Talent isn't special
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
People who don’t know a lot about me or music (other than the fact that music is hard and I am generally good at it) really love to throw the word “talent” around: “You’re so talented, I took piano lessons for a few months but I had no talent like you, it takes so much talent to do what you do,” etc. etc. etc.
Because I am too pedantic to ever allow my brain to just take the compliment, and I have done more research on talent than probably most people have, I often find myself a little irritated at these statements. There are a couple of paradoxical things I know to be true about talent:
The more I learn about talent (and ability, and psychology, and environmental factors, and just music in general), the more I realize I actually don’t have a definition for what talent is. It’s such a nebulous concept, and I’ve read different definitions of talent by artists/musicians, psychologists, and scientists. The fact that I can’t define it suggests it doesn’t exist, and yet it’s something I know and recognize is real. Like Justice Stewart and hardcore porn, I know it when I see it.
Despite my irritation at people ascribing everything I do to innate talent: yes, I am talented. It is not big-headed or egotistical of me to say and acknowledge that; through experience, observation, and a lot of reading, I know it is a fact that certain things have come easier to me than they do to other people, and that the natural ability I’ve had in some cases has given me a leg up.
Talent is not rare or, frankly, special. Raw, innate talent is everywhere; it seems rarer than it is because it takes a lot of happy accidents and just-right environmental factors—which are affected a whole lot by economics, classism/income inequality, institutional sexism/racism/other general biases—for someone with raw talent to find an area in which to excel, to then receive the careful nurturing required to attain excellence, and then to find personal happiness or fulfillment.
You can be talented at something and still be bad at it. Again, talent is not rare, and in most cases it’s not enough to get someone over the finish line of “being really good at a thing” without being backed up by knowledge and experience. All of us who grew up taking lessons and doing yearly recitals knows the pain of having to sit through listening to that one kid who clearly enjoys playing and does it with ease, but also hasn’t applied themselves properly and plays horribly unevenly or super loud and is just really unpleasant to hear. We’ve all heard that kid; heck, we all might have been that kid at some point. And, not to be mean, but every music school has a handful of people who are just so bad that you can’t help but wonder, “How did they get in?”
To get my minor in music history in undergrad I had to do one big research paper and I chose a topic that would have me tearing my hair out over how to define the words talent, prodigy, and genius. I specifically combined a historical examination of the upbringings of six recognized musical geniuses/prodigies (W.A. Mozart, N. Paganini, L. v. Beethoven, C. Schumann, F. Liszt, and F[elix] Mendelssohn) with current research on child psychology and talent.
You know, a totally reasonable, bite-sized undertaking for an undergraduate music major.
I found, in an academic book delightfully titled International Handbook of Giftedness and Talent, a list of common behaviors exhibited by musically gifted, potentially prodigious, children; the list includes but is not limited to:
interest in musical sounds
musical memory (e.g. the ability to hear something and sing it back)
perfect pitch (the stereotypical hallmark of musical talent—though plenty of super-talented musicians don’t have it, and research increasingly shows that perfect pitch is, more often than not, taught, not innately possessed)
improvisational skills
sensitivity to musical expression
Other than perfect pitch—which as I mentioned is neither necessary nor, most of the time, innate—doesn’t this list apply to…most kids? Does this mean that every kid obsessed with “Baby Shark” or “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is a potential musical genius?
…Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m saying. Most kids have the raw seeds of talent within them. Like I said, talent isn’t actually rare. What makes it appear rare is that a lot of it goes unnoticed or unnurtured: parents with no musical experience might not recognize these signs in their children; struggling families may not possess instruments or be able to afford private music lessons (and let’s not forget that, in America, music education is often usually the first thing to get axed when budgets are cut); even kids who are lucky enough to have music lessons don’t always get the supportive environment or knowledgeable teacher required for them to really excel; systemic bias means that even a clearly talented kid may not be recognized for their potential because of their identity (just ask any Black classical musician how often they haven’t been taken seriously), etc. etc. etc.
Warren Buffett, of all people, describes the importance of environment for talent really well:
I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can’t run very fast. I’m not particularly strong. I’d probably end up as some wild animal’s dinner. But I was lucky enough to be born in a time and place where society values my talent, and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the laws and the financial system to let me do what I love doing — and make a lot of money doing it.
Hilariously (to me), a lot of potential talent goes unnoticed because some kids just really like playing with their friends. Back when I thought I would go into performance psychology (long story), I bought a used copy of The Science and Psychology of Music Performance where the authors pointed this out:
More extroverted children will find periods of separation from their friends more difficult to deal with and may well drop out of instrumental tuition during the early stages, preferring activities that are more social and group-oriented. Clearly, some instruments make more demands in terms of practice hours than others before an acceptable sound is produced.
They then go on to point out that children to whom this applies may find singing “more suitable.” ZING. I knew I was justified in bullying vocalists! (Vocalist friends, jk jk ily.)
