A musical prodigy developed a special talent that compensated for his sightlessness

By Nicole Girard

His head was below the keys, he was so little. He would reach up, and he was playing all the melodies to these songs.

Tupac Shakur’s rich, brassy voice waned as I turned down the volume on my stock-car radio and navigated my way around the desert terrain of North Scottsdale. A fuzzy connection on my cell phone had barely let me hear Scott MacIntyre’s directions. “My house is at the end of that road, on a desert acre, it’s not a part of a neighborhood.”

I picked a spot of desert and stopped my car. It was a dark and dreary late Saturday afternoon. Dark, pregnant clouds threatened rain, and the breeze was strong and damp.

Nineteen-year-old Scott MacIntyre opened the door. His slightly sunken eyes had an unusual paleness to them. They were a grayish blue, but the color had a transparent quality, unlike any I had ever seen before. His wavy blond hair seemed to resist the restriction of combing and framed his thin, pale face like long tangled vines. A youthful wash of red warmed his cheeks.

Scott, an ASU music major, lives at home with his parents, Carol, a real estate agent, and Douglas, a businessman. Scott has two younger siblings, Todd, 17, and Katelyn, 14. When I asked Scott’s parents their age, they both hesitated for a few moments, as if performing some mental calculations. “I’m forteee…..I have to think about this….ha ha ha… I always have to think about this. I’m forteee…four…right now,” Carol said.

“I am forteeee…eight,” Douglas said.

Their house was one of the largest I had ever actually been inside. It stood alone on a five-acre expanse of desert. I entered the regal front room of the house with its different shades of black and brown. Rich black leather couches surrounded a sleek, shiny baby grand piano. The house appeared to be held up by ivory-and-cinnamon-colored marble pillars and took on hues of brown sugar. Another piano, a wooden upright, stood in the next room. The kitchen was sparkly and opulent with upscale appliances. The refrigerator was the kind that looks like a large cupboard. It stood partially camouflaged, encased within a dark gray wall.

Photo by Doug MacIntyre
Scott MacIntyre anticipates a performance at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.

Scott rattled off a number of hobbies he found interesting. He plays the drums, creates computer games, helps produce his younger brother’s punk rock album, skis and loves to dance. “I love any type of dancing. I think anything from ballroom dancing to swing dancing is a lot of fun. I’ve danced in salsa clubs before,” he said. “I also play video games. That’s very relaxing to me.”

Random piles of papers and documents on the kitchen counter brought an element of humanness to the palatial atmosphere. But the house was so big that any breaks in the conversation seemed so quiet as to be deafening.

I stood in the kitchen self-consciously sipping a glass of orange juice that Carol insisted on preparing for me. “It’s just the mother in me,” she said as she poured the bright acidic juice.

Nighttime had descended, and the whole family was heading out for dinner. Scott didn’t know where, maybe seafood.

As I approached the foyer, I almost lost my balance as I gawked at the enormous door. Reaching all the way to the elevated ceiling, it resembled the doors of tyrannical kings and emperors in illustrated fairy tales.

“Umm, I can’t… I don’t know…Hmm…I can’t get this door open,” I said, breaking out in a cold sweat. I jiggled, shook, pulled and twisted the life out of the determined little brass knob.

Scott collided with some boxes near the door as he came to help me. He gave the knob a turn, and after a moment of awkwardness I was on the outside.

“It was nice meeting with you,” I said after an awkward silence. I told Scott I wanted to meet with him several times in the future. I held out my hand as he smiled in my face. But he couldn’t see me.

Scott MacIntyre is blind.

Just sitting down at the piano is relaxing to me. It’s one of the greatest emotional outlets.

Looking for the truth
When Scott was a toddler, Carol, his mother, knew something was wrong with her son. But the doctors told her she was an overly concerned mother. “Some doctors told me to have my husband take me out to dinner to just relax. I had another doctor tell me to get a baby carrier for the back of my bike and go for rides along the beach. Some told me to have my husband take me to the mall,” she said.

“I mean it was just ridiculous.”

As a last resort, when Scott was 2, the MacIntyres went beyond their insurance and paid out of their pockets to have their son seen by eye specialists at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles.

“Finally they said, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s blind. For me, it wasn’t traumatic,” she said. “It was just answers I had been searching for.”

