Then, in 2010, Difonis and his family were forced to return to Chile under threat of deportation for remaining in the U.S. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School for those with vision loss.Īs a child, Difonis amazed local audiences with his ability to play classical piano pieces from memory, performing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and attending LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts. Difonis learned Braille and enrolled in the Filomen M. While in Brooklyn, they were connected with Lighthouse International, now Lighthouse Guild, where he was a member of the children’s program. They lived in New Jersey, then Brooklyn, N.Y., and finally Staten Island, N.Y. The cause of Difonis’s irreversible hearing loss is unknown but his external digital hearing aids make playing possible.ĭifonis’s family emigrated to the United States in 2000 on a temporary visa in search of educational resources for their son. He was born with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that blocks the brain’s ability to send signals to the eye. “I was 2 years old in the crib, and everyone would notice I would nod my head when they put music on,” said Difonis, who began playing the keyboard from memory as a 6-year-old. For some of them that may work, but it’s not equal access.” They are learning by ear and develop a knack for memorizing it. “Often times these students are dependent. “We’ve spoken with a lot of other universities with blind students in their music programs and almost none are providing this level of braille music,” said Khurdan. Now, a year after Difonis registered for MGSA, Rutgers’ disability resources office has fine-tuned a cost-effective and comparatively fast process for transcribing music scores to braille, making Rutgers one of the few universities in the country to offer this service to visually impaired music students. Rutgers’ disability resources office has fine-tuned a cost-effective and comparatively fast process for transcribing music scores to braille, making Rutgers one of the few universities in the country to offer this service to visually impaired music students.
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