Its a spectrum. Mozart was a prodigy at 6. Most people are average, and almost everyone who is good practiced for years, but the people who are really good no doubt had some natural gift.
You really can work your way into being a musical genius with an instrument. It just takes a lot of work. I actually like playing instruments for that reason. It's one of the few things where hard work has actual, measurable outcomes on time scales that you can observe.
I switched from violin to voice and found more success with less effort.
But there’s still a starting point and ceiling in intrinsic ability.
I’m curious why you think there’s no difference in inherent abilities? Some people are more “naturally” skilled at some things than others, at a baseline. You can look to see examples of this everywhere.
That doesn’t negate the dedication/sweat/tears of people who have high skill, but many of those people also started several miles ahead.
I really love the “brief moments” part too. I believe growth (maturation, skill improvement, etc.) happens in discrete moments that is then reinforced by practice (or lost by the lack thereof).
> stuck at some ceiling… next step forward
Then they weren’t at their ceiling :) they were at a local minimum of optimization. And getting out of a local minimum is insanely rewarding, regardless of the skill.
And maybe you’re right - maybe there is no hard ceiling. But there are learning rates and diminishing returns involved. It might take me 10x longer to get from the 95% percentile than 96% percentile, and then 100x to get to 96.5%. (Obviously percentiles are quite abstract for art). Maybe we can always improve given the right practice and guidance, even if the improvement is marginal. I just define the marginal returns area as a “ceiling”.
But… all of this can co-exist with “natural” baselines of talent.
I hate to admit that I will never be as “good” of a pianist as Martha Argerich… but I just won’t be, no matter how much I practice. I also will never be able to run as fast as Noah Lyles, no matter how much I train.
And that’s ok.
I think there is a tendency to fight back against the idea of natural talent/skill because this idea can diminish the extreme hard work it takes to hone and develop talent.
Noah Lyles could outrun 99% of us without training, but he had to dedicate his life to beat the last 1%. Most people probably don’t realize/understand how much dedication it takes to climb that final mountain.
But “inherent” talent is still a real thing. If we knew “why”.
My final thought is that high baselines can often be counterproductive for growth. Anyway, thanks for chatting about this with me.
Work is great, but hard work doesn't yield the same reward to everyone on every instrument. Geniuses did hard work, but they often needed less at every step along the way. That means they advanced faster with the same effort. But that's okay! Learning an instrument for music's sake is a joy.
Anybody can learn an instrument well enough to enjoy it. They can probably learn it well enough to play in a community orchestra. They can learn it well enough to appreciate what the pros do.
I could practice technical skill on an instrument to literally no end but ultimately anything I did outside of a several second stretch by myself was completely disoriented due to a total and complete inability to maintain a tempo even when it's provided to me.
So for me there is just a hard ceiling on my ability to ever perform. I could probably do better with digital music production if I invested the time and energy into it but I'll always have the handicap that I have and knowing that it's hard to even want to invest the time and energy into trying yet another path into music where I'll likely fall flat on my face again.
She stressed how important it was to record myself and listen back, in fact she encouraged me to do it for hours at a time. The immediate reaction the first few days of trying this was "holy crap, not only am I pitchy and can't hear it naturally, I'm constantly slowing down and speeding up like +/- 10bpm."
The experience was so distressing that I tried to quit my next lesson, but she pushed back with "Hey if you can hear it, you can fix it. It won't be tomorrow, or next week, or even next month. It could take a year. Improvement happens little by little. And I guarantee you'll see progress as it happens. But you have to put in the work."
After a few weeks of working up to it, I settled into a pattern of spending ~3-5 hours most weeknights in the darkness of my closet, recording myself playing Beatles songs along with an acoustic guitar into a 4-track. Usually just going back and forth over 4-8 bars of a song for 30 minutes, then 30 minutes another section, really just focusing on a couple songs like that. Toward the end of the session I'd attempt several full run throughs, get super frustrated (over increasingly minor issues), and end the session.
And she was right, by about the third month I was comfortable enough to perform in front of the person I was seeing, and by month five, I could get through a song with barely any mistakes, maybe one out of three chances. By the ninth month, after a 15 minute warmup, I could get through a 3 song stretch with just minor errors, enough not to totally embarrass myself at an open mic night.
At that point I felt I hit my goal and took a break from lessons. Never did an open mic night. Continued practicing a bit in my closest, but after a month or two I stopped as well.
And here 20 years later, my rhythm actually is pretty solid... I've been a consistent bedroom guitarist, and routinely record myself, and sometimes I don't bother with a metronome because it sounds that consistent. That said, I stopped singing and that ability is completely gone. But I am starting a similar process learning classical guitar.
So I go back to that original bit of advice with just about anything I try to tackle now... if you're self-aware of your issues, and can actually critically hear them in a recording, then there is a path forward.
But also fwiw I'm so bad at tempo that even my heart can't hold a tempo.
So I'll definitely give it a shot but I'm pretty doubtful I'll ever meaningfully maintain a pace or tempo.
Just start small, record 4 bars of something, play it back. Use a metronome to gauge the actual amount of drift. See if you can hear what the metronome is telling you. Try to improve it with a few more attempts, then call it a day.
Try again after a good night's rest. Over time you should be able to naturally feel when you're slowing down or speeding up.
My experience tells me that one can spend years at an instrument and still lack the fundamental capacity to be an artist.
I've spent years playing different instruments. I'm pretty good at it, I can get proficient at new instruments pretty quickly. However, my ability tops out at reproducing music. There's a fundamental creative spark, some subtly different neurology, that allows some people to create art, to express the intangible through music. I don't have that. I simply can't connect with music or art the way an artist does. I see the mechanics underneath and that's as far as my brain goes.
It's incredibly silly to assert anyone can study into a master musician. There is such a thing as innate talent that simply can't be acquired, and that talent is the thing that makes an artist.
Conversely, as an engineer, I do have that talent. It's been obvious my entire life, the same way an artist's talent becomes obvious early on. The way I approach problems is fundamentally different from the way someone who simply studied thinks about things. It's a fundamentally different way of thinking and experiencing the world.
Look around you at the varied shapes and sizes and varieties of humans. Some humans are natually huge and powerful, some are small and nimble. A 4'8 ballet dancer can't "just" learn to be a 6'4 bodybuilder, physiology just doesn't work like that. Small humans can't get big, and big humans can't get small. Big humans are stronger than small ones, and small humans can never get as strong as big ones.
Why is it unthinkable for humans to be different on the inside? If our outward physiology is so wildly varied, why is it impossible for internal physiology and neurology to be exactly as varied between individuals?
Innate talent exists. Everyone has different mixes of talent, and not all of them can be learned. There's nothing wrong with admitting that. It's part of the beauty of the human species. And realistically our species wouldn't have evolved to this point without a wide mix of specialized individuals.
Claiming that everyone can be Mozart if they just work harder really cheapens the whole thing. That implies talent is interchangeable with effort, and it definitely is not. If you can work past that childish crutch, you can see the awe in a human who was born to do something at the very highest level.