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Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867–1944) was a musical prodigy whose professional career vacillated between piano performance and composition. Her professional debut was delayed until age sixteen because of parental misgivings, and then her performance career was curtailed at age eighteen when she married a prominent physician, Dr. H. H. A. Beach. His insistence that she devote her energies to composition rather than performance, along with his desire that she remain self-taught, inspired her to develop a unique late-Romantic compositional style. With the support of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its musicians, she produced a Mass with orchestra, a symphony, a concerto, and numerous chamber works. Her trailblazing accomplishments included many firsts for American women composers. After the death of her husband and mother in 1910 and 1911, she reinvented herself as a virtuoso performer while still composing. Her compositional output is widely varied in genre, instrumentation, and musical style.
Prodigies may be examples of extreme high intelligence, while savants may be examples of extreme low intelligence. There is relative consensus on how to define a savant but less agreement on the definition of a child prodigy. There have been a small number of more interpretive or theoretical efforts to comprehend and make sense of the prodigy phenomenon. With the availability of powerful imaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and others, prodigy cases shed light on some of the enduring issues in the study of intelligence. There have been advances in two areas that bear directly on savants and intelligence. One of these is of general interest and deals with all savants; this work shows that assumed constraints on IQ and other capabilities do not always hold for savants, that there is more diversity and greater plasticity in savant development than was previously believed.
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