By Siu-Lan Tan
Sometimes you think you can explain something, and then it turns out you really can’t. This remarkable video was posted last year but only went viral in the US in the last few weeks, approaching 5 million hits in a short time. When I first saw it, I was immediately enchanted.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Dubbed by the press as ‘the Mini Maestro’ (although to be correct, she would be a maestra), the video shows little Lara Glozou with a church choir in Kyrgyzstan. She’s the young daughter of one of the choir members and often attends rehearsal.
After watching a few times, I thought I knew what might be happening. This must be an observant child who’s mirroring the actions of a conductor standing in front of the choir, interspersed with a little improvisation of her own. I thought she was a remarkable imitator, not just able to capture the conductor’s motions, but also the emotions.
But then I found another video. It shows the choir rehearsing the same song from another angle, allowing us to see the conductor’s motions of the right hand while Lara is gesturing expressively in the far right corner by the piano.
Click here to view the embedded video.
I was amazed to see that the conductor is not making the same kinds of motions as Lara after all. Even though the conductor’s gestures may be outlining the regularity of the beat and phrasing, many of Lara’s gestures and body movements—the forward lean, the hand to the chest, the sway of the body, and the dips and turns of the head—seem to be her own.
To be fair, Lara is not really “conducting.” If she were directing, her motions would come slightly before the events in the music, in anticipation of them in order to cue the choir. Her movements are more like an expression of the music. However, as an expression or sensitive interpretation of the music, I find her gestures to be remarkable. Truly extraordinary. For instance, her gestures are fewer and more prolonged during the female solo up to 0:21 (on the first video). They are a series of poses. But at 0:22 when the choir comes in, she immediately shifts to grand sweeping gestures. The variety of shapes that she forms with her hands alone express a rainbow of emotions and tone colors.
I am in awe of this little girl’s ability not only to reflect peaks and valleys in the melody of the music, and momentum of the phrases, but also the shape of the sound. For the last note of the song, she curves her left and right hands into the widest arcs for a broad final tone — a lion’s roar — rather than the kind of ending that gradually fades away.
This small child has had so little time on earth to experience falling in love, the sting of heartbreak, betrayal, triumph, grief, pain, and the rest of the great emotional topography of life. How is she able to convey the semblance of emotional depth and angst? Where is she getting her musical sensitivity? Do some young children just have an old soul?
As a former music major, I took Conducting 101. My spine was rigid, my gestures were tiny and angular. As a music student in my 20s, I had none of the intensity and theatrical weight of this little girl. More recently, I have written about how infants begin to spontaneously respond to music in bodily ways, nodding their heads and waving arms to rhythmic music once they are able to sit freely at about six months. Later, bobbing up and down with knee-bends, and spinning around in circles to music between one and two years, after they become mobile.
However, they do so for only short bursts, and most of the movements of two- and three-year-old children don’t really match the music in time (Moog, 1976; Malbrán, 2000). Although Lara is not always synchronized with the music, her deep expressive gestures capture the musical events in a broad way, even anticipating some musical moments, as she is familiar with this piece.
Little is known about young children’s interpretation of music. In one of the few studies in this area, Boone & Cunningham (2001) showed that four-year-olds can move a flexible teddy bear in dance-like fashion, to express emotion in music through movement. However the musical emotions they recognized and expressed were basic emotions (such as happiness, or sadness, or anger). What we seem to observe in Lara is much more nuanced. How is she able to capture this depth in music?
I spoke with a grown-up maestro that I greatly admire, Andrew Koehler, Music Director of the Kalamazoo Philharmonia. He said, “It’s really astonishing. Lara moves in a way that shows that she recognizes agogic accents“ (longer durations of tones, which give natural stress to music). She often reflects this with larger, more expansive motions of her arms that mark those accents.
Her gestures also capture finer details. At 0:45 to 0:47 in the first video, Koehler points out how a higher tone of greater tension resolves to a lower tone of lower tension. The toddler reflects this: “Lara leans into the music, her right hand pushing into it with a claw-like motion [capturing high tone and high tension in the music]. Then both left and right arms make downward motions as her posture goes back to an upright position again [lower tone, lower tension].”
