During the pandemic, the student body has dwindled to 60. #Sixty minutes child piano prodigy freeThe classes were free until 2018, funded mostly through philanthropy, with supplements from Chilean government grants the Fundación Mar Adentro and the island’s cultural corporation. Normally about 100 students, from 2-year-olds to teenagers, study each year, enrolled in classes in both traditional Polynesian and Western classical music that meet after regular school hours. She believes the school - and Rapa Nui, which has already been hit by the effects of climate change - can be a model for the outside world, showing the urgency of taking action on environmental issues. Teave conceives of it as a kind of reversal of the traditional pattern of colonialist exploitation. The building was constructed from recycled tires and the glass and plastic bottles left behind by hordes of tourists. Toki is self-sustainable, using rainwater collectors and solar panels. That vision extends to social concerns and the environment. “It’s a very symbolic word,” she said, “because we believe the present carves the future.” “I realized we need a school, and I am the tool of this universe to do what has to be done at this moment.” “A little door opened and I decided to go through it because nobody else will,” she added. Teave said she felt she had devoted “the right amount of time” to each stage of her formation up to that point - “like a musical phrasing.” Her decision to return to Rapa Nui after launching a potentially stellar career was part of a slow process. “There’s a respect there for history, for lessons learned, that’s very much like being on the island,” she said. She went on to teachers in Cleveland and Berlin, a city where she felt especially at home and which became her base for almost four years. On his advice, Teave’s mother, an American who had settled on the island and married a native of Rapa Nui, took her daughter to Valdivia, in the south of Chile, to study at the conservatory. He did, and invited her to make her public debut she was 9. Teave also wrote to the Chilean pianist Roberto Bravo, pleading with him to visit Rapa Nui. When a retired violinist later settled temporarily on the island, bringing along a piano, Teave became fascinated by the instrument and persuaded the woman to give her lessons. #Sixty minutes child piano prodigy professionalBut rather than press on with a career of incessant touring, and quite possibly the only professional classical performer to emerge from Rapa Nui to date, she decided to return and establish the first music school on the small island nearly a decade ago. From there, one of the remotest inhabited islands on the planet, this pianist went on to earn a place on the international concert stage. Teave, 38, learned to appreciate such stirring encounters while growing up on Rapa Nui - also known as Easter Island, the name imposed by European interlopers in 1722. When the sounds of crickets cease, profound silence completes “a stunning experience for the senses.” The profusion of stars gives the black of the sky a seemingly “papier-mâché texture,” she said. “A big fog is coming in from the hill on the other side.” “On one side, I have an almost 180-degree view of the ocean,” she said in a recent interview. From her home, halfway up the highest hill on Rapa Nui, Mahani Teave was describing the power of nature there to overwhelm.
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