Scott was diagnosed with a rare condition called Leber’s congenital amaurosis, a degenerative disease passed genetically through families. Both parents must be carriers for the child to be affected. Children with congenital blindness make up 10 to 18 percent of all cases of the disease. They often have eyes that appear sunken or deep set. Some have cone-shaped corneas and cataracts that cause the eyes to appear cloudy.

But Scott developed a special talent that compensated for his sightlessness.

Douglas remembers when he and Carol were awakened in the middle of the night as their toddler had crawled out of bed and began to teach himself to play on their old upright piano.

“His head was below the keys, he was so little. He would reach up, and he was playing all the melodies to these songs,” Douglas said. “He was getting the melodies right… like perfectly.”

A wake-up call
Scott was born in Redondo Beach, California, in 1985. He and his brother and sister were all home-schooled by their mother. The family left California when Scott was a year old. They moved to Toronto, where Scott studied piano at the Royal Conservatory of Music. He was nearly to the point of becoming a certified music instructor at age 14 when they had to move once more, this time to Scottsdale.

Honeywell demanded that Scott’s father, a businessman, relocate with relative frequency. The job also demanded regular travel. One of the reasons the children were home-schooled was so the family could join him on his excursions abroad. The other was Carol’s dissatisfaction with the public school system.

“Public schools are really, really sticklers for attendance,” she said. “They don’t like it if you pull your kids in and out of school, you know if you’re going on trips and stuff. The public schools are paid based on the number of days your child is in attendance.”

Scott and his parents initially approached ASU in search of a piano instructor for Scott. “I’ve known Scott for about six years. I met him a little bit before he came to ASU,” said Scott’s professor, Walter Cosand. For the past 29 years Cosand has been a professor in piano performance at ASU’s School of Music.

“When his family moved here from Canada, they contacted me,” he said. “I tried to send them to the preparatory program because he was only 14 years old and I thought that was the place for him to go, but they met with the professor in charge of that program, and she sent them back to me.”

Scott auditioned and was accepted in the university’s Bachelor of Music Piano Performance degree and Barrett Honors College when he was only 14. He has a 3.95 GPA. He received his lone ‘B’ during his sophomore year.

“I got a B in a music history class. That was kind of my wake-up call,” Scott said. “Ever since then, I’ve never gotten another B.”

In addition to lecture-style classes, Scott gets weekly individual lessons from Cosand.

“Scott is a unique student. Obviously he learns the music from hearing it, so his way of learning is very different,” Cosand said. “I think the other students here make the faculty appreciate how wonderful Scott is because they see how much he has accomplished. He’s one of the best there is, no doubt about it.”

Scott is one of only 70 visually impaired students registered with Disability Resources on the ASU campus.

Until the 1960s, visually impaired students had to rely solely on Braille for reading materials. Nowadays textbooks can be scanned onto a computer for students who can see print. Scott falls into this category. “It’s kind of like looking through a straw,” Scott said. “Whereas people usually have 180 degrees of peripheral vision, I have about 2 degrees.”

Photo by Doug MacIntyre
Siblings Katelyn (left), Scott and Todd MacIntyre visit Arizona’s Salt River.

Music and academics
Scott’s life is wrapped up in music and academics, and his social life seems marginal. At one point I asked him if he ever drank alcohol.

“I do all kinds of… I mean, I, I never get drunk, to use your example. No, I do not drink, I do not,” he said. “I have never and, I don’t have anything against it, actually. I’ve, I’ve just never, I’ve done a lot of scientific research on it, and I hate the fact that it destroys brain cells.”

He said he liked to dance “pretty much anywhere at swing clubs, or at umm, actually. I don’t know, you know, just whatever. I’ve danced in salsa clubs before…..I’d get together with people, you know, do it in someone’s house or apartment or, (laughs) you know.”

No, I didn’t know. I really didn’t know. I saw him struggling, and I felt like an interrogator. So, remembering he had mentioned marriage in a past interview, I asked him if he had a girlfriend.

“Umm…I may have someone, you know. She’s actually at another school, so…we get together once in a while, but we’re both very busy,” he said. “It’s not official yet, so I wouldn’t want uhh, it to get out in the paper, you know. If this wasn’t an interview, I’d probably talk a lot more about it. But, as you can tell, I do write a lot of songs for girls. I have over my lifetime.”

After some consideration, Scott added that“in a more general sense,” he hung out with people all the time. However, as he had gotten older, his life had gotten busier. “I just thrive on being busy like this,” Scott said. “And yes, I’ve known something different, once upon a time. But you know when I really got into the beginnings of my career like this. it took off. And it’s all about persistence.”

