Perfect Pitch : Gloria Lenhoff Is a ‘Musical Savant’ Who Sings and Plays Beautifully but Can’t Understand Mathematics

Gloria Lenhoff is a woman of great talent. She sings opera in a beautiful soprano. She plays the accordion as if it were an extension of herself, effortlessly absorbing new pieces into her repertoire of more than 1,000 songs.

Her abilities go beyond music. She speaks in half a dozen languages, including sign. While performing for a large audience representative of Southern California’s cultural diversity, Gloria bandied niceties in Spanish, Hebrew, French and Japanese.

There is an aura of genius about this woman. And so sometimes, if you have known her only a few days, you forget. Because she excels in extraordinary areas, you forget her limitations in ordinary areas.

“Gloria, if something costs a dime and you pay for it with a quarter, how much change will you get back?” her father prodded.

She stared at him blankly. Math, even simple math, is not a language she speaks. “Can you help me with the answer?” she asked.

Gloria has Williams syndrome, a rare form of mental retardation that did not have a label when she was born with it 35 years ago. Although she is quite adept at small talk, her conversation becomes halting and foggy when steered off the beaten path. And she does not know the answer to three plus four.

Yet in one corner of Gloria’s childlike mind, she possesses a gift that people with twice her measurable intelligence can only admire from afar.

She is what is commonly called a savant, a phenomenon that gained attention in the 1988 movie “Rain Man.” But unlike the Dustin Hoffman character, who was autistic and had superior mathematical skills, Gloria’s talent lies in music.

Her parents first noticed Gloria’s prowess when she was 11. She enjoyed singing and putting on make-believe shows for them, so they gave her lessons in voice and accordion--with no great expectation that she would master either field.

It was at his daughter’s bat mitzvah that Howard Lenhoff realized how far she had gone with her music. Before a congregation that was visibly moved, the 13-year-old girl sang Hebrew hymns with the voice of an opera star.

“My wife thinks I place too much emphasis on the bat mitzvah as the turning point,” Lenhoff said. “But that was the first time I saw the effect Gloria has on an audience. Before then, she just sang around the house for her own amusement.”

Ever since, Gloria has been taking her act on the road. She performs at synagogues, convalescent homes, Leisure World. A couple of times a year, she steals her father’s thunder at his UCI biology class.

The students had waited months for this night--the grand finale of their undergraduate course, “Conception to Birth.” Professor Lenhoff presented his last lecture of the quarter, ending with a brief discussion about birth defects.

By the law of averages, about a dozen people in the room that night someday would have a handicapped child, the instructor said. What would they do? Would they treat the experience as a tragedy, or as a challenge?

Gloria stepped out on stage, smiling brightly. She was dressed in casual slacks, as though she would be performing for a few friends rather than a few hundred strangers.

Calm and self-assured, she introduced herself. She did not sound mentally handicapped, nor particularly look it.

A prickly wave of silence rolled across the auditorium. Then Gloria began to sing Gluck’s aria, “O Del Mio Dolci Ardor,” her voice strong and lovely. The amazed audience thanked her with a roar of applause as Lenhoff stood in the background, beaming.

“He just radiates pride,” a student whispered to his buddy.

There was still more for Lenhoff to show off. He suggested to the students that they greet Gloria in foreign languages. “Comment allez vous? “ someone asked. “Je vais tres bien, merci,” Gloria responded with a polished accent.

One by one, Gloria engaged in chitchat with various audience members in whatever language they threw her way. Finally, a man yelled out something she could not discern. “I didn’t understand,” she apologized. Was she finally stumped? He repeated himself. Oh! And she rattled on awhile in Japanese.

Next trick: Gloria sat down on a stool with her accordion and played a couple of lively waltzes. Two students leaped to their feet and danced a jig.

After awarding her a standing ovation, Lenhoff’s newest fans lined up to hug her and pass along notes of praise.

A few days after the performance--one that she now gives regularly as the capper to her father’s popular course--Gloria sat in her living room sifting through the students’ notes. “Oh my,” she said. “Listen to this.” She slowly read one of the letters aloud, occasionally soliciting her mother’s help.

“I first heard you sing at Temple Bat-Yahm in 1977,” it began. “My sister is handicapped too. . . . When I was pregnant, I was never afraid of having a handicapped child because of what I have seen and heard you and my sister achieve. . . .”

How does it make her feel to know that she affects people so positively?

“I really feel a great deal of love,” Gloria said, automatically. It was familiar territory--a question she had answered many times before.

