The Musical Genius - Season 5, Episode 226-year-old Derek Paraviccini is completely blind and partly autistic; he can’t tell left from right or count to ten. Derek now lives in a RNIB home for the blind but despite his profound disabilities, his brain is a perfectly programmed musical computer.
Derek was born three and a half months premature. His twin sister didn’t make it, and Derek technically died three times in the hospital. Miraculously, the tiny baby pulled through but his eyesight was destroyed by an oxygen overdose; as a result, he developed an astonishingly acute sense of hearing. Autistic people are often attracted to patterns and repetition, which can lead to some of them developing great gifts in fields such as mathematics or music. “When areas of the brain aren’t being used for their normal function, they are recruited for other functions,” says autism expert Dr Simon Baron-Cohen. With no visual cues to distract him and little emotional or intellectual recognition, Derek’s mind is free to concentrate almost entirely on music. He lives in a world of sound.
The Paraviccinis were astonished when, at the age of two, Derek started playing the piano. When they took him to school for the blind, little Derek heard a piano in the hallway and lunged for it. He broke away from his parents, pushed the poor child who was having a lesson off the stool and began playing with frightening vigour – with his fingers, with his elbows, with karate chops and occasionally with his nose. A musical prodigy was born, but to this day experts are baffled as to how Derek’s genius can coexist with such severe disability.
The RNIB’s Dr Adam Ockelford took Derek under his wing and became his mentor; he is one of the few people Derek trusts implicitly. We see Adam accompany Derek as he travels to the University of Sheffield, translating the pitch of a train engine into notes as he travels. At the University, a group of sceptical music scholars test his musical brain by playing him a Basque lullaby which he has never heard before. Of course, Derek amazes his audience by instantly playing the whole song perfectly; Derek remembers every single piece of music he’s ever heard. He is a true savant.
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Derek has the rare gift of universal perfect pitch, but the experts want to know exactly how many notes his brain can process. He is presented with a sequence of chords he has never heard before, played by an orchestra of 50 instruments; he still manages to repeat the sound by arpeggiating the chords.Next, Derek is taken to Goldsmiths college where Professor Linda Pring fixes 32 electrodes to his skull in order to test how accurately and quickly his brain monitors sound. She plays him 64 musical phrases from Moonlight Sonata, half of which contain errors. His verbal responses are random, but his brain activity filters the wrong sounds with startling accuracy.
There’s no doubt that Derek has a gift, but can it really be called talent? Is he playing the piano with feeling or is he just a musical machine? Professor John Sloboda wants to measure Derek’s capacity for discerning emotion in music. When instructed, he can play a song in a happy or sad mood, but struggles when asked to play angrily; he merely growls over his playing. However, Jools Holland argues that the only way to judge is to listen to what Derek creates and the way he communicates to his audience. Derek is an exceptional musician because music is an extension of himself; he has an intuitive bond with the musical world.Derek heads to Las Vegas. Here, he meets another musical savants named Rex Lewis-Clack, with whom he will duet in front of the biggest audience of his life. Will Derek rise to the challenge – and can he help the less experienced boy to play the concert of his life.
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