90. IN THE KEY of GENIUS (The Extraordinary Life of Derek Paravicini)

Adam Ockelford 2007

Derek Paravicini is an autistic musical savant with absolute 'perfect pitch' who can remember any musical piece after hearing it just once in his life. Born three months premature, one of a twin who survives but is left totally blind, they discover his musical talent after his beloved Nanny encouraged him to play an old keyboard at two years old. This work of non-fiction is narrated by the author, Derek's first piano teacher who guided him with heart-felt admiration and devotion through his first concert at nine years old, through the difficulties of adolescence, the loss of his Nanny and his current fame and successful musical career.

'Mary Ann lay absolutely still, silently praying that she had been mistaken... She sensed that the climax to a difficult six months (and a terrible week) was near. For the last seven days, doctors had battled to prevent her from going into premature labour.'(8)

'Hastily, names had been chosen that reflected something of his distinguished lineage: 'Derek' after his maternal grandfather (Derek Parker-Bowles, who had died a couple of years earlier); 'Nicolas' after his father; and 'Somerset' after a paternal grandfather, Somerset Maugham.'(11)

'That night, Nanny made another decision: since Derek couldn't see her, whenever she wasn't physically in contact with him she had better keep in touch by talking or singing... At first, of course, Derek didn't know what any of this meant, but he quickly got used to Nanny's voice-- a constant mellow stream in a complex and ever-changing auditory landscape-- and by the time he was three he could do a creditable impression of her 'warbling'.(20)

'His fascination with abstract patterns of sound, those thousands of hours spent simply listening during the first twenty months of his life, largely uncontaminated by understanding, had caused millions of special neuronal connections to form, and it was those connections that now lay behind the emergence of a precocious musicality.(34)

'Mary Ann could only smile at Nanny in disbelief. Her son truly was amazing. How could it be that this little boy, just over two years old, totally blind, virtually unable to speak and apparently able to understand very little of what was going on in the world, had taught himself to play the keyboard-- something that she couldn't even do herself?'(39)

'He began in A flat major, as Beethoven had intended, reinforcing my view that Derek must have 'perfect pitch'. This meant that whenever he heard a piece of music, the notes didn't just sound vaguely 'high' or 'low', as they do too most of us. For him, each one had its own distinct character. This gave Derek a huge advantage as he taught himself to play by ear, since he didn't have to fumble around on the keyboard, finding out what sounded right by trial and error. Before his fingers even touched the piano he already knew which notes he needed to play.'(80)

'For at the end of every session with Derek I sensed that there was still more to come-- a great deal more-- and that I hadn't as yet come near to fathoming the depths of his labyrinthine musical mind. I was continually working out how to help him realise the next level of his potential. It was rather like trying to look round the bends in a tunnel that was twisting further and further into the ground, with a light flickering somewhere at the end. Every time you thought that you'd got there, it turned out that there was another bend to negotiate. Yet on each occasion, the light that appeared to be just beyond the reach was brighter that it had been before: he was yet to show us the full brilliance of his latent musicality.(113)

'That was one of the odd things about Derek, as Nanny had observed years earlier. In order to learn a piece, he didn't physically have to practise it or even play it through. All he had to do was just listen a few times and it would be there, ready and waiting, for whatever he wanted to call it up-- sometimes years later.'(134)

'It's like the spines of a hedgehog. Imagine that each memory is a single spine. Touch its tip with precisely the right verbal label and that memory will open to you. But miss it, even by a tiny amount, and Derek won't have any idea what you're getting at. And he doesn't have the reasoning power to make an educated guess either: he doesn't do "fuzzy logic".'(221)

'There was something about Derek's playing-- an immediacy, an authority that took no prisoners-- that seemed to cut through the fault line in perception and understanding that their autism so often produced, and he was able to communicate through music with children who in almost every other situation were locked away in themselves.'(267)
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Arrow edition 2008
279 pages
Book owned
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I found this on You Tube, Derek at 26 years old, 4 years ago: