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People have always been curious about
the nature of certain artistic gifts, and, having been
blessed with some of them, I thought it would be fun and
enlightening to share what I think I know about musical
talent and what I've observed about popular beliefs
regarding them.
There are such a myriad of different
kinds of abilities that it is not easy to zero in on
what makes an artist. One of the most mythologized
aspects of the craft is that it "springs from nowhere."
People seem to want art to be mysterious, and, although
there are plenty of great artists on record talking
about how much work goes into their profession, most
people don't seem to want to hear them. Inspiration is
the key, we are told. Hollywood keeps feeding us movies
about "just believing" or "following your heart" and the
heroes of such films are successful just because they
want it real bad, despite their lack of training. This
kind of thinking may be so enchanting because it lets
the rest of us off the hook. If it either happens to you
in a bolt of lightning or it doesn't, and it doesn't,
well, that's just too bad. No need to try. The funny
thing about workmanship is that some of the greatest
Symphonies ever written start off with tunes that just
about anybody could've come up with. Frequently there
will be a masterful subtlety that makes something that
seems so simple actually evidence of a rare gift, but
sometimes the theme is about as basic as you can get,
and it is the working out of that theme that shows the
composer's genius. That requires extremely hard work. It
requires the kind of discipline that few people have.
Many of my students could be much more than they are if
they would only work harder. There is nothing profound
about this. And there is nothing mysterious about the
young lives of the great composers, either. Somebody was
there early to impose a rigid work ethic on the child,
in every case. A few composers known to history had
little early education and so had to scramble in later
life to achieve proficiency. Some were able to go a long
way on what seems to be the strength of their
inspiration, but the way was not easy. These composers
are generally known for only a few of their best works.
The lucky accidents, perhaps? To some degree, yes, but
notice how luck favors the craftsmen, those with
training, who know what to look for, recognize a great
idea when it rains down upon them, and are able to
transform even a mediocre idea into something sublime.
A few weeks ago the CBS show 60
Minutes featured a young man who is said to be "the next
Mozart." One of the prime aspects of the story was how
this 12-year-old could hear completed compositions in
his head; that they just happened to him and he wrote
them down very quickly. (Sounds familiar, actually; at
12 I was beset with the same phenomenon but without the
drive to write most of it down!) Not that this
inspiration isn't an important part of the compositional
process, but it is certainly not the most important.
After gushing about this amazing ability for a while,
the reporter had the good sense to consult with a former
child prodigy, Samuel Adler. Adler said that the fact
that the young man wrote so quickly, never made
revisions, and seemed so sure of his first inspiration
was actually a bit worrisome. If you look at a Beethoven
score, he said, you'll see that it looks like a complete
mess. Beethoven was constantly crossing out his first
inspiration and trying to improve it. He was working
with his score constantly, never satisfied until every
note made sense.
You'll note that the young man was
being compared to Mozart, not Beethoven. Mozart is
frequently considered the greatest genius of them all
because he could hear those completed compositions in
his head and just wrote them down without erasing
anything. Actually, many of Mozart's early compositions
are stylistically simple enough that it would not be
such a stretch to imagine that a well-trained composer
(Mozart's father just happened to be a worthy composer
in his own right and taught the boy everything he knew
from a very early age) could keep that sort of thing in
his head, if he understood the musical processes going
on well enough. You and I can keep the plots of
90-minute movies in our heads after just one viewing; we
can't remember every detail, but imagine having the
confidence to select the appropriate details based on
much experience and knowledge. A young man whose head
was always working on music, writing day and night for
years, would certainly gain the experience and knowledge
to fill in those details with style and clarity.
That doesn't make it not a miracle.
Just because art often takes place on a conscious level
does not make it mundane. Most creators have a healthy
respect for their unconscious minds: for ideas that
occur to them during sleep, for things that just seem to
"come to them" out of the blue, but they also know that
they have to work hard to make those ideas into art.
Which is why before even discussing the specifically
musical gifts, I want to raise up discipline and hard
work, method and technique as possibly the ones that are
most essential.
