Why would musical ability be different than say mathmatical aptitude?
I do agree that most people can achieve some level of musical or mathmatical or literary skill, through studying and practicing. But there is more than that to it. There is a level of natural ability. I used to play the piano, and if I went back to practicing 10+hrs a week, I believe my skills would improve again. But no matter how much time I sit at a keyboard I won’t ever be a good enough to play professionally. I can study the theory, practice until my fingers bleed, and it’s just not going to happen. I’ve got enough musical ability to do ok, with some work, at most instruments, but I’m just not star material.
To reach very high levels in any skill requires both the natural aptitude and the willingness to put in the time and effort. I reallized in high school that I was never going to better than good enough to amuse myself, and I cut way back on the practicing time.
Maybe your talent is that you can invest enough dedication to become accomplished at something. That’s a talent, even if not a sexy sounding one, and not as common as you might think.
If talent doesn’t exist, then any two students of any given skill, working equally hard, studying the same materials, will progress at essentially equal rates.
Does talent exist? It exists to the point where it is vastly over-rated. Most things to be done have about a million people who could do them. Yes, including professional sorts and performance arts.
Getting a lucky break is the hardest art of using your talents.
If you’ve never had a piano lesson, and yet through “only my self-determination and want” you’ve managed to improve to the point where people compliment your performance, that’s pretty much the definition of “talent.” It doesn’t take anything away from your desire, drive and thousands of hours of practice to acknowledge that you have an innate ability that others don’t.
I think there is some confusion because “talent” is applied with two different meanings in common speech.
First, “talent” refers to being more suited for a task which makes learning and mastering that task both quicker and able to take to master levels compared to the average able person. A study done once showed that the average, not-talented person (barring physical handicaps) can learn any sports to pro level … when they train for 10 000 hours. Now calculate how many years that is, and you realize why some people are talented because they reach that level sooner.
Having a certain build and the right type of muscles* for a sprinter means you will top out at a higher level after the same kind of training than people with a different build; having a good hand-eye coordination means that ball games will be easier to learn for you etc.
there are two types, vertical and horizontal striped I think; one is good for short bursts of energy - sprinting; the other for endurance - long distance. How much of each type you have is mostly genetically determined, so while with training you can increase your overall muscle, you can’t become a sprinter if you mostly have endurance muscles and vice versa.
HOWEVER, music is not sports. It does require more than just a skill set of hitting the right keys which can be learned with training; it also requires a soul, emotion - and that is often called talent.
So if people criticize the OP because of talent, and the OP stresses how untalented (unsuited?) she was when she started, and how much hard work she put into it… I’m thinking she has mastered the mechanical skill but lacks the soul that people expect to be expressed in music, and that’s what the criticism is about.
BTW, that’s also an often-heard criticism of child prodigies: they lack experience of life and emotional maturity to fully express all the nuances of a complicated piece, although they are technically perfect.
My tiny church in Princeton frequently has students from Westminster Choir College attending. They are all excellent musicians and we are often treated to professional-level music that other churches do not get to hear as regularly.
When one of the students has finished performing some unbelievably awesome piece during the service, there are always those folks who comment on how he or she has “such a gift” and is “so talented”
Those same students have some right to grumble: eight hours a day of hard work practicing should not be reduced to “she has such a gift for music”
On the other hand…
I’m a firm believer that just about anything can be done by an average person, up to a point. And that point is where unusual talent and dedication take over.
hard work + dedication = really good average person
hard work + dedication + natural talent = professional
As a runner, I believe any healthy individual can run a half marathon (13.1mi), if they build up to it properly over several months. I don’t know if the same can be said about a full marathon. Still, running a half marathon is a great achievement that should not be diminished.
it’s a lot easier to test your limits in physical ability (well, as easy as going out and trying to do 40 pull ups) than in intellectual ability. That doesn’t mean that your intellectual ability knows no bounds and with 8 hours a day any random Joe can achieve anything in intellectual pursuits. Try reading an abstract algebra textbook or doing mental rotations in 3d for awhile and see how that goes for you.
There is quite a bit of controversy nowadays in psychology about whether, and to what extent innate talent really exists. The more people study it in detail, the more it looks like some people just work a lot harder than others to acquire certain skills.
"Yet Gladwell deftly debunked the Mozart myth. ‘“First of all, the music he composes at four isn’t any good,’ he stated bluntly. ‘They’re basically arrangements of works by other composers. And also, rather suspiciously, they’re written down by his father. … And Leopold, it must be clear, is the 18th-century equivalent of a little league father.’ Indeed Wolfgang’s storied performing precocity was exaggerated somewhat by his father’s probable lying about his age.
But most importantly, the young Mozart’s prowess can be chalked up to practice, practice, practice. Compelled to practice three hours a day from age three on, by age six the young Wolfgang had logged an astonishing 3,500 hours — ‘three times more than anybody else in his peer group. No wonder they thought he was a genius.’ So Mozart’s famous precociousness as a musician was not innate musical ability but rather his ability to work hard, and circumstances (i.e., his father) that pushed him to do so. "
It’s not a reduction. It’s a given that exceptional performers have worked hard to refine their talents. This comment is addressing something else, the part that makes the difference between exceptional performers and merely adequate ones who have worked equally hard.