I could go on on and on about the very specific conditions that need to be created for talent to blossom into something more, but 1) I’ve already written a paper on it (and touched on some of my research in an article I wrote for VAN!), and 2) much better writers and academics than me have already done the research and written actual books on the topic. (Many of you are probably familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hours rule; the body of research on talent, particularly artistic talent, goes much, much deeper than that.)
And for those of you who are reading this and going “You’re telling me I can turn basically any kid into Mozart? brb, signing my kid up for ALL THE LESSONS,” spoiler alert, the biggest determining factors for whether or not your kid actually makes it in music are how much money you have and how many inside connections you can provide.
Anyway. I’m at the point in my life—and I realize how statistically improbable it is that I’m here and how lucky I am to be able to feel this—where I genuinely cannot tell anymore where my talent ends and where the work and training begin. Is an objectively difficult, virtuosic passage surprisingly easy for me (and I have to say, what an utter delight it is to find hard things easy! It truly never gets old) because I’m talented, or because I’ve drilled so much that my fingers are simply used to those patterns now? Is pouring emotion into a thorny passage natural for me because, as people have pointed out since I was little, I am naturally very expressive, or is it because I’ve been sufficiently trained to compartmentalize the physicality of playing?
Furthermore, there are aspects of my playing that used to be weaknesses, but that I’ve worked on so hard that they’ve flipped back around and become strengths. For example, voicing—emphasizing chosen notes out of the many I’m playing at any given time in order to create the illusion of a distinct melody—was something I struggled with when I was younger, but that I do unthinkingly now and am praised for doing well. Is voicing purely a skill I learned through work, or is it that doing the work cleared up my fine-motor control enough to do a thing I always had the natural impulse to do?
I’ve been taking the self-questioning even further and wondering lately, “Why is the thing I’ve applied my talent to even considered valuable?”
Don’t get me wrong: I love what I do, and my willingness to do painstaking work for hours a day for weeks on end with no immediate gratification clearly indicates that I have troubling masochistic tendencies. However, I’ve been increasingly realizing that I am really lucky that the type of virtuosity I’ve honed happens to be be highly respected because it’s a fancy performing art with high-class connotations.
But virtuosity—which I loosely define as talent manifested as extraordinary ability—is all around us, and whether or not we deem it valuable is totally arbitrary.
For example, I was gobsmacked the first time I saw this video of this woman making perfectly wrapped and folded dumplings with the fastest fluttering of her fingers and flicking of a knife:
This is how prepackaged frozen dumplings are made, and yet “This is the product of virtuosity” is never my first thought when I pluck a bag of dumplings out of the supermarket freezer case.
Or, have you ever seen videos of farmworkers harvesting fruits and veggies? I have, and they’re mesmerizing:
It is so ironic that farmworking is often categorized as “unskilled labor” because holy crap, this is skill! Watching this video, I can’t help but think, this is rhythm, this is teamwork, this is what so many chamber groups and orchestras are trying to achieve, and some of them aren’t even this good.
Or, have you ever seen what the workers behind the counter of any cheap food joint are doing? The first time I went to Lanzhou in London—a tiny, unimpressive, hole-in-the-wall, I watched the noodle guy take a ball of dough in his hands and then…somehow, noodles happened:
It honestly seems unfair that people ooh and ahh at my abilities, and tell me how special I am, and say things like “I couldn’t do what you do.” I couldn’t do what these people do, and honestly I think they’re just as skilled and special! I mean, my finely honed ability to wiggle my fingers on a keyboard doesn’t even make food!
“But Sharon,” you say, “these videos are cool, but making dumplings/harvesting watermelons/pulling noodles really fast is just a function of doing something long enough that you get really good at is—it’s not real talent.”
To which I say, does the distinction even matter? I’ve been living in my head and body my whole life (I know, can you believe it?) and as I said earlier even I can’t tell what part of my skill comes from talent and what part comes from repetition anymore. It doesn’t matter at this point: I can do what I do, and I’m good at it [citation needed]. The same can be said for farmworkers harvesting vegetables in record heat, or low wage workers churning out packaged lunches.
We are absolutely swimming in talent and virtuosity—it feeds us, clothes us (I picked all food-related videos, but I am just as astonished by the virtuosity of garment workers making our cheap T-shirts), and keeps all our conveniences of daily modern life going. And the more I realize this, the more I’m weirded out by it. Whatever you want to call this application of human potential—talent, skill, virtuosity, whatever—it’s not rare and it takes many forms. Unfortunately, if the form happens to be utilitarian, it’s just not valued.
Of course, I can’t possibly explain all of this when someone at a party says “Wow, you’re so talented” (and that isn’t even getting into the fact that our modern conceptions of talent and genius are a relatively new phenomenon from the 19th century)—so instead of all of this [gestures] I just say, “Oh, thanks.”
