Cole T. Griscom

From a very early age it was apparent Cole was a gifted child with a natural thirst for learning.  At 18 months of age he displayed early powers of what seemed like total recall, and by age 3, he commanded such elevated conversational skills that he often refused to play with other children his age, instead preferring the intellectual stimulation of adults.  At age 9, while preparing for a family visit over the holidays, his parents uncovered an old toy keyboard that was intended to entertain Cole’s two-year old cousin.  The keyboard never engaged with his cousin but rather surprisingly caught Cole's attention.  Six weeks later Cole was still playing with it each day after school for at least an hour when one evening Cole asked his father “Daddy does this sound like Mozart?” and began to play along with a Mozart piece on YouTube.  While performing, his father noticed that Cole's concentration was fixated to the toy keyboard, not on the training video on his computer.   When asked to play the song without the aid of the YouTube video in the background, it was evident that Cole had memorized the piece and possessed a unique self-taught talent. At that exact moment the entire family headed out to the local music store, where his parents upgraded his $2 toy to an electronic teaching keyboard.  Within three months Cole had mastered many of the training songs on the new keyboard and was asking for professional instruction. Soon after starting formal lessons at age 10, Cole began composing his own classical inspired works.