Future plans of a great composer
After Scott graduates in May, he will head overseas to England on a Marshall scholarship. He will study musicology in Cambridge for one year, then go on to London to study at the Royal College of Music. When he returns to Arizona at 22, he will have two master’s degrees. This scholarship is his second. For the first he went to Austria and studied at the Universitat de Mozarteum in the summer of 2002. He thought England was the right choice.

“Each country can claim their great composer, but England doesn’t have one,” he said. “They’ve have had Vaughn Williams, and he was amazing, but they’ve always been off the trend, kind of like the French were with Impressionism. They were rebelling against German romanticism and stuff.”

Scott chose England because he’d exhausted much of the musical world.

In his 19 years, Scott had studied and played music in Austria, Germany, London, France and Switzerland. As a 6-year-old, he appeared on CNN when he played the piano for a neighbor’s wedding.

“I love performing in front of audiences,” Scott said. “When I started, I was so young that I didn’t really think how I would be perceived by other people. It was fun to play the piano. I didn’t care if people were listening.”

Since that time, Scott has performed in countless concert halls. In May 1999 he performed before a viewing audience of about 22 million on the Hour of Power at the Crystal Cathedral in Los Angeles. Scott was a featured soloist with the Phoenix Symphony in 2001 and 2002. He and his brother, Todd, sang the national anthem at a Phoenix Suns game in 2003. He has five independently released CDs and is working on another comprised of his own compositions.

Just recently he was named one of USA Today’s 2004 All USA College Academic Team.

Photo by Tim Trumble
Scott MacIntyre has five independently released CDs.

A musical awakening
On a clear sunny Thursday afternoon, I stood in one of the hallways of ASU’s Music Department. I’d secured another chance to meet with Scott, despite his grueling schedule.

I left work early that day because Scott and I had agreed to meet at noon. I waited at the broken-down water fountain in the little outdoor area of the music building. He never showed up. A young man with wavy caramel hair that brushed his shoulders picked a beautifully busy melody on a large wooden guitar.

The musty smell of string instruments and the resin used to wax the strings wafted outside the building with the opening and closing of the doors. I could identify the smell, although it was something I hadn’t experienced since my futile and disheartening second grade experience with the violin.

I glanced down at my watch and decided to call Scott. It was 12:30 p.m. He was at home. He said he couldn’t meet me. He’d had an emergency, but he could meet me at 2 p.m.

I fought back rising feelings of annoyance. He stood me up and didn’t even call. That didn’t seem like him, or did it? The truth is, after weeks of trying to get to know him, I really didn’t know him.

As the hands on my watch approached 2 p.m., I made my way down the hall of the practice rooms. I hopped up on my toes and peeked through the small square windows near the top of each door until I found Scott, secure, in his hole, playing the piano. I watched him through the small window in the door as he played. His long, thin frame bent over the piano, seeming to fit the instrument like a puzzle piece. Wavy blond hair leaned to one side, grazing his navy blue hooded sweatshirt as he held his head cocked, his ear close to the piano, listening intently as the beautiful melodies came soaring out of the shabby wooden upright piano. His pale white hands swept up and down the length of the piano as long, smooth graceful fingers danced madly on the keys. His shadowy gray-blue eyes turned briefly in my direction. I froze, but he didn’t see me.

Photo by Shaina Levee
Scott MacIntyre practices at ASU’s School of Music. Currently he’s studying at the Royal College of Music and the University of London.

I felt guilty watching him like this. I entered the dirty little practice room with foggy windows and broken soundproofing panels on the walls. Scott stopped playing, stood up and smiled brightly.

“Hi! How are you?”

His walking cane lay in the corner of the room between the piano and a full-length mirror on the wall. He began playing again. No music I had ever heard had made colors and scenes come alive in the way that Scott's piano-playing had. Like little squirrels, the music hopped and danced about the room. The music was alive.

Suddenly the music stopped.

“You know what?” Scott paused, and the tension seemed to fall out of his shoulders. A finger lightly, rhythmically tapped a key, serving as background music to his thoughts.

“Just sitting down at the piano is relaxing to me. It’s one of the greatest emotional outlets,” he said. “Whether I’m doing a classical piece or if I’m interpreting what someone else has written or if I’m writing something original, I can get lost in that world. And that’s what it’s really all about.”

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The Devil’s Tale showcases the coursework of individual students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University.