And then there’s Jonathan Okseniuk. Here he is at three years old, appearing to ‘conduct’ a recording of the last movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in his home in Mesa, Arizona.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Even if he appears to be getting some coaxing off camera, this is a remarkable three-year-old.
Here is Jonathan again at age four, conducting a live orchestra in a rousing rendition of Khachaturian’s ‘Sabre Dance’. “This is a more challenging arena,” explains Koehler, “which would require Jonathan to anticipate what will happen in the music as opposed to simply responding to it.”
Click here to view the embedded video.
There are many other videos of Jonathan on the web, conducting Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, and Strauss with different orchestras.
How an understanding of music blooms so early in some young ones astonishes me. This mini-maestra’s sensitive expression of music and mini-maestro’s early conducting chops have left me perplexed.
Siu-Lan Tan is Associate Professor of Psychology at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, USA. She is primary editor of The Psychology of Music in Multimedia (Oxford University Press 2013), the first book consolidating the research on the role of music in film, television, video games, and computers. A version of this article also appears on Psychology Today. Siu-Lan Tan also has her own blog, What Shapes Film? Read her previous blog posts.
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By Lara Alcock
Two contrasting experiences stick in mind from my first year at university.
First, I spent a lot of time in lectures that I did not understand. I don’t mean lectures in which I got the general gist but didn’t quite follow the technical details. I mean lectures in which I understood not one thing from the beginning to the end. I still went to all the lectures and wrote everything down – I was a dutiful sort of student – but this was hardly the ideal learning experience.
Second, at the end of the year, I was awarded first class marks. The best thing about this was that later that evening, a friend came up to me in the bar and said, “Hey Lara, I hear you got a first!” and I was rapidly surrounded by other friends offering enthusiastic congratulations. This was a revelation. I had attended the kind of school at which students who did well were derided rather than congratulated. I was delighted to find myself in a place where success was celebrated.
Looking back, I think that the interesting thing about these two experiences is the relationship between the two. How could I have done so well when I understood so little of so many lectures?
I don’t think that there was a problem with me. I didn’t come out at the very top, but obviously I had the ability and dedication to get to grips with the mathematics. Nor do I think that there was a problem with the lecturers. Like the vast majority of the mathematicians I have met since, my lecturers cared about their courses and put considerable effort into giving a logically coherent presentation. Not all were natural entertainers, but there was nothing fundamentally wrong with their teaching.
I now think that the problems were more subtle, and related to two issues in particular.
First, there was a communication gap: the lecturers and I did not understand mathematics in the same way. Mathematicians understand mathematics as a network of axioms, definitions, examples, algorithms, theorems, proofs, and applications. They present and explain these, hoping that students will appreciate the logic of the ideas and will think about the ways in which they can be combined. I didn’t really know how to learn effectively from lectures on abstract material, and research indicates that I was pretty typical in this respect.
Students arrive at university with a set of expectations about what it means to ‘do mathematics’ – about what kind of information teachers will provide and about what students are supposed to do with it. Some of these expectations work well at school but not at university. Many students need to learn, for instance, to treat definitions as stipulative rather than descriptive, to generate and check their own examples, to interpret logical language in a strict, mathematical way rather than a more flexible, context-influenced way, and to infer logical relationships within and across mathematical proofs. These things are expected, but often they are not explicitly taught.
My second problem was that I didn’t have very good study skills. I wasn’t terrible – I wasn’t lazy, or arrogant, or easily distracted, or unwilling to put in the hours. But I wasn’t very effective in deciding how to spend my study time. In fact, I don’t remember making many conscious decisions about it at all. I would try a question, find it difficult, stare out of the window, become worried, attempt to study some section of my lecture notes instead, fail at that too, and end up discouraged. Again, many students are like this. I have met a few who probably should have postponed university until they were ready to exercise some self-discipline, but most do want to learn.
What they lack is a set of strategies for managing their learning – for deciding how to distribute their time when no-one is checking what they’ve done from one class to the next, and for maintaining momentum when things get difficult. Many could improve their effectiveness by doing simple things like systematically prioritizing study tasks, and developing a routine in which they study particular subjects in particular gaps between lectures. Again, the responsibility for learning these skills lies primarily with the student.
