You may have met Feng E on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, or seen one of his viral ukulele covers on YouTube. He is an 11-year-old Taiwanese ukulele and guitar prodigy who began playing when he was just 5-years-old. His father encouraged him to play the ukulele because his fingers weren’t nimble enough, and he wanted Feng E to become better at handwriting. He threatened that if Feng did not develop his fine motor skills in this way, his father would not play Legos with him. This simple practice in fine motor skill quickly turned to talent and took off. Feng made YouTube covers and performed live shows on the streets of Taiwan and eventually came to the United States to share a new style of playing the ukulele he entitled ‘Finger Styling.’ He has since received over 500,000 subscribers on YouTube with this global attention, and has even received the golden buzzer on America’s Got Talent. He later returned home and also made it to the finals on Asia’s Got Talent. This young prodigy has a well established audience and advanced skill for his age, but when probed on how he creates his music, his responses are very much expected of any 11-year-old kid.
When asked to elaborate on his style of playing, he describes it as “Finger Styling” with no elaboration at first. Then when pushed further he describes it as a variation of acoustic because it’s the closest thing he can say that would describe his style. He is truly a one man band; he uses his fingers to vigorously strum the strings and tap the base of the instrument for a beat, and even adds vocals to enhance his covers. Surprisingly, Feng claims he performs as well as the other students in his music class, and that when music is written in score he cannot read it very well. He uses mental imagery in his creative process to play the covers of Western music by ear, while knowing basic scales and musical keys. He has an idea of what the music is supposed to sound like in his head, and then his fingers just do the work for him. When he plays, his eyes roll back in his head and he bobs his head to the beat, letting the music flow through his mind straight to the instrument without the constraints of technical training.
Something I find very interesting about Feng E is the way he has integrated Western culture with his Eastern culture upbringing. Most of his covers are American pop culture music you might hear on the radio, and he seems drawn to Western pop culture in general. We talked in class about a common (but not universal) trend in Eastern culture creativity, which is to reinvent a traditional idea versus Western culture creativity tendency to branch out from traditional ideas. Feng E seems to have a balance of both of these cultural influences. Being raised in Taiwan and then moving to America gives him multicultural perspectives. He puts a spin on covers but does not write his own music, suggesting that he takes a ‘traditional’ song and makes it his own rendition. However, his own rendition is not like any other in process or product, so he branches out from traditional ukulele covers in that regard. Adult ukulele musicians across the globe are jealous of this 11-year-old prodigy’s immense talent.
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