Over the last decade, the New Zealand Ministry of Education (2000, 2012) has continued to identify young people from low socioeconomic backgrounds as one of six groups who are consistently underrepresented in gifted and talented programmes in New Zealand schools. This paper reports on a research project that explored the lived experiences of 101…

This study investigated the careers of three former musical prodigies (i.e., Ervin Nyiregyhazi, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, and David Helfgott) who made mature decisions to pursue music as a career, but did not achieve at the expected levels of distinction as adults. Many of the individual factors that may contribute to their relative lack of adult…