Prodigious and Sophisticated Musicians

[Mark Gunter]

Strange title, I know. It comes from a question that a guy asked about in a podcast I listened to. Here's the gist of his question, slightly edited, he was asking about a really good, professional musician.

How did someone I’m presuming from a not rich background end up becoming such a prodigious and sophisticated musician?

I'm not sure what being rich or poor has to do with anything, or why the guy couched his question in those terms, but I found the answer (by Tyler Mahan Coe of the Cocaine and Rhinestones podcast) to be pretty interesting. Here it is, again with light editing (indicated with asterisks):

That’s an amazing question, Paul. Thank you.

I’m afraid my answer may be boring and disappointing to you but I do believe it is the truth: practice. Many of the world class musicians I’ve been around often take issue with the entire concept of “talent.” They say it’s really about time. The younger you start, the better, for the same reason that it’s easier to learn to speak multiple languages when you’re young rather than waiting until you’re older. You can still learn another language when you’re older (and you should start as soon as possible if you think you want to do that), it’s just not going to be as easy as if you’d started when you were, say, 10.

But starting young isn’t a magic pill. If you begin occasionally *messing* around with a *mandolin* when you’re seven and all you ever do is occasionally *mess* around with it for the rest of your life, you’re never going to be *Sam Bush*. I’m not going to say it takes passion because I really believe it does just come down to time (and I’d throw focus in there as well) but passion certainly makes it easier to dedicate that time and focus to the instrument. I think about it like a connect-the-dots picture, where there are always new dots showing up to make the picture better. But you have to be there and you have to already be connecting dots before you notice those new dots showing up. The more time you spend connecting the dots, the better you get at seeing the new dots arrive and connecting them with the ones you’ve already connected. I hope that makes sense.

I thought his answer made a lot of sense. PRACTICE. And I really like the analogy he made with "connect the dots."

[Ivan Kelsall]

Mark - I tend to agree with the original response - BUT !!. When you were going through college,how many of your classmates were there that could pick up on a subject as though they'd written it ??. Some people,for reasons currently unknown,have a natural aptitude for 'whatever'. We've all come across articles written about 'child prodigies' ( Geniuses ),young children who possess amazing abilities in all sorts of subjects, & who simply haven't HAD any time to develop (practice) their skills.

In music,maybe Mozart is one of the most noteable. He began composing music from aged 5. Ok, his father was a composer,but Ol' W.A. was pretty quick off the mark. From an early age,he watched his sister play the Clavier,& by age 4,he was playing the Clavier himself - apparently faultlessly.

Currently - nobody really understands 'how' this happens,but happen,it does. Maybe from a 'Mandolin perspective',the most noteable musician would be Chris Thile. We all know of his stunning talent as a player,but i have his first recordings - ''Leading Off'' & ''Stealing Second''. Nobody listening to those recordings & knowing how young CT was when he recorded them, could not be totally amazed. Remember - CT was THAT GOOD well before he recorded them.

'' Practice'' is certainly a major aspect of perfecting any talent,but some folk kick off with far more ''inate knowledge'' than the rest of us - for those people,everything seems to fall into place & is totally understandable. The rest of us work hard & very often struggle to understand concepts which these people were seemingly born with an understanding of.

Oh well !!,
Ivan

[Bertram Henze]

I agree with the concept of time leading to ability, put it takes passion to survive the time. The other thing you need is perception: if your brain refuses to register pitch, let alone intonation, you can spend all the time of your life and achieve not much (you can still be a bodhran player, though - if you have a perception for time, that is).

[LemonyLobster]

Hi Mark, thank you for sharing! I really like the connect-the-dots analogy as well. I would like to add, though, that from what I have learned it is not just the time you put in but how you use that time. Focus, which was mentioned briefly, plays a far larger role than its causal mention here would suggest. Not all practice time is created equally. My sense is that 'prodigious and sophisticated' musicians learned this early on, and used their practice time wisely. That is - not just playing through things (which is the fun part) but doing the less-fun and much more difficult work of analyzing and shaping their technique, tone, etc. The kind of practice that doesn't 'sound' like practice. Passion's role is to get you through this not-very-musical part of learning music. Without passion, it would be unbearably boring. With it, you see the constellation you are creating with those connecting dots, and can see where and how it is expanding, and this is what gives every moment you spend with your instrument meaning. Just my two cents.

[Kevin Stueve]

On the flip side of practice, there is a youtube video of Sierra Hull age 10 playing with Sam Bush. She was already amazing. How much practice could she have put in by then.

[sblock]

On the flip side of practice, there is a youtube video of Sierra Hull age 10 playing with Sam Bush. She was already amazing. How much practice could she have put in by then.

Actually, lots and lots of practice! You might be surprised to learn how hard some kids will work when they have both aptitude and passion.

