Celebration of Music - Talent Search

Ryan Tzou - Biography Ryan Tzou is a 5th grade student at Long Lots Elementary in Westport, CT. He’s your typical preadolescent boy, who enjoys reading novels, sports magazines, drawing comics, and quarreling with his younger sister when he’s not busy traveling to his basketball or baseball games.

What’s atypical, however, are the achievements already under his belt at this age. As a student, he attends the Gifted & Talented program at his school and is a recurring participant of the NSGT’s Summer Institute for the Gifted at Fairfield University. At 8 years old and with only 1.5 years’ experience, he played Carnegie Hall and won 2nd place in the Little Mozarts International Crescendo Competition. To balance out his music knowledge, he joined the school chorus, picked up violin in the school orchestra, and successfully completed the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Level 5 Theory last summer, a program usually reserved for high school students. Having just turned 10, he now plays percussion in band and has upped his practice time to 30 minutes a day, where he is challenging himself with ever more difficult pieces, like the Virtuosic Piano Solos from Jarrod Radnich, and classic works from Mendelssohn and the elusive Chopin.