The "Gift"

This latest intervention expresses -Gilda, forgive me if I say this brutally- exactly the cliché that I intended to refute with my article. How can one confuse a completely passive quality of the human body (hair, broad shoulders, green eyes, etc.) with a quality that develops through knowledge and that intertwines with creative ability?

Ease of intonation is certainly a basic talent; some are more gifted than others. But I challenge a person who is extremely in tune but lacks self-discipline and logical capacity to play the piano and face Bach's polyphony: in that case, intonation is useless, method counts much more, along with a logical/mathematical mind. I reiterate that music is a discipline that draws from an innumerable series of talents, not just one, and that even people less gifted in one or more of these talents can and have known how to excel in music.

Some examples for the skeptics, across various musical genres. Chet Baker, Antonio Jobim, Lucio Battisti had approximate intonation. Thelonious Monk had a very modest technique. It is read that Chopin's own performances of his music were anything but impeccable. Frank Sinatra had a very limited vocal range. John Coltrane managed to overcome heavy limitations thanks to total dedication; those who know him recount the difficulty of his progress.

I know some musicians gifted with perfect pitch (a physical quality of the person) for whom this talent has, in the long run, become more of a burden than an advantage. In fact, they have skipped entire important phases of exploration and deepening, becoming approximate musicians and much worse than many others who are less gifted.

I believe I have expressed my thoughts in a manner that was perhaps even too vehement; very cordial greetings

leoravera wrote:

Ease of intonation is certainly a basic talent; some are more gifted than others.

Exactly. A more or less great gift.

leoravera wrote:

But I challenge a very in-tune person who lacks self-discipline and logical ability to play the piano

Exactly, but I also challenge an unmusical person to go beyond just moving their fingers

leoravera wrote:

I reiterate that music is a discipline that draws upon an innumerable series of talents

Exactly. We don't create the talents; we keep them alive and use/finalize them for something, such as music.

leoravera wrote:

an even people with little talent in one or more of these areas can, and have known how to, excel in music.

That is the point in my opinion; it's the classic case of seeing the glass half full and half empty. I mean that in the examples you list below:

leoravera wrote:

Some examples for the skeptics, across various musical genres. Chet Baker, Antonio Jobim, Lucio Battisti had approximate intonation. Thelonious Monk had a very modest technique. It is read that Chopin's own performances of his music were anything but impeccable. Frank Sinatra had a very limited vocal range. John Coltrane managed to overcome heavy limitations thanks to total dedication; those who know him recount the difficulty of his progress.

you highlight the limitation but not the talents that served him to overcome them. If you look closely, there will also be sensitivity and musicality, which combined with great dedication and method allowed him to reach a certain goal that they perceived, anticipated, and desired... how? One would need to make an exhaustive list of the talents (including character traits) that each person utilized.

leoravera wrote:

I know some musicians gifted with perfect pitch (a physical quality of the person) for whom this talent has in the long run become more of a burden than an advantage. In fact, they have completely skipped important stages of digging and deepening, becoming approximate musicians and much worse than many others who are less gifted.

In reality, this is another "myth"; perfect pitch is only a facilitation, but what the musician needs is relative pitch... which, as it happens, can be constructed... therefore, method, dedication, sensitivity, musicality, etc... all contribute to reaching the goal.

leoravera wrote:

I believe I have expressed my thought in a manner that was perhaps even too vehement

and I hope to have integrated something useful for those who pass by, read, and try to form their own idea... perhaps also by doing some targeted further study

Obviously without claiming to persuade anyone

Eh, now it is difficult to intervene on all the things written previously. I will try to respond to all of them in a single discourse.

I think that if we are talking about gift, it is not that which makes a man a great musician, a good surgeon or other (they are supportive but not fundamental). The gift is something that comes before all of that.

The gift (as the word says) is having something without having made any effort to have it. This gift can be having perfect pitch, sharp calculation skills, or other.

Having this gift certainly does not imply the certainty that one will one day become a musician or a mathematician, and I will explain this by giving you some examples.