[Steve Ostrander]

How did someone I’m presuming from a not rich background end up becoming such a prodigious and sophisticated musician?

Perhaps rich parents are more able to afford lessons? I think the question says more about the asker than the subject.

[Mark Gunter]

Mark - I tend to agree with the original response - BUT !!. When you were going through college,how many of your classmates were there that could pick up on a subject as though they'd written it ??. Some people,for reasons currently unknown,have a natural aptitude for 'whatever'. We've all come across articles written about 'child prodigies' ( Geniuses ),young children who possess amazing abilities in all sorts of subjects, & who simply haven't HAD any time to develop (practice) their skills.

That's the sticking point for me as well, Ivan! I do believe that practice, time on the instrument, focus and passion are most important, but there can be no denying that for unexplained reasons some people are more apt than others to do well at this or that specific thing in life.

[SincereCorgi]

Perhaps rich parents are more able to afford lessons? I think the question says more about the asker than the subject.

Not necessarily- I bet most accomplished classical musicians come from, at the least, comfortable middle-class backgrounds. If Sophia shows an aptitude and passion for bassoon, you still need to pay for her lessons from the local symphony's principal bassoonist and drop $8000 or so for a serious instrument, not to mention reeds or reed-making tools and the constant minor repairs that complicated woodwinds need. You can probably get to the NY Philharmonic's bassoon section from an economically poor background, but it would be a truly heroic accomplishment that would be well-worth asking about in an interview.

I admit it's different with, say, banjo, but it's not that different. I agree with all the practice stuff though.

[Mark Gunter]

Perhaps rich parents are more able to afford lessons? I think the question says more about the asker than the subject.

Steve, that's probably what the guy was getting at, who knows? All it tells me about the asker is that he is confused and probably doesn't play any musical instrument.

By the way, the podcast is a very interesting one to me, it explores the history of country music and the people who made it in the 20th century (1901-2000), but I'd think it would be attractive to any one interested in music history or the history of the recording industry in general.

https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/episodes/season-one

[dadsaster]

Mark - I tend to agree with the original response - BUT !!. When you were going through college,how many of your classmates were there that could pick up on a subject as though they'd written it ??. Some people,for reasons currently unknown,have a natural aptitude for 'whatever'. We've all come across articles written about 'child prodigies' ( Geniuses ),young children who possess amazing abilities in all sorts of subjects, & who simply haven't HAD any time to develop (practice) their skills.

In music,maybe Mozart is one of the most noteable. He began composing music from aged 5. Ok, his father was a composer,but Ol' W.A. was pretty quick off the mark. From an early age,he watched his sister play the Clavier,& by age 4,he was playing the Clavier himself - apparently faultlessly.

Currently - nobody really understands 'how' this happens,but happen,it does. Maybe from a 'Mandolin perspective',the most noteable musician would be Chris Thile. We all know of his stunning talent as a player,but i have his first recordings - ''Leading Off'' & ''Stealing Second''. Nobody listening to those recordings & knowing how young CT was when he recorded them, could not be totally amazed. Remember - CT was THAT GOOD well before he recorded them.

'' Practice'' is certainly a major aspect of perfecting any talent,but some folk kick off with far more ''inate knowledge'' than the rest of us - for those people,everything seems to fall into place & is totally understandable. The rest of us work hard & very often struggle to understand concepts which these people were seemingly born with an understanding of.

Oh well !!,
Ivan

I'd highly recommend reading "The Talent Code". It turns out that child prodigies are just kids who practiced a lot more than normal. Mozart practiced so much that he deformed his hands permanently. His father told stories about how they would have to wrestle Mozart from the piano bench at bed time.

Natural talent often looks like a desire to practice; specifically, practicing right at the edge of your current ability. If anything, child genius is an unusual desire to practice a lot at a young age.

[Mark Gunter]

A hypothetical example: A person is born with the aptitude to play, but doesn't choose to sit and spend the hours upon hours of practice. That person is not a Sierra Hull.

But on the side of innate aptitude: I don't think we can seriously question that some people are more apt to be successful at a given task with less practice than others. I think of Darryl Philpot, who amazed me in high school because he could hear any song, tune, or guitar riff one time and simply play it perfectly by ear immediately. There are things we can all do to practice those kinds of skills, and surely he'd been practicing those kinds of skills ever since he had begun playing, but why? I'd say he had an innate aptitude for it.

BTW, don't waste time searching for info on Darryl Philpot. As far as I know, he never made it to the big times. He was just another musician from my small hometown in the pine woods of Louisiana.

[dadsaster]

A hypothetical example: A person is born with the aptitude to play, but doesn't choose to sit and spend the hours upon hours of practice. That person is not a Sierra Hull.

