This article may hit a few nerves. It isn’t my intention, but it’s inevitable whenever I bring this subject up. If taking a long hard look in the mirror is hard for you, you may not want to read this. You’ve been warned.
Talent. That elusive thing that separates the great from everybody else. Or does it? Did Mozart have talent or did he just have good teachers? Yeah, I know…he wrote at a very early age. But he didn’t come out of the womb writing music. He had to learn something from somewhere, even if it was just listening to the music of others. Yeah, contrary to popular belief, there WAS music before Mozart. Lots of it.
So before we can answer the question of whether talent can be “learned” and how important it is, we need to define exactly what talent is. The dictionary defines it as “natural aptitude or skill.”
What is natural? If we were to take a human being after birth and lock him in a room and do nothing but feed him in order to keep him alive, would this human being show any talent in anything? Would he suddenly start to sing songs in his head and demand music notation paper to jot it down?
Naturally, the above is a silly premise. We would never do that to another human being unless we were sick, sadistic monsters. We would allow this person to go out into the world and experience everything the world has to offer.
So, by allowing this person to go out into the world and experiencing all these things, including music, how much of what this person ultimately creates is from talent and how much of it is from what he learned? I don’t think that’s a question we can ever accurately answer.
Therefore, we have to make some assumptions or this conversation goes absolutely nowhere. So let’s assume that natural talent will come out before the person is formally trained for a period of time long enough to produce work that technically could be produced after that level of instruction.
For example, in order to write a symphony, one would have to have a formal education in composition, scoring, arranging and so on. A person who doesn’t have this formal training and yet can sit down and write a symphony we could then definitively say is talented. Yes, it’s a little more complex than that but for the purposes of this article, let’s say it’s that simple.
But what about the person who IS formally trained and then sits down to write a symphony? Did this person have any natural talent to begin with and we didn’t give them the chance to develop it, or did they ultimately write a symphony solely because they were formally trained? Of, is it a combination of the two? And if so, how much for each part?
Again, this is a question that really can’t be accurately answered so let’s for argument sake say that the proportion of each is directly related to how “good” the work is. So, if a person writes a great symphony then we will assume that they had great talent to begin with. If a person wrote a so-so symphony then they didn’t have as much talent. It’s really the only way to measure this.
So, now let’s try to answer the questions put forth in this article starting with the first one.
How important is talent?
Well, that depends. How important is the finished product? Is it something that can be produced with pure book knowledge? If you think some music hasn’t been produced in that manner, you haven’t listened to some of the stuff that passes for music these days. It’s pretty much canned ham. In fact, with technology today, one can turn on a sequencer and drum machine and make a song. You almost don’t have to do anything at all.
But what if you’re completely book learned? Remember, there can be a combination of book learned rules and talent at work when somebody writes a song. It is conceivable that a person can get a solid education, know all the musical forms and have listened to enough music in their lives to, by the numbers, write a “decent” song. At least decent enough to get the job done. It may not ever win a Grammy or anything like that, but it is possible to pay the bills this way.
If that is the case, talent may not be as important as knowing the rules. Again, I’m talking about composition and not performing where you can’t “learn” to move your fingers at the speed of light. For that you need to practice. Sure, some people can sit down and start playing right away without having been taught how to position their fingers on the keyboard. This is pretty much obvious talent because no matter how much you listen to music, unless you actually sit down to play it, you’ll never know how good or bad a player you are.
With composing, there is no real physical act. Composing is more intellectual than physical. You don’t need your hands, just your mind and a way to communicate the music. Unless you’re mute, that can be done via singing and somebody else can do the actual transcription.
But can all this be learned? Well, you can certainly learn the “rules” of composition. You can learn harmony and chord progressions. You can learn voicing and so on. And by learning composition you are essentially learning how to write a song. But that in itself is not talent. Talent is being able to take what you learned and apply it. How well you apply it can be a measure of how much talent you have. But then that’s not natural talent. That’s learned talent. So yes, technically it can be learned to a degree. But how far can you take your training? If you take it beyond your peers, is that talent? Could you have done it without the training? Those who do, do they have more talent than you?
I think I’ll stop there. As you can see, we can wrack our brains over this subject until our sun goes nova and nobody is going to come up with a definitive answer as to what talent really is, if it can be learned and how important it really is when formal education is always available.
Head hurt yet? Mine does.
It always does when I try to think my way through this stuff.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim