In a third-floor studio in Leakin Hall, Sid Zaleski has played just a few bars of the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 7 in D Major, when his teacher, Corey McVicar, smiles and waves his hand to stop. The lanky 16-year-old moves his New Balance sneakers off the pedals and lifts his fingers. The air goes silent.

"It's already too cautious," says McVicar, briskly, and slides onto the bench in front of the Steinway next to Sid's. He raises his voice as he begins to play: "The attack is staccato. You should feel like the keys are almost too hot to touch."

A soft-spoken teen of few words, Sid looks up through the dark hair that hangs to his eyes and nods. McVicar teaches 19 students at the Peabody Conservatory, and Sid is one of five pre-college students he also teaches at the Preparatory. "He started studying with me when he was 11," McVicar says. "Here was a student you were able to challenge by putting any piece in front of him, and he was able to meet it." In 2006, when Sid was just 14, he won second prize in the ensemble division of the New York Piano Competition, a prestigious competition for 14- to 18-year-olds. He plans to include the Beethoven piece on the CD he will record and submit to enter the 2008 competition.

Sid starts and restarts the passage several times, as McVicar stands and follows along with the sheet music, making notes in pencil for Sid to refer to later. "Good, good," he says as Sid plays the last few notes. Smiling, he then turns to ask the question he will repeat throughout the lesson: "Are we happy with that?"

To many people, this scenario might seem like a simple recipe for success: a talented young student hooks up with great teacher at a prestigious conservatory, wins a competition or two, and voilà! a professional musician is born. Pianist Eric Zuber, for example, entered the Preparatory at the age of 6, later earned a bachelor's from the Peabody Conservatory and a performance diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, placed first in several competitions, and debuted this past November at Carnegie Hall. "He has a very strong personal voice and he's had it since he was little," remembers Peabody's Boris Slutsky, who started teaching Zuber when he was 12, and is now teaching him again. "And I think that's what set him apart."

But for many students—and Sid Zaleski is one of many promising students currently studying at Peabody—talent is hardly the only predictor of success. Some students go on to have careers in music, and others burn out along the way or choose to do something else. "Innate ability does not in itself [predict a career in music]," says Slutsky, who won the Peabody Conservatory's 2007 Excellence in Teaching Award. "I have had some very gifted kids who went on to become doctors and scientists."

Rebecca Henry

Moreover, most people who wind up as professional musicians begin training very young, and it's tough to gauge talent that early. As chair of the string department at the Peabody Preparatory, where she teaches violin and viola, and as a teacher of violin pedagogy at the Conservatory, where she also mentors master's degree students, Rebecca Henry has worked with students at many stages of development. She points out that musical talent has several components. She ticks them off: There's the physical aspect, or the coordination and fine motor skills that playing requires; cognitive ability, which enables students to read music, memorize fingerings, and understand structure and rhythm; and the emotional quotient, which is being able to express yourself through your instrument. Students can be strong in different areas, and Henry says she can never fully predict how a young child will develop.

"You can work with a 7-year-old who seems uncoordinated on violin and by the time they are 12 or 13 they have developed into a fluid player," says Henry, the Bendann Faculty Chair in Classical Music. "Likewise, you can have a 5- or 6-year-old beginner who moves right along, but then as they get older they get less interested."

Occasionally, of course, a true musical fairy tale does come along. In 1983, a little girl was walking with her father past the Towson branch of the Peabody Preparatory when she spied a sign advertising violin lessons for 4-year-olds. "We sat in on a lesson," she remembers. "My dad asked me if this was something I'd like to do, and I said sure."

A musical fairy tale come true: Internationally acclaimed Hilary Hahn, who first studied at the Peabody Preparatory, took up the violin as a pre-schooler.

During her first Suzuki practice, she held a ruler to mimic a fingerboard, and just stood there while a cassette of violin music played. Eight years later, she debuted as a soloist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Today, Hilary Hahn has won a Grammy and appears with orchestras all over the world.

But even for an exceptional musician like Hahn, the depth of her musical ability was not instantly apparent. "She didn't make a xylophone out of her crib bars," quips her mother, Anne Hahn. "What I did notice was that at an early age, she could concentrate on something for a long time." Whereas a lot of younger students could practice for only 15 minutes, Anne remembers that little Hilary could easily practice for half an hour.

Hilary Hahn

According to Anne Hahn and husband Steve, discovering the extent of their daughter's musical gift took years. "We realized she was getting shorter and shorter compared to the other people [as she advanced] in her group lessons," she says. Then, when Hilary was just 10, her teacher, Klara Berkovich, told the Hahns she'd taken their daughter as far as she could. A teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music was suggested. Anne Hahn remembers the audition: "Her feet were growing fast and her shoes were too tight. So she wore this nice little dress and her big comfortable tennis shoes." When Gary Graffman, the director of the Institute, phoned the Hahns to tell them their daughter had been accepted, Hilary Hahn became the youngest student at Curtis. "That was a revelation," says her mother.

Even nearly 20 years post-revelation, Anne Hahn resists focusing on her daughter's genius. "People do think that if you have talent, it just happens," she says. "But even for kids who have talent, it never just happens. They don't spring forth fully formed as a musician. There's a whole lot of work and planning around it."

Judah Adashi, who directs the composition program at the Peabody Preparatory, puts it this way: "I used to go to the Aspen Music Festival, and there would be some 12-year-old playing concertos. The thing is, becoming that good that young can be done. What remains to be seen is if someone has that something else. You learn not to look at prodigies and say, 'This is the second coming of Yo-Yo Ma.' You say, 'What's going to happen in the next 10 years?'"

