What is Talent?

 

Everyone talks about talent, but not everyone understands what it means. Of course talent is different depending on the field of endeavor. Talent for sports is quite different than talent in the visual arts, for example. I'm going to discuss musical talent, specifically, talent for playing a musical instrument such as the piano. Talent for composition or conducting would be somewhat different, and is beyond the scope of this post.

I believe their are three aspects of talent in music: ear, physical ability, and emotional depth.

Everyone would agree that having a great ear is necessary for great musicianship. In fact, the term "ear" is synonomous with musical talent. When we talk about ear, we are, of course, talking about the auditory cortex of the brain. If you have a good, or great ear, it means you are very sensitive to the subtleties of the relationships of tones and rhythm. How this happens in the brain ist still a mystery. It is not about the acoustics, or physical properties of sound, but about the "dynamic quality of tone," that is, the intangible (but very real) way that tones relate to each other. If this quality didn't exist, music would be just a string of unrelated tones and would have little or no meaning to us. (See my post The Cosmic Mystery of the Musical Scale for more about this.) As we know, just about everyone can hear music in their heads, and hearing the actual music being played aloud is not necessary to "hear" the music. Beethoven spent the latter years of his life completely deaf, but could hear everything internally, and composed many of his most complex works without the benefit of physically hearing it. 

Some people think having a great ear means having so-called perfect pitch (or absolute pitch). This is absolutely not the case. Being able to identify a single tone just hearing it without any reference point is a very nice ability to have, but it doesn't necessarily mean you hear relationships well. In fact, relying on one's perfect pitch could hamper one's ability to hear relationships between tones to the degree you want. That was true for me. I have perfect pitch since birth, and thought (and was told by teachers!) that my ear was great and there wasn't much more to do. I later learned, from my late great teacher Joseph Prostakoff, that I had a lot of work to do to strenghten my relative pitch. I still work on that, four decades later. (If you need clarification about this subject, see my post Perfect vs. Relative Pitch.)

The second aspect of talent is the physical coordination. Most people who do not play an instrument do not realize the athleticism that playing an instrument, especially the piano, requires. Although you don't need to run fast, jump high, hit a ball hard, and so on, there is still tremendous agility and coordination needed to play with speed, power, and accuracy. Just watch any video of a top pianist playing difficult pieces of Chopin, Brahms, Rachmaninoff and so on and there will be no doubt in your mind that great pianists are great athletes. In addition to that, there is the subtlety of control needed to play extremely soft, as well as a whole spectrum of other tonal qualities. 

The third aspect of talent is the emotional depth. It's the ability to feel the music deeply and connect with the listeners to convey that depth of emotion. There are many pianists who have the ear and the athleticism, but lack the expressiveness. Their playing may be dazzling technically, but it just doesn't move you. This aspect of talent is the most difficult to explain or quantify. Are we born with it? Do we develop it through life experience? It used to be the case that amazing young child prodigies who played with the equivalent technical prowess as adults would not be as expressive as adults with more experience. "They just don't have enough life experience yet," we used to say. Not so anymore. I recently heard the Junior Tchaikovsky Piano Competition finalists, all of them under age 17, and they all played with incredible musicality as well as technical perfection. How to explain it? I don't know. I think that the playing of the piano, time spent with so much beautiful and profound music, has given them the depth that comes with "life experience" in a shorter amount of time.

With my students, I don't talk about talent. Regardless of how much natural ability you were -- or weren't -- born with, you can still work to improve all three aspects of talent. Work on your ear every time you practice through playing by ear, transposing, and other techniques I have mentioned in previous posts. Singing improves your ear, provided you try to sing on key. Practice technique always, not by doing boring, mechanical exercises, but by choosing pieces that stretch you in terms of technique. (For technique, you really must have a good, or great, teacher.) And for the emotional/expressive aspect, always play with full emotional engagement. Don't be content to just "get the notes right." Feel the music in your soul. Why would you do it any other way?