Is music a skill or talent?

Music is a field in which the word “talent” is bandied about a lot: the world is full of “talented” violinists, conductors, and rock guitarists. Obviously no one is born with the ability to play the violin; like everyone else, a talented person must learn the instrument.

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Are You Musically Talented?

A lot of people would like to take their love of music one step further by learning how to play an instrument, but they are put off by the idea that they don’t have the required talent. This is a shame because, as this chapter will show, this “I haven’t got the talent” worry is irrelevant. The strange truth is that most professional musicians haven’t got any innate musical talent either. The word “talent” can be used in several ways, but the two most common reasons people use it are: 1. Wholesome pride in someone else’s skill. (“Yes, my wife and I are very proud of little Jessica’s talent for seal hunting. Here’s the club we gave her for her eighth birthday.”) 2. A peculiar combination of pride, laziness, and the bitter resentment at the unfairness of life that we all feel from time to time. (“No, I wasn’t picked for the team. My idle brother was — but he just has a natural talent for the game.”) In both cases the talent is assumed to be a gift that people are born with. They deserve a little bit of credit for it, but not too much, because it’s just the luck of the draw. Some people have curly hair, and some people have a talent for ice sculpture. Music is a field in which the word “talent” is bandied about a lot: the world is full of “talented” violinists, conductors, and rock guitarists. Obviously no one is born with the ability to play the violin; like everyone else, a talented person must learn the instrument. But the general view is that those with talent will learn much faster and more easily and become far more proficient than the pitiable untalented folks could ever be.

Well — I have good news and bad news.

The good news: talent is mostly myth. So now you can take even more pride in your heroes and children, as they probably weren’t born with extra skills. The bad news: talent is mostly myth. So now you no longer have an “I’m not musically talented” excuse not to start those piano lessons you’ve always thought would be pointless in your case.

But what on earth can I mean? Some people are clearly better at music than others. So if they’re not talented, what are they?

Let me tell you a story.

In 1992 a team of researchers in the UK decided to do some serious research into musical talent. Professor John Sloboda and his team investigated 257 young musicians who ranged in ability from those who had studied an instrument for only a few months and had given up, to those who were actively training to be professionals. Fortunately for the researchers, they had access to an accurate measure of the abilities of the individuals involved—the UK grade system. If you take music lessons in the UK, you are encouraged to take grade exams every year or so until you reach the top grade, grade 8. At this level you are pretty good at your instrument and capable of giving a concert or playing at your sister’s wedding without engendering cringing embarrassment all round. This is also the grade that is a requirement for studying at most music colleges. So the researchers knew the musical education performance history of 257 young musicians of different levels of ability, and they knew when they had passed their various grade exams, so they could compare how good they all were.

The subjects of the study were divided into five groups:

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The top group of musicians had gained entry to a high-level music college by taking part in a competition. These people were training to be professional musicians. We’ll call them the “A group.” The B group students were good musicians but they hadn’t done well enough in the competition to get into the college. The C group students were serious about music and had thought about applying to the college, but eventually decided against entering the competition. The D group students were learning a musical instrument for fun but weren’t considered (by themselves or anyone else) to be music college material. The E group students had started learning an instrument but had given up. It sounds pretty obvious that the A group of students, who succeeded in the competition and ended up training to be professionals, would, on average, be more talented than the B group, who would be more talented than the C group, and so on. So Professor Sloboda and his colleagues donned their computers and booted up their lab coats to look at how quickly the talented students rose through the grades compared to their less gifted compatriots. When they looked at the figures and interviewed the students and their parents, they found what they expected: the high achievers did get through their grades faster than the others. After three and a half years of training, the A group had, on average, achieved grade 3, whereas, in the same amount of time, the C group had only achieved grade 2. But when the academics looked a little closer, they began to suspect that talent was not the key to success. The numbers showed that, on average, the group A musicians needed almost exactly the same number of hours of practice as any of the other groups in order to pass the next grade exam. The average amount of practice any of the students had to put in to get from grade 1 to grade 2 was two hundred hours, no matter what group they were in. To get from grade 6 to grade 7 took on average eight hundred hours of practice. The average total amount of practice needed for any of the students to go from total beginner to achieving grade 8 was just over three thousand hours (although, of course, they didn’t all go that far). The conclusion was simple: the more you practice, the faster you become a good musician. The only “gift” the A group students had was the gift of diligence: they started off practicing more than the other groups and also increased the amount they practiced as the years progressed. This group started off doing about half an hour’s practice a day in their first year of learning their instrument, and increased to over an hour a day by their fourth year. The lower-achieving students started off doing less than half an hour and didn’t increase the amount of practice time much in subsequent years. (For example, group D started at only fifteen minutes a day and rose to the dizzying heights of twenty minutes over those initial four years.) On average, group A students weren’t especially talented; they just put in more hours of work every week. The results of the Sloboda study were confirmed by another group of psychologists, who carried out a study of music students in Berlin in the early 1990s. The researchers began the project by asking the staff of the Music Academy of West Berlin to rank their violin students into three groups — let’s call them excellent, good, and ordinary. The researchers then analyzed how all the students spent their time on an hour-by-hour basis and also looked into the history of their musical training. They found that the students were very similar in many ways. They had all started their training at about the age of eight, and they all spent about fifty hours a week involved in various musical activities. The only big difference between the groups was how much solo practice they did. The excellent students had, on average, 7,410 hours of solo practice under their belts by the time they were eighteen years old, compared to 5,301 hours for the good students and only 3,420 hours for the ordinary ones. These figures fit in well with the generally accepted rule that just about anybody can achieve a professional standard in nearly any skilled activity — from athletics to zoology — if they put about 10,000 hours of prac- tice into it (and in case you’re wondering, 10,000 hours is equivalent to about four hours a day, every day, for seven years).

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For those of you who were keen on the concept of talent and resent the idea that musical achievement can largely be attributed to simple, boring hard work, please don’t forget, this makes the high achievers more admirable — not less. When parents proudly describe the musical talent and potential of their beloved offspring, they are, without realizing it, actually talking about how well the child has already progressed on the instrument in question. They don’t point at little Henry before he’s laid his sticky fingers on a violin and say, “He looks like he would be a marvelous violinist.” They actually wait until the child has acquired some skills and then declare his genius for playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or “Smoke on the Water.” They seem to have forgotten the weeks of squeaks and all the hard work involved. The key to acquiring high-level musical skills is something called deliberate practice. The more deliberate practice you do, the better you get — and this applies to any skillful activity. But deliberate practice is not the same thing as ordinary practice. Ordinary practice often involves simply repeating something you can already do pretty well. Deliberate practice, by contrast, means that you are taking a step forward. You are doing something you find difficult — and once you have mastered it, you will be a step nearer to perfecting your skill. One of the defining characteristics of deliberate practice is that generally it isn’t fun—which is why excellence is rare. The film producer Sam Goldwyn once famously said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get,” and for musicians this could be reworded as “The harder I work, the more talented I get.”