When conversation turned to a more trying era--Gloria’s early life--her father courted her permission. “You don’t mind if we talk about this, do you?” he asked. “You don’t mind because you know how good you are--better than most of us.”

Sylvia Lenhoff, a UCI administrator, let her husband tell the story. “Eh, that’s all ancient stuff,” she said.

They knew that something was wrong with their first baby soon after her birth. At the time, Howard Lenhoff was doing his post-doctoral apprenticeship in Connecticut. A physician broke it to the young couple that their daughter had a mental handicap.

“It was more shattering to me than it was to my wife,” Lenhoff said. “I was the sort of person--and I still am--who makes everything in life go right. When I was a kid going through college, I was always at the top in everything. For the first time in my life, I had no control. You feel like, ‘Why me?’ ”

But they adjusted. Three years later they had a second child, a son named Bernie, who is now an actor and musician living in Los Angeles.

Gloria went through public school sharing special education classes with Down’s syndrome children, although she was more verbal than most of her peers. Her own brand of mental disability seemed not to have a classification.

Thirty-three years after their daughter’s birth, and 20 years after her bat mitzvah opened musical doors, the Lenhoffs discovered that Gloria’s handicap indeed had a name.

In 1988, Gloria starred in a PBS television program focusing on her unusual talents. When it aired, the Lenhoffs received letters from parents who recognized Gloria as a member of their children’s club.

“They told us that our daughter has Williams syndrome,” Sylvia Lenhoff recalled, “My first reaction was, so what? What good will a label do us at this point?”

However, as she and her husband learned more about the syndrome, it became the missing piece in the puzzle of Gloria. Right down the line, the list of indicators fit: heart murmur, odd gait, superior hearing, crossed eyes, a charming demeanor known as “a cocktail personality” in Williams syndrome circles, and elfin features that--through her father’s eyes--give Gloria her “adorable face.”

Last year, the Lenhoffs attended a convention in Boston for Williams syndrome families. Said Sylvia Lenhoff: “For Gloria, it was like finding her soul mates.”

Unlike Down’s syndrome, caused by an abnormal number of chromosomes, the roots of Williams sydrome are mysterious--although scientists believe the defect is related to a hyper-production of calcium during fetal development. It affects 20,000 to 50,000 Americans; many cases go undiagnosed, as did Gloria’s.

The syndrome was first identified as such in 1961 by an English physician, Dr. J.C.P. Williams. Pediatric cardiologist William F. Friedman, now with the UCLA School of Medicine, in 1963 wrote a report documenting the syndrome for the New England Journal of Medicine.

“One very positive thing that has happened in the past decade is that parents of Williams syndrome children have formed support organizations,” Friedman said. “Williams syndrome often causes a number of physical problems, including cardiovascular, so it helps these parents to get together and share information.”

La Crescenta resident Sally Meersman is the membership director for the Williams Syndrome Assn., which comprises 1,600 families nationwide. Like Gloria Lenhoff, her 10-year-old daughter has both Williams syndrome and a musical knack.

“We’ve started Mary in piano lessons, and her teacher feels she has perfect pitch,” Meersman said. “She plays by ear. She didn’t get this from us--my husband and I can barely pound out a few notes. Gloria is exceptionally gifted, but a lot of kids in our association are musically inclined. No one knows why.”

Some doctors speculate that at least three Williams syndrome characteristics might go hand in hand: hypersensitive hearing, musical aptitude and verbal ability generally more advanced than that of people with Down’s syndrome.

“The fascinating thing about Williams syndrome is that it leaves children at a level that is called mentally retarded, but that deserves to be called something else,” said Ursula Bellugi, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. “Williams syndrome children are especially spared in the area of language. And we’ve noticed that a lot of the children remember musical tunes well.”

University of Illinois psychologist Leon Miller, author of the book “Musical Savants,” found in his research that mentally handicapped people who are musically gifted have one factor in common: absolute pitch.

“For a variety of reasons, these folks have an early sensitivity to sounds and music,” he said. “In the same way that you can look at a color and immediately know that it is blue, they can hear a note and know that it is a B flat.”

Although he has not studied Williams syndrome specifically, he observed that one of its most frequently occurring characteristics, acute hearing, could produce absolute pitch.

“The nice thing about music is that it doesn’t have to mean anything,” Miller said. A mentally handicapped person “can pay attention to the structure of music’s sound independent of its meaning. It’s kind of like paying attention to the beauty of poetry’s sound independent of its words.”

