Playground prodigy

MUSICAL TALENT:Daimee Chu Tao Ng's musical talent could well be prodigious, but in addition to long hours spent playing her violin, she also enjoys going to the playground, just like any other five-year-old, writes ARMINTA WALLACE

DAIMEE CHU TAO NG lifts the violin, places it under her chin and begins to play. Her fingers are tiny but confident. Her black hair, caught back in a cute hair-band, gleams as she moves. She’s wearing a pink T-shirt and jeans. She’s five years old. Is she a prodigy? Her violin teacher doesn’t like the word; it carries a lot of baggage and stereotyping, not to mention expectation. Mozart was a prodigy. So was Yehudi Menuhin. It’s tough company for a little kid.

On the other hand, since she founded her music school, Young European Strings, in Dublin in 1988, Maria Kelemen has assessed the musical potential of thousands of children from the age of two and a half upwards. Many of those children are musically gifted; some are exceptionally talented. Kelemen’s own daughter, Gwendolyn Masin, is a professional violinist. But in more than two decades of teaching, Kelemen has never come across a child whose musical progress she would have categorised as prodigious – until now.

“Daimee is doing things at five that even the very talented would normally only do at seven or eight,” she says. The fact that she is practising for an hour a day, or thereabouts, means that her skill is increasing exponentially; so is her repertoire; and the more she can do, the more she wants to do. That’s how it works. Even the experts who disagree over the definition of “prodigy” agree on this much: it’s characterised by a “rage to master” the subject at hand.

But let’s ask Daimee, who is now sitting on the rug in her socks. How much does she practise? “About one hour, or half an hour, every day,” she says. She speaks softly but fluidly, without a hint of Chinese intonation. At home, the family uses Cantonese and she can also write basic Mandarin characters. Daimee’s mother Amy, who attends lessons with her and has been supervising her practise until very recently – this is standard for very young children – smiles wryly. “Sometimes more,” she says. “Especially when she gets new pieces. Then she will spend an hour and a half. You don’t really notice the time passing. And she wants to do it well.”

Amy came to Ireland from Hong Kong in 1988. “So I’ve been here 22 years,” she says. “When Hong Kong was being passed back to China my parents were very anxious about the whole political situation, so we moved over here. I used to have an aunt living here, so that’s why we came to Ireland. I went to secondary school here and I went to Trinity. All along, I was thinking I would go back to Hong Kong; but then, life is not what you expect.

“I met my husband David here. He’s Chinese, but he was born here, so he’s Irish, in a way. We got married in 2000 and Daimee came along in 2005. We have a baby as well. Darryl is almost nine months.” Amy works as a software engineer in a bank – part-time, since Daimee was born – and her husband is a system administrator.

It quickly became clear that Daimee wasn’t going to be the kind of child who sits around watching cartoons on the telly. “She has a lot of energy – she never stops,” Amy says. “She started talking in sentences when she was one and a half. She can talk all day, non-stop, except when she’s sleeping or eating. She moves all the time and she asks tonnes of questions.”

She won’t be fobbed off with any old answer, either. “She has just too much energy, not just physical, but mentally and in every single way.” Her skin became highly sensitive; she developed eczema, which became quite severe. By the time her daughter was two and a half, Amy was trying to find activities to channel and focus this incredible energy. “We could never satisfy her with books and things. She was one and a half, and there are only a few things you can do at that age in Ireland. One of them is swimming, but with her skin, that wasn’t an option.”

At one point, Daimee enrolled in a pre-school music group that involved playing triangles, bells and other percussion instruments, and singing songs. “She sat down, but she wasn’t very much into it, if you know what I mean. Then I asked her, how would you like to play violin? And she was very excited about it. That’s why I started looking .” Neither Amy nor her husband play a musical instrument; but Amy heard about a violin teacher in Templeogue who would take suitable children from the age of two and a half. “I rang Maria during the summer, two years ago, and she said, ‘Come for an assessment’.” Daimee, who had just had her third birthday, began lessons the following September.

“And life has been quite different since then,” Amy says. “There’s a huge difference. Playing the violin helps her so much, in every way. The technical aspect of it challenges her, so she’s looking less, I would say, for attention from other people. It calms her down so much.” It has also helped her social development. At Young European Strings, Daimee plays in the orchestra with other children. “She was a very reserved child, but now she’s much more open, much more bold in the sense of being able to mix with other people, and much more willing to make friends.”

The first year of lessons featured regular blow-ups, even occasional full-on tantrums. “I realised that here was a child who looks for perfection and gets extremely frustrated if she doesn’t immediately get the result she wants,” Kelemen explains. “Some children will say, ‘okay, I’ll just give it up because I can’t do it’. This one” – she smiles down at Daimee – “would just go into a rage. Because she has such delicate skin, the first thing you would see is her eyes become red. So I would think, ‘Uh, oh – here we go’. There were moments when she got so mad that we had to stop the lesson. Slowly she learned to accept that: okay, it won’t happen today, but it will happen tomorrow.”

It’s a tough lesson for a five-year-old. But then, Daimee is not the average five-year-old. At her primary school, Zion Church of Ireland school in Rathgar, Dublin, she’s forging ahead with maths and reading. “She loves reading,” her mother says. “Apart from the violin, the next thing that she loves most is reading. She can spend hours with books. All kinds of books – even ones we don’t think she would be interested in, like science books. One day she said to me, ‘Actually, mummy, we have 650 muscles in our body’. I didn’t think she would be reading a book about muscles. But she also reads books about fairies, ponies, princesses, bears that come alive.”

Like many girls of her age, Daimee enjoys ballet lessons. Did her class put on a show for the mums and dads, before the summer holidays? Another nod, faster this time. “Lion King,” she says. Can she show us what she did in the show? She clenches her tiny fists and launches into a pretty convincing roar. We all laugh and cower, so she does it again. She obviously enjoys playing to an audience. Whether that will translate into a career as a musician is another matter.

Kelemen insists that the question is irrelevant. Mastery of a musical instrument, she says, gives a child an extraordinary head start in life. Her teaching methods at Young European Strings are designed to encourage creativity and imagination. She uses Michaela’s Music House, a beautiful illustrated tutor, designed and written by her daughter Gwendolyn, rather than Suzuki-style imitation and repetition. “With this, her mind is occupied. As to whether she’s going to become a violinist or not, who knows? I was asking her the other day whether she preferred going to the playground or playing the violin. What does Daimee think? “Going to the playground,” is the prompt reply.

“People think that prodigies are freaks, and that there’s always a mother or a father who’s pushing the child. It’s not true,” says Kelemen. “A prodigy is pushing the parent. A prodigy is pushing the teacher. People think it’s the parent who’s pushing. It’s not.”

Kelemen turns to Amy. “Are you pushing her?” Amy laughs and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I actually find it very difficult to keep up with her. Sometimes, I really wish that she could give me a break.”

Daimee, meanwhile, has put away her tiny violin, vanished into the hall and is playing with a coat-hanger, making racing-car noises that suggest it has become a steering-wheel. Five-year-olds. Don’t you just love ’em?