Ronnie Mansour was 2 and a half years old when she followed her older brother Alex to a piano lesson. After he finished playing a Mozart piece, she jumped on the bench and started to play the song by ear.
The piano teacher told the precocious child she wasn’t playing Mozart correctly.
“I said I don’t want to play the Mozart way, I want to play the Ronnie way,” she recalled. “The piano teacher looked at my mom and said, ‘You’re gonna have a big problem on your hands’ — because I was acting like a little bit of a diva.”
Ronnie and Alex Mansour chose Notre Dame over a traditional music conservatory because the University’s music program allowed them the flexibility to do it, as Sinatra would say, their way. They were able to study a wide liberal arts curriculum and go abroad. Both majored in cello performance, but they also found the freedom to create musical paths that included writing original compositions performed by their classmates.
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Originally published by at news.nd.edu on July 12, 2021.