Music is
often approached with a kind of mystic reverence
just because people don't understand it too well. It
seems all the more mysterious and wonderful if it
seems to come quickly and completely, unbidden, as
if from a world beyond the trivial, mundane one we
know. There are innumerable myths about inspiration,
some of which are sustained by the composers
themselves! The masterful romantic composer Schumann
wrote that his young genius
Brahms had "sprung from the head of [the
god] Chronos" surely, completely, and with a full
knowledge of his craft. He did not need to learn
anything, Schumann wrote, his instinct was perfect.
Brahms himself thought otherwise, and frequently
wrote about how a composer had to make those ideas
that suddenly come upon him his own by sheer hard
work. Always a tough self-critic, Brahms, who lived
by the blue editing pencil, making constant use of
it, actually wrote and destroyed 20 string quartets
before he allowed one to survive. As a result, his
published works are mostly of a very high quality,
not because Brahms never had a poor idea, but
because he was able to realize when he did, and
because his workmanship lifts even his poorer ideas
to a new realm.
But still the myth lives on of the
great composer whose greatness can be proven precisely
because he can write a towering work in just hours on
the strength of his "inspiration," who never need
second-guess his initial thoughts, who can't even
control them. It is such an attractive idea, too,
because it exudes confidence and certainty. Never
crossing anything out, sure of what you want to say and
just saying it. People love performers, too, who
are brimming with self-confidence whether they are
backing it up with real musical substance or just plain
glitz. I was once "accused" of playing the piano
"boldly and surely" by the critic of the Baltimore Sun,
but I tried not to take it personally!
I feel that I have some license to
speak on these issues since I have created music in mere
minutes or many months. Being able to "improvise"
requires a pretty thorough knowledge of musical
processes, willingness to experiment, to possibly get
yourself into and out of a jam, and some fearlessness if
you do it in public. What is interesting is that,
whether you create music instantly, or with a great deal
of forethought, you still need to be able to understand
your medium thoroughly, and be willing to go with your
gut sometimes when you don't.
Some years ago I worked in a church
where I naturally had to prepare musical selections for
the worship service each week. It is not easy to offer
quality music every week, as many in this position have
found out. Often the overburdened musician tries to find
something quick and easy to fit the occasion and satisfy
the requirements for another in the endless parade of
Sundays. There is naturally a market for this kind of
thing and the advertising blurbs that adorn the music
catalogs never say anything is difficult. Everything is
easy and comes with the promise that your congregation
will love it. Since I was not terribly interested
in practicing just enough to sound terrible every week,
I began to improvise. Every morning during the offering
there would be a new piece, one that the congregation
had never heard before. And neither had I! It was
a challenge, and it gave me an opportunity to create, to
think, to dare, and to be more myself at the keyboard
than if I had virtually read-at-sight some ready-made
composition.
There is actually a long tradition of
doing exactly what I was doing; wherever organists have
had to provide lots of music in a hurry, skills in
"making it up as you go" are quite useful. In
America the tradition is not nearly as prominent as in
Europe; French organists consider it part of being a
musician, but, being an American pianist, the number of
my colleagues who can improvise is quite small. Only in
Jazz does improvisation seem to be part-and-parcel of
the musical experience, and yet, it can be done in any
style. Beethoven, Mozart, Bach--all were inveterate
improvisers, and some of those initial improvisations
made their way later into written compositions.
Improvisation provided a way for them to try out ideas,
to "think" at the keyboard, and it also came in handy
when a composition wasn't quite ready in time for the
concert and certain parts had to be filled in.
Improvising was part of a musician's trade, and it has
always been able to impress the public. During the 18th
century, Mozart always set aside part of his concerts to
improvise on a favorite tune, just as he would often
make up those long piano solos that come near the ends
of his piano concertos (cadenzas) where the orchestra
stops and the star of the show is left with a monologue
to show his inventiveness and his powers of
prestidigitation.
What may be impressive to some,
however, strikingly fails to register with others. Once
before a rehearsal I was playing a Mozart sonata from
memory. A man entered, listened, and said, impressed.
"You must be making that up! There is no way you could
be playing all of that from memory!"
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