But on the side of innate aptitude: I don't think we can seriously question that some people are more apt to be successful at a given task with less practice than others. I think of Darryl Philpot, who amazed me in high school because he could hear any song, tune, or guitar riff one time and simply play it perfectly by ear immediately. There are things we can all do to practice those kinds of skills, and surely he'd been practicing those kinds of skills ever since he had begun playing, but why? I'd say he had an innate aptitude for it.

BTW, don't waste time searching for info on Darryl Philpot. As far as I know, he never made it to the big times. He was just another musician from my small hometown in the pine woods of Louisiana.

I would argue that what you are calling innate aptitude is really just exposure to an "igniting event" (borrowed from the Talent Code). For South Korea’s golfers, it was May 18, 1998, when Se Ri Pak won the McDonald’s LPGA Championship and became a national icon. Before her, no South Korean had succeeded in golf. Flash-forward to ten years later, and Pak’s countrywomen have colonized the LPGA Tour, with forty-five players who collectively won about one-third of the events. Are Korean's natural golfers or did a lot of young kids start dreaming the same dream?

Interestingly, long-term commitment is a predictor of success. In a study of a large group of music students, the long-term-commitment group, with a mere twenty minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the short-term group who practiced for an hour and a half over the same period of time.

“We instinctively think of each new student as a blank slate, but the ideas they bring to that first lesson are probably far more important than anything a teacher can do, or any amount of practice,” McPherson said. “It’s all about their perception of self. At some point very early on they had a crystallizing experience that brings the idea to the fore, that says, I am a musician. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill.”

[Mark Gunter]

That's interesting, dadsaster. I haven't read The Talent Code and can't comment on it, except to say that in general terms I agree about the importance of practice. "Practice over 'talent'."

Even not having read the book, if the author claims to have all the answers, I'd automatically be inclined to read him or her very critically.

I'll see if I can define what I actually meant by "innate aptitude." What I meant is that some individuals are simply more apt to succeed at certain endeavors than others. As far as an "igniting event" for this aptitude goes, I suppose it could be anything, including perhaps a genetic cocktail, so that the aptitude might be present from conception or from birth. I don't know this for a fact, I'm simply thinking at the keyboard here.

Savants, as just one example, may be apt to develop uncanny skills in the spheres of art, mathematics or musical abilities at a pace and to a degree that 'normal' folk are not able. So whatever is meant by "innate aptitude" I think we have to agree that all people are not equal in it. To echo your author's sentiment, we don't all approach our subjects with clean slates - or equal ones.

That does not discount the importance of practice or of an individual's desire in learning to make music and becoming a masterful musician, I think.

[Mark Gunter]

In The Practice of Practice, Jonathan Harnum warns of the danger that comes from believing in the idea of "talent." The danger is that a student can deduce, erroneously, that he or she "has no talent" because they don't currently possess the ability to play well - when, in fact, they may be perfectly apt to gain great skill if they only believe that they can and practice for it! The great musical masters put way more sweat and effort into their art than anyone else can ever know, I'd wager.

[Kevin Stueve]

I guess, I fall into the aptitude and passion == talent and just practice cannot overcome that all else being equal. In my field after 30 years I have see a lot of people who "practiced" hard to have the skills to be good programmers, unfortunately they just didn't have the innate talent (aptitude, passion whatever you want to call it) and either were slow, or actually impeded progress on major applications. Likewise I am a journeyman when it comes to music, I can play what someone else invents, I can pick out simple melodies, I can fake my way through a short 8 bar improv on trombone, but I will never be good enough.

[Louise NM]

Rich or poor has tons to do with it.

Wealthier parents are able to get private lessons for their kid, buy them better instruments, and pay for camps and clinics and contests where their kid can meet the people who can help him or her advance. They can easily pay for travel to do these things, and one parent, usually mom, can go with the kid whenever and wherever without having to worry about punching the time clock. It makes a huge difference. Soccer, music, ice skating, it all gets extremely expensive very quickly.

Yes, there are kids who triumphed over an upbringing where they couldn't get all this, but they are few and far between. The ones with more advantages are much more likely to go further faster, especially when they have the aptitude and the self-discipline too.

[SincereCorgi]

Interestingly, long-term commitment is a predictor of success. In a study of a large group of music students, the long-term-commitment group, with a mere twenty minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the short-term group who practiced for an hour and a half over the same period of time.

Do you have a citation for this? I can't believe a group doing 20 minutes a week would progress faster than a group doing 90 minutes a week. 90 minutes a week isn't that much either, now that I think about it. But nobody's going to make any progress with three minutes a day.

[Mark Gunter]

Rich or poor has tons to do with it.

Wealthier parents are able to get private lessons for their kid, buy them better instruments, and pay for camps and clinics and contests where their kid can meet the people who can help him or her advance. They can easily pay for travel to do these things, and one parent, usually mom, can go with the kid whenever and wherever without having to worry about punching the time clock. It makes a huge difference. Soccer, music, ice skating, it all gets extremely expensive very quickly.