Even so, Miller added, most such people do not simply regurgitate compositions--mechanically, dispassionately. “They are not like tape recorders, devoid of any feeling for the music,” he said. “I found that they played (their instruments) with an awful lot of emotion--it wasn’t just a literal repetition.”

Miller said that Gloria Lenhoff’s aptitude for foreign language might stem from the same resources that enable her to memorize musical pieces with ease. She could “pick up the accent and inflections of a language without really understanding the semantics,” he said. “Reciting a stream of cliches is one thing, but when you get into deeper conversation that takes nuance or sarcasm into account, forget it.” The skills of these persons are most likely to surface in areas of music and math, Miller said, because both are “closed systems of knowledge”--as opposed to the “open-ended experience” of philosophical or political analysis, for instance.

In some ways, he added, mentally impaired musicians may have an advantage over other musicians because they approach their art free of preconceived notions and set formulas. “Their response usually is much faster; it doesn’t seem to involve conscious reflection,” Miller said. “My piano teacher keeps telling me, ‘You think too much--just play it!’ Being too analytical can get in your way.”

Gloria can’t read music, much less analyze it. She knows an F sharp when she hears one, but not when she sees one. And she can show you where a B flat is on a keyboard, but she can’t tell you.

“Gloria, how many buttons down from a C is an A?” asked her accordion instructor, Roek Willemze.

“Can you help me with the answer?” responded Gloria, loath to disappoint.

“It’s not important, honey,” he assured her. “You don’t need to know.”

In his 20 years of teaching the accordion, Willemze has “never seen anyone like Gloria.”

“No one comes close, to be honest,” he said. “You play something once for her, and she can play it back for you the next week. She picks up every note in a composition, just the way she hears it. Then she never lets go of it. She’s unbelievable--I myself can’t remember all this stuff.”

The day had been long and tiring for Gloria. She spent all morning at the preschool where she volunteers as an aide, then rushed home for her accordion lesson without a break. Her spunky “cocktail personality” waned.

But when she sat down with her accordion, she got an energy burst. She laughed and smiled and tapped her feet, seeming at one with her instrument as she gracefully segued from Beethoven sonatas to polkas.

Howard Lenhoff dreams that someday Gloria will earn an income through her talent. “Professionally, I see a lot of potential in her and I want to guide her all I can,” he said. “The greatest concern of any parent who has a handicapped child is what happens when you die.”

Gloria still lives at home with her parents, who look after her as if she were 12 years old. “It’s like having a child who never really grows up,” Lenhoff said. “But she’s a lot of fun to have around.

“Our next great move is for her to live independently of us. There’s a home for mentally handicapped people right around the corner from our house, and we’re hoping that within two or three years she’ll try it. She ought to get used to living away from us before she loses us, although we like having her here.”

So far, Gloria mostly has garnered only tokens of appreciation for her performances. “You know what? Leisure World paid me $30,” she revealed. “I bought a television with it. My mom and dad helped me pay for it.”

Normally, Gloria catches public buses to and from her job at an Orange preschool. “I take the 53 bus, and I stay on the 53, then I transfer to the 54 and then I get off at Yorba. . . ,” she proudly explained.

As fathers will do, Lenhoff embarrassed her with a bit of family folklore. “She’s gotten on the wrong bus a couple of times and scared us to death,” he said.

“That’s in the past,” she interrupted.

On a recent afternoon, she thumbed a ride home with her visitor, who had spent the morning watching her in action at Orange Unified Child Development Center.

Gloria helps the children tie their shoes, wash their hands and put out their mats at nap time. She gives them pushes on the swing, hugs and songs. That day, they had gathered around her and--with attentiveness unusual for 4-year-olds--listened to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

“We’re becoming friends, aren’t we?” she remarked to her temporary chauffeur.

She was full of girl talk:

“Do you have a boyfriend? I do. And you know what? One day he was in my swimming pool and he splashed water on me.

“Did you like the lipstick I had on yesterday? Did you think it was pretty? I like to buy Avon makeup. I like to put on makeup.”

She was asked a question almost anyone would find too complex for a simple yes or no: Are you happy with your life, Gloria?

“Sometimes I’m not happy,” she bluntly replied. “Sometimes people tease me on the bus. Sometimes I want to do things other people can do that I can’t do. But when I’m performing, I try not to let those things get to me too much, because then I won’t be able to think of all the good things coming up.”

What song does she most enjoy performing?

“Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” Lenhoff said, decisively. “It makes me not feel lonely. The verse I love is. . . . “

Beautifully, she sang it: “Where troubles melt like lemon drops, away above the chimney tops, that’s where you’ll find me.”