My fellow radical music educator Jared O’Leary wrote a pretty remarkable paper with a deceptively dry title: A Content Analysis on the Use of the Word ‘Talent’ in the Journal of Research in Music Education, 1953-2012. It got me thinking about talent, and what a pernicious concept it is.
The word talent derives from the Latin word talentum and the Greek word tàlanton, which both mean balance, weight, or sum of money. This sense of the word was the dominant one until quite recently. The use of talent to mean a special natural ability or aptitude derives from a figurative use of the word as referring to money, taken from the parable of the talents in the Bible. Talent has also been used in salacious sexual and underworld contexts; see Jared’s paper for the full etymology.
The big question with talent comes down to nature versus nurture. Sir Francis Galton coined the phrase, and he himself believed that “heritable capacities set the upper bound for an individual’s physical and mental achievements that no amount of practice can overcome.” While he recognized that training can enhance your inborn abilities, ultimately it’s futile to fight against your basic nature. Should we believe him? On the one hand, he was a half-cousin of Charles Darwin (you can see it in the forehead.) On the other hand, he also coined the term “eugenics.”
Jared’s survey of the word “talent” in the JRM divides the usages into three categories: talent as nature, talent as nurture, or talent as ability from whatever source. Here’s what he found.
During the first 60 years of publications in the Journal of Research in Music Education there have been nearly 400 uses of the word talent that met the criteria of this study… Of these uses, there appears to be a lack of consensus on the definition of the word. Although the majority of definitions implied the neutral definition of ability, the use of the definition that implied natural abilities was over 30% higher than the definition that implied nurtured abilities. This discrepancy between the word’s usages in music education is problematic.
Problematic is an understatement. The scholarly community of music educators apparently leans toward the assumption that musical talent is innate. But if that’s true, what is the point of music education for everybody? Jared points out that the nature model of talent can be used to restrict access to music to the kids who are already good at it.
If the phrase “your child lacks talent playing the trumpet” is said to a parent (as I have unfortunately heard some music educators and parents say), it could be interpreted as follows: Using the definition of nurture, or the neutral definition of ability, the parent could interpret it as meaning their child has not yet developed the ability to play the trumpet at the expected level and needs to invest more time practicing their instrument. Conversely, using the definition of nature, the parent could interpret it as meaning music lessons would be a waste of time and money because their child does not possess natural talent and therefore will not benefit from studies in music. How that parent understands the definition of talent could have a drastic impact on that child’s music education.
If you base your assumptions on the nurture model, then music becomes a matter of learned expertise, of skills that you develop and knowledge that you acquire. Jared recommends not using “talent” at all, and instead using “expertise” as our standard for measuring musical ability.
A change of terminology could prevent a problematic word from being misinterpreted from its intended use and help eliminate propagation of the false assumption that music is only for those who are born with a natural ability.
I think that he’s absolutely right. First of all, the nature/nurture debate about the origins of musical ability will never be resolved. There are too many confounding variables. Second, even if there is a meaningful “nature” component to musicality, so what? Life experience and enculturation are more than capable of turning the seemingly “untalented” into excellent musicians, and of grinding the musicality out of the seemingly “talented.” Whatever genes there might be in the seed, if it doesn’t fall in fertile soil, you aren’t going to get much of a plant. When you examine stories of supposed child prodigies and natural geniuses (Mozart being the paradigmatic example), you always find a history of rigorous practice and intense education, formal or informal.
As a philosophical matter, we should lean hard toward the nurture view of musical ability. Either it’s the correct one, in which case the nature view is a harmful delusion, or the picture is more complex, in which case erring toward nurture still makes more sense. We want to create an educational culture that values effort and skill acquisition, rather than trying to identify the “innately musical” kids and kicking the rest of them to the curb. Both my research and my observation of little kids teach me that every neurotypical human is born with considerable music cognition abilities, but that those abilities have to be activated by learning. It’s the same with language; nearly everyone has the capacity to talk, but learning how to do it doesn’t happen automatically, it has to be nurtured.
Music education as currently practiced in America has proven itself highly effective at scaring the vast majority of kids away from active music-making. A good step toward fixing this problem would be to disabuse ourselves of the talent myth.