Yes, there are kids who triumphed over an upbringing where they couldn't get all this, but they are few and far between. The ones with more advantages are much more likely to go further faster, especially when they have the aptitude and the self-discipline too.

I can see this logic. Other things being equal (aptitude, passion, drive), wealth certainly has its advantages. On the other hand, a poor kid with the desire can progress far above a wealthy kid with a passing interest. We can find a myriad of examples of the poor kid who sequesters him- or herself in their room for endless hours with a rented or borrowed instrument, and ends up the toast of the world musically.

Or maybe I just want to believe that the rags to riches stories are true

[Louise NM]

I can see this logic. Other things being equal (aptitude, passion, drive), wealth certainly has its advantages. On the other hand, a poor kid with the desire can progress far above a wealthy kid with a passing interest. We can find a myriad of examples of the poor kid who sequesters him- or herself in their room for endless hours with a rented or borrowed instrument, and ends up the toast of the world musically.

Or maybe I just want to believe that the rags to riches stories are true

A generation or two ago, it was closer to true. These days, the conservatories are not full of kids who started playing cello in fifth grade, fell in love with it, and drove everyone nuts practicing. Those kids no longer stand a chance at getting into the top schools, or even the middle level ones. There are too many kids who have been groomed and helicopter-parented since toddlerhood who have the technical prowess that can buy. The ones in that subset who also have the passion and drive end up at Curtis.

That kid was Mozart: parental support and means combined with natural ability and drive. The musical boy across town, whose father was a baker and thought music was stupid, who was not hauled across Europe to play for royalty and was never mentored by Haydn, did not go down in history as a great composer—his sister didn't either. Mozart's sister was supposedly a better musician than her brother. She didn't stand a chance.

[Ivan Kelsall]

I agree - Practice is an important factor in learning anything - BUT. If you add to the amount of practice,a firm understanding from a very early age,of :- what to practice / how to practice & your ultimate goal,your end product is not just a well practiced 'whatever',but something else entirely. Mozart,at age 6,could outperform many of his contemporay musicians in playing & writing music, & by age 12,he'd written 10 'Symphonies' (not the large scale Symphony type that came later).

There have been almost countless examples of child prodigies in the fields of Science & Mathmatics,many of whom came up with totally new 'concepts' that couldn't have been ''learned''. My point :- SOME young people have incredible insight into the subjects that they choose to study,far more that the rest of us could ever have. It's not simply down to practice - how can you practice arriving at 'new' mathematical & scientific ideas ?. IMO - the same goes for immensely talented musicians. Yes they do practice,but a great many of them have musical insights that escape the rest of us.

You can ''practice'' your mathematical skills for decades in conventional maths / physics - but you may never come up with original ideas the way Albert Einstein did - to name just one example !. Einstein & others like him,had that ''something extra'',
Ivan

[AlanN]

Was it Norman Blake, or perhaps Butch Baldassari, who posed the question to a picker wanting the silver bullet:

"How much time have you spent behind the box?"

That's it, right there. I've been attending Alan Bibey's Mandolin Camp (will be the 3rd annual next month). It's growing in stature and attendee list, with many returning campers. The varied answers to this question will be readily apparent.

[Bertram Henze]

"How much time have you spent behind the box?"

I suspect that question to mean: "do you want to play that thing more than anything else in your life?"
It's more a measure of passion than of practise.

[dadsaster]

Do you have a citation for this? I can't believe a group doing 20 minutes a week would progress faster than a group doing 90 minutes a week. 90 minutes a week isn't that much either, now that I think about it. But nobody's going to make any progress with three minutes a day.

https://issuu.com/rabberson/docs/tc_excerpt_3 . Page 6-7 if you can make it out.

[ProfChris]

I think there's no question that natural aptitude gets you a head start. Nor that natural aptitude without practice hits a peak below what we might call "professional" standard (carefully not defining that!).

The interesting question is whether a person without natural aptitude can, after enough practice, reach the same peak as someone with aptitude who also practices. No idea what the answer is though. I'm excluding, of course, those with "anti-aptitude", who can't hear a tune and/or keep time.

What I am sure of is that enough practice can get a person without natural aptitude to professional standard. And I also suspect, from personal experience, that on the way one picks up some of the abilities which the person with natural aptitude has from the outset.

But as others have said, you have to distinguish practice from time spent. One of my hobbies is flying sailplanes, and you measure a pilot's experience in hours flown. But the question is always there - "Did you fly 1,000 different hours, or the same hour 1,000 times?".

Passion's role, I think, is to keep you going at the practice and lead you to explore beyond what you can currently do so you can practice that. With passion, you're never flying the same hour twice.