because he needed those things to see. You know most kids learn to crawl, they learn to walk because they want to try to get to something. Well, Matthew couldn’t see to get to anything. So a lot of his toys and stuff we had to have sounds. So that he would want to crawl, want to reach those things.” He did start crawling towards music, sometimes sliding up to the speaker to feel the music. No one in Whitaker’s family was a musician, but his grandfather bought him his first keyboard when he was 3 years old. It didn’t take long for Whitaker to show that he had a gift. “They were nursery rhymes more so than anything,” Moses Whitaker said. “So they weren’t that complicated. But what he was doing was complicated. Because most kids don’t play with both hands. And they don’t play chords and the harmonies and all of that. And Matt was doing that.” So the Whitakers decided to get Matthew a teacher, which proved to be difficult. “At the time, we got a lot of answers where people were saying he’s too young,” Moses Whitaker said. “He was 3 years old at the time. Or, ‘I don’t know how to teach a blind child.'” Dalia Sakas agreed to meet Matthew. Sakas is the director of music studies at the Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School in New York City, a school for the visually impaired. “So we brought him over,” Moses Whitaker said. “And Dalia played something on the piano… and Matt repeated it. Then she played something else and Matt repeated it. She said bring him in. We’ll make the exception.”
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Read More »Sakas has been teaching Whitaker ever since. She is a classically-trained concert pianist. “I was performing a couple of recitals and the Dvorak Piano Quintet is a piece actually for a piano and string quartet. So there’s five of us,” Sakas said. “So Matt and his mom came to hear, you know, the night I played. He comes in Saturday morning. I walk into the studio and he’s playing the opening of the Dvorak Quintet. You know, and then the cello comes in and he knew that whole thing… And I thought, Oh, very nice.” Dvorak’s Piano Quintet is a challenging piece for five musicians. Whitaker was playing his version of all five parts on his piano. Sakas told Alfosni that Whitaker can listen to a piece of music one time and then play it.
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Read More »Then Limb put Whitaker through a different series of auditory tests. He showed us the results. “So we started out not by looking at music but by looking at somebody like this who would give a lecture that most people would consider to be a little bit boring,” Limb said. “This is what happened when he was listening to that. And then interestingly because he is blind we looked at his visual cortex. And we didn’t see any significant activity there at all.”
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