NOBLESVILLE -- Not long after Benjamin Boren began taking piano lessons, his teacher referred him to a more qualified instructor.

Mainly because after only a few months, Boren, whose mother said he badgered his teacher for more challenging material, could execute a musical piece that third-year students were playing.

"Ben was scary to her. He was advancing so fast. She wasn't quite sure she knew how to handle him," Paula Boren recalled. He learned the first two pages of "Spinning Wheel" within a week.

"It was a passion within him to practice," she said. "When he was 7 or 8, if we went to relatives, and he started getting fussy, not getting along, we would send him upstairs to practice the piano for half an hour. He'd come down in a different mood."

"It made him a happier person," Paula said. ". . . I don't think it was something he was aware of. Piano was a way to express himself."

At 8, Ben was with his third piano teacher, who entered him in his first competition with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.

"They were impressed," his mom recalled, "but he was not at the level to compete against some of these children."

He returned to the competition at age 9, and again didn't place. However, a piano teacher trained in performing arts invited to take him under her wing. "That is what changed our lives," said Paula, who once a week would load up the car with Ben and his sisters and make a 90-minute drive to Anderson from their Connersville, Ind., home.

Ben was in competition after competition. At 11, he performed with his first orchestra, a result of the competitions.

"By the time Ben got to junior high, it was too much," his mom said. Then, Ben's dad Jim Boren made a job change to Indianapolis. The family moved to Noblesville in the winter of 1993, making Ben closer to piano teachers.

"It made it easier when Ben got his driver's license," said his mom.