I have a question for you, Mother Popcorn: If you would quit your musician job and study physics as long and hard as, say, Stephen Hawking, are you confident that one day you’d be able to win the Noble Prize? Note that you need only mental qualities to achieve this.
Having lived in Princeton, I know about them. Talent by itself doesn’t produce such a result, talent and practice do. But, I believe the auditioned to get into that school. Do they think the applicants were rejected had equal talent in all cases? I very much doubt it.
When I was that age, my parents could have offered to endow a new wing and they still would have rejected me!
No-one has an innate talent for playing the piano. What some people have is a set of attributes (co-ordination, musical ear, sense of rhythm, memory, determination etc.) that makes it much easier for them to learn how to play, and ultimately attain a higher level of skill.
Maybe a million people, but not everyone. The initial screen for a kid interested in signing with a manager as an actor was having the kid say “I love Cheerios.” That’s it, but that was enough to screen out 95% or more of applicants. I thought this was crazy, but when we got more experience we discovered that kids who were getting acting jobs had a certain charisma and directness, which we got to be able to recognize. We got a lot of “my kid could do that if I just had the time” from parents. No, their kids could not. When we recognized a kid who could, we recommended him, he got signed, and he immediately got some major parts. For him it wasn’t acting lessons and it sure wasn’t dedication, it was just raw talent.
Mother Popcorn, I am your antithesis. When I was 15, I became driven to learn the guitar, despite having no music lessons. I saved, bought a guitar, and practiced for hours each day until my fingers bled–literally. (I had some beautiful calluses.) I figured with enough hard work and determination, I could become a decent musician. I couldn’t afford lessons. A friend showed me a few basic chords and picking patterns, and the rest was self-taught. This went on for over two years. At the end of that time, I played guitar, all right, but only sub-average. I had trouble tuning it accurately (no ear). I lacked the fine motor skills necessary for any but the most basic picking, and try as I might, I couldn’t develop a better sense of rhythm, so every song I played went faster as I went along. By the last stanza, “House of the Rising Sun” sounded like it was about hookers with ADHD. With hard work, I DID learn to play, just not very well.
I agree with the poster who said you’re interpreting the “natural talent” comments as discounting your hard work. In fact, most people recognize that developing a talent takes hard work. They’re not ignoring that; they’re saying that in addition to the hard work you deserve credit for, you have an intrinsic gift that inspires them. The hard work develops and reveals the gift. Be grateful for both.
The opposite is true as well. Some people figuratively kill themselves training and preparing for something but ultimately don’t succeed. That isn’t a major problem if the your goals are lofty to begin with. Would you laugh at the person who came in 5th in the Boston marathon especially if they were the fastest American and fastest white person that year? Of course not, that is about as high as anyone in that category ever places. What the OP is implying is that any failure is the fault of the person no matter how high they were aiming. That is a brutal and unrealistic attitude especially for people like parents, teachers, and coaches.
You made the national team but didn’t make the Olympic team huh? I guess you just didn’t try hard enough. There is no points for second place. You just didn’t want it badly enough. It sounds like the beginning scene in The Karate Kid II when the Cobra Kai guy freaks out and starts breaking 2nd place trophies.
The interpretation of the comment depends on both the listener and the speaker.
If the person giving the complement is a musician, no matter the skill level, then I’m certain that the performer would accept a “gifted” or “talented” comment as meaning “you are above your peers because your talent has enhanced your work and hard effort”
However…
If either of my parents, who are totally non-musical, were to proffer the same complement, I wouldn’t be surprised if deep down they honestly thought that the performer just happens to be really good at music, without a clue as to the number of hours of practice per week.
You are correct (about the level, not necessarily the rejection ).
One of our church members was an opera singer at the Met in NYC. At another time, the students invited us to Lincoln Center to hear the entire school singing the choral part of Beethoven’s Ninth along with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
Those students are truly talented.
Both of my parents were artists, and I also have what may be called a “talent” for art. When I was a kid my artwork was usually met with “Oh, you’re so talented; it’s obvious where you got it from” or even worse, “Oh, your mother did that for you.” Either way, the implication was that I was born with some kind of “gift” that other kids weren’t lucky enough to have. And of course it raises the question of where my parents’ “talent” came from. Neither of them came from an artistic background in any way.
So where does my “talent” come from? Part of it comes from seeing my parents doing art and learning to understand why they did what they did a certain way, rather than some obvious alternatives. And part of it comes from my mother taking me to the art museum from a very early age, and explaining things like composition, texture, how to make eyes sparkle, how to paint a horse that looks like it’s moving, how to paint velvet differently than satin . . . how Rembrandt used shadow and Vermeer used light.
So if anything, it involves the ability to look at things critically, and at least in my case it was learned, not inborn. And the most interesting thing, at least for me, is standing back and comparing my work with that of my parents. It’s totally obvious that my work contains elements of both of them, almost like I deliberately incorporated their way of doing things into my own . . . and then expanded it into an entirely new dimension. Yet this was anything but intentional; it’s just my way of doing and seeing things. And though their influence will always be with me, I’ve also been influenced by other artists and experiences as well. So I’d say if I have anything that might be called “talent,” it’s overwhelmingly “nurture” rather than “nature.”
Now that my parents are deceased, at least nobody’s saying they did my work for me.
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