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BRAVE GIRL RECEIVES THE PIANO OF HER DREAMS —Brave Illinois Girl With Spina Bifida Gets the Clavinova Digital Piano of Her Dreams— PEORIA, IL (March 14, 2001)—It was on one of her countless visits to Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, 150 miles from home, when 11-year-old Dania first saw a Yamaha Clavinova digital piano at the nearby Ronald McDonald House®, where she and her mother were staying. With the help of the Starlight Children's Foundation, Samuel Music and Yamaha Corporation of America, today Dania has a CVP103 Clavinova in her own living room in Peoria, and it lights her up.
Dania, whose family prefers to withhold her last name, suffers from spina bifida, a common but serious birth defect that results from the failure of the spine to close properly. Her physical life involves frequent hospitalizations; varying amounts of time spent on crutches, a wheelchair, bed or even a body cast; and she's endured more than 40 brain surgeries to date. Her inner life, however, is the same river of creativity, friendship, love and Britney Spears mania you'd find in any girl her age. Finding an outlet to bridge the two was the tricky part. Enter the Starlight Children's Foundation, an international non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for seriously ill children and their families. Pamela Smith, Director of Children's Services for Starlight's Midwest chapter, remembered Yamaha's generosity in providing a piano in a previous case she'd worked on, and contacted Yamaha sales professional Kerry Keck at Samuel Music in Peoria. "She's a very creative little girl," Smith reports. "She'd been trying to decide upon her wish—but as soon as she saw the Clavinova, that settled that. This has really been a dream come true for her, and she's passionate about it." Yamaha's Piano Division teamed with Samuel Music to provide the piano to Starlight at a substantial discount, and in keeping with Starlight's policy, Dania's family paid nothing at all.
"To talk to her, you wouldn't think anything's wrong," Dania's mom says. "For her, the frustration is not being able to do what her friends are able to do." The Yamaha Clavinova is a digital piano that combines stunningly realistic sampled piano sounds, hundreds of other instrument voices, and a floppy disk system that lets users play pre-recorded Yamaha MusicSoft™ disks or record and play back their own compositions. One feature of the Clavinova that captivated Dania was its Follow Lights™ system, which uses guide lamps over each key to direct the player's hands for self-teaching. Now that Dania's got her Clavinova—"Just in time for my birthday!" as she exclaimed when the movers came—her mother reports, "She wouldn't leave it alone. Her two brothers wanted to try it, but she wouldn't get off the bench. She stayed up until midnight. She focuses on the piano—she's totally absorbed by it." Dania's mother is an amateur pianist and flutist herself, and plans to help her daughter learn to get the most out of her new Clavinova. She's even bought a Britney Spears songbook and played the melody lines herself onto a disk, so that Dania can play them back on a slower speed and learn the tunes using the Follow Lights. "I didn't realize we were going to be able to do that," her mom relates. "That was so cool." Dania's brother even downloaded music files from the Internet so his sister could play them back on her Clavinova. "The biggest thing is, we're still at the hospital at least twice a month," Dania's mom explains. "We don't know if we're there for a day or two, or a week, or more. She has attention span problems, it's hard for her at school, but this piano breaks through that. I think it's creating some normalcy for her." Starlight Children's Foundation is an international non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for seriously ill children and their families. Working with more than 650 hospitals worldwide, the Foundation provides an impressive menu of both in-hospital and outpatient programs and services. A leader in delivering distractive entertainment therapies, over 74,000 children benefit from Starlight's programs each month. For more information on the Midwest chapter, call (312) 251-7827 or visit www.starlight-chicago.org. For more information about the Clavinova CVP103 digital piano, write Yamaha Corporation of America, Piano Division, P.O. Box 6600, Buena Park, CA 90622-6600; visit www.yamaha.com; or telephone (714) 522-9011.
© 2001 Yamaha
Corporation of America |