When children begin their musical studies early, much of the work and planning that Anne Hahn refers to falls to parents. And in the United States, where there are very few special arts schools where students can get both academics and fine musical training, parents have to find music education outside school. Just having an institution like Peabody in the same city is lucky.

Many parents rearrange their schedules, and sometimes their lives, around their child's lessons. Sid Zaleski's parents rearranged their lives for two children. In 2002, Sid's older brother, Simon, also a pianist, was accepted into the Peabody Conservatory. But he was only 15, and the Zaleskis, living in Seattle, didn't want to send him across the country to live by himself. So the entire family relocated to Ellicott City, Maryland. When Simon began his studies at the Conservatory, Sid started studying with McVicar at the Preparatory.

For Rachel Shapiro, a violist, the distance was shorter, but still required considerable effort on the part of her family. Every Saturday from the time she was 6, her mother shuttled her 160 miles roundtrip from their home in Harrisburg, Pa., to her lesson at the Preparatory. By the time she was in 5th grade, they were making the trip twice a week. "We had a minivan with a table where I did my homework," she remembers. Eventually, the family moved to Baltimore, where Rachel graduated from high school and the Preparatory before going to Juilliard. Shapiro now works as a teaching artist for the New York Philharmonic Education Department and performs around the country with the string ensemble Concertante.

Striking a balance between providing their children with a good music education, and not forcing too much on them, is tough. Kids with talent are still kids, up to a point. "I always set a schedule," says Sid's mother, Annika Zaleski. "So at 10:30 in the morning, I would say, "Sid, you have to practice." But I can't do it for him. I see myself as a steward. He has to want to. If he doesn't want to practice, then we don't have to have lessons."

Parents can set the stage and pay the bills, and even make their kids practice, but after that, the student has to want to play. Where do young students find motivation? For Sid, the payoff is on the stage. "The part that makes me feel good is when I've prepared a piece and I'm performing and communicating it to an audience," he says.

Moreover, a performance date sets a goal. "I had good teachers and I didn't want to waste their time," remembers Hahn. "I applied myself to being able to perform, so I had that goal in mind when I was working."

Finding a community of peers serious about music is also important. "Kids listen to each other more than the adults in their lives," says Rebecca Henry. That's one reason she's so pleased about a new program she's directing at the Preparatory, the Pre-Conservatory Violin Program. The inaugural year includes eight serious violinists, all in high school. "It's fabulous because they are all in a room together," says Henry of the program, launched last fall with funding from the Starling Foundation. "One of the benefits of the program is that the students listen to and perform for each other regularly, which inspires and motivates them."

Around adolescence, a child's relationships change, parents get less involved, and often a student either discovers other interests or begins to take control of his or her own music education, say Peabody faculty. If they choose to continue with music, they have to start looking inward for discipline and motivation. "Before I was 11 or 12, I was interested but I didn't want to practice that much. But then I did," says Sid, who currently practices around three or four hours a day.

Other times, something happens that changes a student's perspective. "I broke my collar bone when I was 16 and couldn't play for a few months," remembers Shapiro. "When I couldn't play, I started to miss it. And it was upsetting to me that I couldn't play. After that, I had way more desire."

McVicar says that during the Preparatory years, he tries to teach students as much solo and concerto repertoire as possible. "You need a massive amount of repertoire behind you to sustain a performing career so you can pull from that at short notice if you're playing 50 concerts a year," he says. "At the Conservatory, they also teach music history, literature, theory, and practice time is limited. So you really want to cover as much as you can when you are younger and get it behind you."

To prevent burnout in his young students, McVicar tries to remind them of why they are doing it "for the love of music. " Jonathan Rubin, a composition and piano student at Peabody Conservatory, learned that through a botched performance. Jonathan practiced hundreds of hours, only to fail the first partial of an exam for an advanced-level Peabody certificate. "The biggest criticism was that I wasn't musical, which directly contradicted what I used to be told when I was beginning. I had worked so hard it had become a technical exercise. I realized that I play music for enjoyment, and also for myself." Once he realized that, he stopped getting as nervous during performances. He also stopped being so hard on himself about making mistakes. The result? When he took the second partial of the exam and replayed the piece, he passed easily.

Even students who go on to study at the conservatory level aren't necessarily going to finish. Shapiro found that, in fact, college is the place where some of her classmates got burned out or lost their way. To those for whom music has been their entire lives, college represents a new degree of personal freedom.

Shapiro credits her current professional success in music to the balance she has always maintained in her life. "When I compare myself now to my colleagues and hear about their childhoods, I am so normal. I just did this one thing extremely intensely. But I went to prom, I played on a soccer team."

Even Hahn, who eventually was home-schooled while she attended Curtis so early in life, alludes to a certain kind of balance. "I had to be reminded that it was time to practice," she says. "I was always reading National Geographic or some fairy tale and I'd say, 'I just want to finish this chapter.' I've always been interested in a lot of different things and would have been content to do something else. This is just the thing that took off. Music isn't my entire life; it's what my life is around."

The choice not to continue in music often has nothing to do with an error made in training. Some young people just find that they have other interests they are more passionate about. Boris Slutsky says he is never disappointed if a student chooses not to focus his or her life on music. "When people ask me should I continue, my answer is, 'If you know you can't live without it, you have no choice. If you know you enjoy other things, please do it and you can enjoy [music] in your spare time.'"

Right now, Sid Zaleski hopes to major in music when he goes to college, but he's also considering a double major in chemistry, his other love. He's got a year to decide.

In the meantime, he and McVicar are working on his audition CD. "That was so much better," says his teacher, after Sid finishes playing the Beethoven. "I really love how you are much more aware of the harmony changes. Happy?"

"Yeah."