A friend of mine in high school was very good at mental calculations. He was truly a phenomenon and left friends and professors astonished, but despite everything, he did not exploit this innate characteristic of his and nowadays does something else entirely in life.

Then I remember an episode from when I was taking melodic dictation lessons. A child who was there for the next lesson would simply answer the points where I got stuck and had problems. I don't know if that child has become a musician today, but I am sure that if it had been only because of his ear (as was equally true for my friend's gift), today he too would be doing something else entirely.

Then the presence or absence of a gift, in some situations, can also be a double-edged sword. It can force a person to live a life that is not theirs.

"I am good at athletics and I must do this in life", "no, but I'm not doing so well in school... too bad, I would have liked to become a lawyer".

These are the typical phrases that a person might say who, when grown up, may find themselves doing things they don't feel are theirs, just because they stopped too soon, because they didn't know how to take a risk/dare.

Who knows if that boy/girl could have done something else in life and been happy, like that boy/girl who wanted to realize their dream of becoming a lawyer.

The gift is a precious thing and it must be guarded jealously, but not let it become a constraint. Furthermore, in life, one can also do one's job very well—another job, different from the one they wanted to do when they were little—and at the same time keep alive that passion that in youth they thought could become their profession as an adult. And well, even these people have a talent of their own. The talent of always finding oneself by doing the thing they want to do regardless of everything.

Hi Leo, I respect your point of view and I hope you will listen patiently to my opinion. You say that the gift does not exist but you admit that it exists in every human being anyway, "a passive quality" ....and why do you set limits on passive quality? Why should only hair, shoulders, body fall under a passive quality? And why not intonation or the voice, the latter of which, after all, concerns the body itself? Having a beautiful voice from birth is it not perhaps a passive quality? Do you perhaps believe that a person born hoarse, with a mediocre register and pathetic vocal cords, can through application manage to sing like a good singer? You see then that the gift is nothing other than that passive quality of the human body that you speak of. A child who is born and at 3 years old starts singing perfectly without anyone having taught them, has received a passive quality in the human body (as you call it), because they found themselves with this gift without any effort and without anyone teaching them, exactly like blue eyes or curly hair....it was in their DNA....I call them gifts, you want to call them passive qualities...ok, to me it seems like the same thing.....The gift, in fact, is nothing other than a passive quality precisely because it is present from our birth. To deny that the "gift" exists also means denying genius; does it mean that the very few geniuses we have had in the world are nothing more than the very few people who truly studied, who truly applied themselves, and who in reality had no particular gift and if they became geniuses it is only because they studied more? It also means that all others did not apply themselves to the same equal extent... But this is not true....I will never be able to become like Chopin, even if I study 30 hours a day, and it is this "never, never, never" that makes me understand that a "gift" exists. For Chopin, only 1 hour of study per day was enough (testimony from his father in a letter)....in short, we have these examples before us every day, how can the evidence be denied? I agree with you anyway on other things you said which are, in my opinion, sacrosanct, namely that talent or gift is only a beginning that must be developed into something greater through application and study, as Sisyphus also said, otherwise one gets nowhere. I also agree with the fact that by studying we improve and refine ourselves and even a mediocre person with application can reach a good level....but I doubt it without at least a minimum gift. I perfectly agree with Frank,...on the examples of the characters you spoke about, you highlighted their flaws and not their true gifts...Anyway, these are opinions....it may be that you are right.....the course of life will tell us the truth.

I am reporting this topic

www.pianoconcerto.it/forum/index.php?/topic/1307-talento-e-genetica

it dealt with a "parallel" subject

I would also like to give my two cents a few days after the last response. Unfortunately, lately I haven't had the time to be very present here on the forum and I try to catch up whenever I can.

Whether we like it or not, height, eye color, hand length, and any physical trait that we can boast about or regret was already written and decided in our DNA. Intelligence, which then splits into various capacities and forms, is also the result of a genetic component (even if its heritability has not been proven), but while physical qualities are more the offspring of genetic information, intelligence also follows—or perhaps mostly follows—a path dictated by the environment and the stimuli that this causes in the human being (These are not things I am making up; they are studies conducted by groups of neuroscientists, therefore so far I haven't said anything new or of my own).

