10 year old composer and performer
 

Yeah...I don't feel at all inagequate. You can speed thru the chatter but this kid is amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3YlcHyF9dc

Incredible. Prodigy.

I always tested out in the 99th percentile. Yet in a world of billions, that still puts a very large number of people ahead of me. Of those people, some are simply staggering in their intelligence and ability.

Even so, I think there is something more at work here than simple intellect can explain.

I completely agree Daniel that there is something mysterious at work. As this young lady describes to us how she is the recipient of these melodies, so do other great composers and geniuses of the other arts.

Beethoven (or was it Mozart?) described himself as simply transcribing, as if he were a conduit. Paul McCartney also describes waking at night humming a tune, not knowing from whence he heard it. So, he goes to close friends and asks what is this tune? No one seems to recognize it so Paul concludes, 'Ah, well I must 've written it then.'

Also, I have been theorizing that music is in itself a form of pre-verbal communication. I was not aware that Darwin surmised music to be a 'proto-language'. So much for my arrogance in thinking I may have had an original thought!

Aside from the obvious intellectual endowment necessary to emit such great and wonderful (perhaps divine?) expressions, there seems to me to be a requisite 'openness' one must possess.

That openness, I think, comes from the child we all once were. There is an innocent receptivity to the world (and beyond, perhaps) and profound luck involved in recognizing it.

Alas, that receptivity and openness rarely survives even in spite of every parent's desire to nurture it. Most of us see our own inadequacies in people like this. The salve, for me, is to look for that inspiration in children and to make it up even if the science says it doesn't exist.

In a sense, yep.