Personally, I never got to a point where I understood every lecture. But I learned how to make sense of abstract material, I developed strategies for studying effectively, and I maintained my first class marks. What I would now say to current students is this: take charge. Find out what lecturers and tutors are expecting, and take opportunities to learn about good study habits. Students who do that should find, like I did, that undergraduate mathematics is challenging, but a pleasure to learn.
Lara Alcock is a Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics Education Centre at Loughborough University. She has taught both mathematics and mathematics education to undergraduates and postgraduates in the UK and the US. She conducts research on the ways in which undergraduates and mathematicians learn and think about mathematics, and she was recently awarded the Selden Prize for Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education. She is the author of How to Study for a Mathematics Degree (2012, UK) and How to Study as a Mathematics Major (2013, US).
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Author Lara Zeises has a secret identify: she’s also author Lola Douglas. As Lara, she’s published Bringing Up the Bones, Contents Under Pressure, and Anyone But You. As Lola, she’s the author of True Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet and More Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet.
And now her book above a teen movie star has become a Lifetime movie starring some current and future teen movie stars – and a once-teen movie star, Valerie Bertinelli. How sweet is that? Many books are optioned, but few are actually filmed. The movie premieres August 9 at at 9 p.m., and Lara will be live blogging here – revealing secrets, stories, and reactions – during the movie!
Click here for more info and links. You can also visit Lara on the web here.
Kirkus says the books are “fun, breezy entertainment with thoughtful undertones.”
But as for me, I always like to ask authors questions that have to do with what I write: mysteries and thrillers.
So here goes:
A: What’s the scariest thing that’s ever happened to you? Bonus question: have you used it, in any way, in a book?
L: One night several years ago, my friend Candace and I were hanging out with a mutual friend who had a total meltdown while driving. With us in the car. She started going 90 on the Interstate, screaming at cars, riding people's bumpers and swerving from lane to lane. She was sober but something had snapped, and I really thought we were done for. I'm pretty sure I cried a little. When she finally dropped Candy and me off at my apartment and drove off, Candy actually got on her knees for a minute and said a little prayer. I've never used that moment in a book, and I probably never will because it's one of those random things that sounds almost fake when you tell people about it.
A: Mystery writers often give their characters an unreasoning fear – and then make them face it. Do you have any phobias, like fear of spiders or enclosed spaces?
L: I have a couple of phobias. One is that I don't like tall, steep stair-like things that are open. Like, bleachers: I can climb up bleachers just fine, but going down freaks me out. I'm fine on elevators but going down one of those Big Daddy escalators into a London tube station is terrifying. This stems from an incident that happened when I was maybe twelve years old. My dad and I used to go to baseball games at Vet Stadium in Philly pretty regularly. One time I lost my balance heading to our seats, and I reached out for this seated guy's shoulder to stabilize myself. He must've thought I was a thief or something, because he shrugged me off hard and I went flying. The only thing stopping me was the concrete barrier at the end of our level. I had to go to the infirmary to get checked out and everything. The cool part was they let us sit on the 100 level when my check up was done!
A: Do you have a favorite mystery book, author, or movie?
L: All of the women in my life are into Janet Evanovich, and I was indoctrinated into the Plum series this past spring. She's hilarious. I love watching mysteries on TV, especially stuff like THE CLOSER. I find watching mysteries really helpful in terms of my writing, because even though I don't work in that genre it forces me to think about plotting in a way that I don't normally.
A: At its heart, every story is a mystery. It asks why someone acts the way they did – or maybe what will happen next. What question does your book ask?
L: It's kind of abstracted, but I think the biggest question of the book is about identity. Morgan's trying to figure out who she is and where she belongs. Is it Hollywood, where she grew up? Is it Fort Wayne, where she went to try and reinvent herself? Is she an actress, a tabloid star, a cautionary tale? More importantly, who does she want to be going forward?
A: Is there a mystery in life that you are still trying to figure out?
L: Time management mystifies the hell out of me. Especially when it comes to Internet stuffs. Between my blog and Facebook and MySpace and e-mail ... Let's just say if I stayed on top of all of that, I'd never write another book.