Ethan, have you considered the alternative: Ericsson-style belief in minimal innate differences in ability to learn … considered harmful?
The idea has been around so long and seems intuitively encouraging: if you just practice hard end mindfully and deliberately etc etc enough, (the full 10,000 h please), then you too can become a virtuoso.
Now consider you do all this and you fail at the virtuoso threshold. What might have happened? Scenario A: you believe natural ability differences are insignificant. Your failure means, not enough practice, motivation, deliberateness etc. Your will failed you, basically. You try harder and harder and longer and longer, possibly to no avail. Scenario B: You believe you just “don’t have the talent” for this (instrument, activity, style, etc). You stop trying this and start something else that works better for you.
Personally I believe Scenario B has the more meaningful and satisfying outcome. I believe the negation of talent sets huge numbers of people up to try the impossible, to fail at it, and to blame themselves for not trying hard enough. This, even if the belief were true – because it takes a lot of dedication to reach virtuoso level.
But is it true? Exhibit A: Sports coaches and music teachers have a notorious way of only fostering the already good. I’ve suffered from this as a kid and it’s not a nice thing to experience. Still, why are they doing this? Probably some kind of history with students. Exhibit B: my own experience learning an instrument as an adult. In a nutshell, I tried a long while to learn guitar with comparable slow progress for my efforts. I accidentally started learning bass and progressed a lot faster (with all the reinforcement this entails). I quickly switched to bass and for good. These are very similar instruments, used in similar music, my dedication and effort etc were all very similar. The theory is the same anyway. Yet one worked a lot better than the other. And I concluded that I really have a facility for rhythm and note lengths, but not for chords and fast arpeggios.
“To be FAIR, here is my biased study supporting INEQUALITY”. The Irony is nauseous. @Davy why do you ask questions if you’ve already decided upon the answers ahead of time?
I’m glad you don’t dismiss the idea of innate talent entirely. Surely the existence of prodigies (not just the schooled Mozart) coupled with the fruits of musical education are proof that the concept goes both ways?
Show me a “prodigy” and I’ll show you someone who had some kind of intense psychological motivation to practice intensely for many many hours. It’s all just means, motive and opportunity.
Whether or not prodigies exist, the idea of them is harmful to everyone’s music education. I would prefer we think of them as they are: vanishingly unusual zebra cases, irrelevant to the way that we should think of music making and learning for everyone else.
Yes, of course they’re unusual, hence the prestige inherent in the word “talent”! And of course music education should be available to everyone on equal terms; I simply don’t think the notion of it should be ignored entirely, just as we don’t ignore young mathematicians with great aptitude and the like, who are rather rewarded with repute and scholarships. Et cetera.
On that note, perhaps the kind of determination for greatness you mentioned could be counted as talent in some way or shape.
I just doubt there’s anything innate in the prodigies. There’s always some kind of extraordinary pressure and/or motivation combined with a receptive audience. It’s like height — even though it’s supposedly “genetically determined,” your actual height depends heavily on childhood nutrition. We should be deeply skeptical of the concept of “aptitude.” Does it mean skills already acquired, or skills that might be acquired in the future? In trying to identify who would benefit from teaching, looking at people who have already done substantial learning is not necessarily going to be helpful to us. Better to look for ways to motivate students at whatever level of expertise we happen to find them at.
But what of artistic vision? I sincerely doubt “expertise” and college education is enough to create an array of Björks and Thom Yorkes. What do you believe makes these people different? Is it something completely unrelated to musical proficiency?
Creativity and vision aren’t magical qualities imparted by the gods. They are skills that can be learned, and unlearned. All young children are tornadoes of wild imagination. The Björks of the world have managed to sustain that childlike freedom and channel it through adult technique. You’re right that college education is insufficient for making a creative person. The environment has to be nurturing from early childhood onwards. Plenty of kids get their imagination ground out of them well before they turn eighteen. Magical thinking about innate talent blinds us to the ways that our educational system punishes creativity, and the urgency of reforming it.
I don’t recall suggesting they were magical qualities. If anything I’m worried that an oversaturation of Björks will ultimately render musicians and artists superfluous and disposable. To be fair, in empirical studies, not even all children are created equal. Have a look: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&uid=1962-07802-000