THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
It was the end of term in 2003 at the Royal Academy of Music, and some young hopefuls were going through their paces. On walked a tiny boy with a wide smile, luminous gaze and hands that could barely stretch an octave. But there was nothing boyish about the way this pianist of British-Taiwanese origin played the first movement of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto – he radiated a finely nuanced expressiveness and coolly relaxed authority.
At 12 years old, Kit Armstrong was already being talked about in tones of reverential wonder, so I decided to interview him. Sensing something mysterious, I got a pre-emptive briefing from his economist mother. ‘As a baby he didn’t sleep much,’ said May Armstrong. ‘And he had ultra-sensitive hearing. The slightest sound in the next room would wake him up. I first became aware of his mathematical talent when he was one, as he started counting apples.
‘And in our household we spoke several languages: I speak to Kit in Chinese and to my parents in Taiwanese, and we had a Tibetan maid. And he began to speak them all – he wasn’t confused. He even began to sing back the Japanese songs my father sang to him. He was so smart that I decided to give him music as a hobby.’
So Kit started lessons on an electronic keyboard. ‘But by the third lesson he began to ask such sophisticated questions that the teacher couldn’t answer them. And after a month he started to compose on paper.’ What sort of music?
Here Kit broke in: ‘I first composed monophonic music, just one single line of notes, and not even particularly melodious. But for some reason I got excited about it – I liked making strings of notes. And at one point I realised I had to make it sound good, so I had to discover what those strings sounded like. Then we got a piano.’ ‘From the moment it arrived,’ said May, ‘he was on it every single minute. It drove me mad, but I couldn’t say a word. I had to grab him away and say “eat!”’ Kit continued: ‘Then it built up exponentially, and I started to write melodies with harmonies. I worked out my own primitive version of harmony, and theory, and voice-leading.’
At seven, he became the youngest maths scholar at Chapman University in California, and at nine was a full-time undergraduate, but his musical creation kept pace. He transcribed Mozart symphonies for his own two-finger piano rendition before being taught to play with all his fingers. And when he came to study in London in 2003, his compositional talent developed phenomenally fast. Yet in some ways he was still very muc