A higher number of nerve endings does not necessarily imply that an individual's intellectual quality must be better than that of another physically (at a brain level) less endowed individual. All of this cannot be separated from the environment in which one is born, grows up, and more generally lives.

Analyzing why and how talent arises in people's minds is something almost impossible to discover. Just think that even today, many groups of neuroscientists "pass around" Einstein's brain to try to understand its neurological properties and weave together information from his life to understand how these also contributed to the formation of his genius. Recent discoveries by a group of neuroscientists in New York have shown that Einstein's brain had a much higher number of nerve endings in the logical-mathematical-deductive area, which made him a man of extraordinary abilities. Now, let us assume for the sake of argument that Einstein had grown up in a low-income farming family that would not have been able to afford his studies; most likely he would never have reached the discovery of special relativity and all the discoveries such as the demonstration of Planck's quantum theory.

Einstein's life, however, was favored in this sense: his father had a company producing electrical and mechanical machinery, and from a young age, Einstein developed mechanical models and became passionate about science. His uncle very often posed extremely difficult mathematical questions to him, which he solved brilliantly in record time.

To make a long story short, I think it is already very difficult to discover what one is most inclined toward, and it is not always possible to pursue a certain goal. Basically, however, if one has the intellectual and economic possibilities to begin a certain path, results will eventually come (the timing varies from person to person, logically); but to be number one, it is necessary to have that something extra and mark my words, I am not just referring to intellectual gifts given by a different brain morphology, but I am referring, perhaps even more so, to the overlapping of favorable situations for directing that human being toward the right path; the one written and most compatible with their genes.

... and can one not think that there is a strong link between individual characteristics (I don't like the terms "talents" or "gifts") and each person's aspirations?

I have never known an incorrigible tone-deaf person in love with music. During studies, especially the early ones, there were a lot of tone-deaf people but they were all forced by their parents. Just as I don't know people afraid of blood who aspire to be surgeons, or people who are bad at mathematics who claim they will become physicists...

I think that those who are "naturally" inclined toward music are better disposed to commit themselves with discipline to develop their own abilities.

I also fully share negativevera's considerations on the excessive emphasis on talent: 1) it does not do justice to artists who have "made themselves" by working hard; 2) it demoralizes those who consider themselves (for one reason or another) not very "talented"; 3) on the contrary, it pushes toward failure those who consider themselves "talented" and therefore think they don't need to work and learn: regarding child prodigies (an expression I find horrible), how many remain prodigies even as adults?

Beyond this, however, I find that wanting to link artistic qualities with genetic characteristics—if in certain aspects, especially of instrumental technique, it is correct (those with large hands find it easier to play the piano)—expresses, however, a deterministic and nihilistic anthropological conception. I don't know, it brings to mind a certain way of reasoning, Lombrosian, fortunately consigned to history (but will that be true?).

I fully agree with this latest intervention

leoravera wrote:

I fully share this latest intervention

Without taking anything away from PestaTasti, it seems to me that he has restated in other words a good part of the considerations that had already emerged... welcome.

Ultimately, rereading your writing:

This false vision of music as a "gift" is harmful both for those who would like to play and encounter the inevitable difficulties of the first steps, as well as for the musicians themselves whom it would celebrate; indeed, it fails to recognize that musical talent is cultivated over time with commitment, dedication, and sacrifice.

I didn't understand why you then dissented from so many opinions; I read on your blog content that in the end, with different words and nuances, everyone has written a bit... do you also talk about talent and study, or did you mean something else?

Hi Xenakis, many different opinions have emerged; engaging in a bit of controversy is a pleasant dialectical game, clearly we are all music enthusiasts. The differences lie in the nuances, or perhaps sometimes in the meaning we attribute to certain words.

Being very stubborn, I will continue to maintain that "talent" and "gift" are not the same thing, but I assure you that I don't take myself as seriously as it seems (someone has reprimanded me in this regard...).