Let’s get philosophical about sandwiches (and the teeth we eat them with)
I sent this Guardian deep-dive about Great Britain’s sandwiches to a lot of people, including everyone I’ve had the “is a hot dog a sandwich” debate with. It’s a surprisingly beautiful journey through history, economics, and even a little bit of philosophy.
One of the great strengths of the sandwich over the centuries has been how naturally it grafts on to our lives, enabling us to walk, read, take the bus, work, dream and scan our devices at the same time as feeding ourselves with the aid of a few small rotational gestures of wrist and fingers. The pinch at the corner. The sweep of the crumbs.
But just because something seems simple, or intuitive, doesn’t mean that it is. The rise of the British chilled sandwich over the last 40 years has been a deliberate, astonishing and almost insanely labour-intensive achievement. The careers of men and women like Roger Whiteside have taken the form of a million incremental steps: of searching for less soggy tomatoes and ways to crispify bacon; of profound investigations into the molecular structure of bread and the compressional properties of salad. In the trade, the small gaps that can occur within the curves of iceberg lettuce leaves – creating air pockets – are sometimes known as “goblin caves”. The unfortunate phenomenon of a filling slumping toward the bottom of a sandwich box, known as a skillet, is “the drop”. Obsessed by perfection and market share, the sandwich world is, unsurprisingly, one beset by conditions of permanent and ruthless competition. Every week, rival sandwich developers from the big players buy each others’ products, take them apart, weigh the ingredients, and put them back together again. “It is an absolute passion,” one former M&S supplier told me. “For everybody. It has to be.”
I also really enjoyed this ultra-fascinating article in WaPo that starts out talking about the blindingly white, unnaturally straight veneers that every celebrity (and wannabe celeb) seems to be getting, and then gets to the heart of the matter:
All of these altered smiles […] seen one after the other after the other, start to take on a vaguely ominous bent. These perfect, inhuman teeth embody a phenomenon that I am calling “hotness creep.”
Hotness here is emphatically not about beauty — which is rooted in nature and often results from an unexpectedly pleasing assembly of imperfections — and it’s not about being sexy: messy, raw and alive. Hotness, by this definition, cannot be achieved through regular means, e.g. a combination of genetic luck, fitness and nutrition; hotness here must be bought and rigorously maintained through laborious, expensive and possibly dangerous upkeep.
Hotness creep is about that algorithmic tug toward sameness. Hotness creep is aggressively bland. Hotness creep is to actual beauty what ChatGPT is to literature. Hotness creep is a body whose every facet has been “optimized” through a cosmetic, capitalist intervention, which is why its most high-profile practitioners look less like people than android-esque approximations of people, as if they are wearing a filter full-time. Hotness creep is why everybody traded in their natural bone structure for “Instagram face.” Hotness creep is a face that doubles as a proof of purchase. Hotness creep is why so many nepo babies look like yassified versions of their parents. It’s appealing the same way a McMansion is appealing — a house that does not look “good” but does look expensive and, crucially, like every other McMansion.
Stuff I’m Listening To
If you, like me, spent the mid-to-late 2010s traversing emerging adulthood, then Icona Pop’s “I Love It” was an ANTHEM.
Their new album, Club Romantech, is a very different vibe; it’s significantly clubbier, but…I Love It. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
There have been multiple days I’ve woken up and just had to listen to “Desire.”
Similarly I really love “Faster” and “Stick Your Tongue Out” and, to my surprise, the marginally chiller “Stockholm at Night” has really become one of my favorites.
The whole album is really great for getting my energy up, though it’s not the type of thing I want to put on for hours on end.
I’ve also been listening to Rita Ora’s new album, You & I, which is a lot less frenetic (and therefore more conducive to repeat listening). My favorite track might be “Shape of Me” which I suspect I just really like for the simple tonic-to-dominant scalar hook and the draggy snare drum.
(I have come to realize that, on any given pop album, my favorite track is always going to be the one where the melody leans heavily on scale degrees 1 and 5, especially if there’s a strong 5-1/so-do moment, and I am just waiting for someone to call me out on my very predictable and simplistic taste.)
I was also stoked to see the other day that the LA Phil has released a recording of Arturo Márquez’ violin concerto Fandango, which I heard premiered in 2021 by Anne Akiko Meyers with Dudamel conducting. It was an electrifying piece to hear live and it happily translates very well to the recorded medium.
There isn’t, afaik, video of the whole thing, but Meyers did perform the final movement at the Hollywood Bowl last year and you can watch it to get a little sense of what it was like to see live:
I’ve just been listening to the whole piece over and over again; it’s one of those pieces that is just so appealing and fun. The harmonic structure of the first movement’s main theme is also so reminiscent to me of the Piazzolla tangoes and, well, we all know how I feel about those.
I also really love hearing/watching a violinist just go absolute ham; it’s why I’ve always loved the everloving crap out of Pablo Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, played here by Itzhak Perlman:
It’s clearly an unbelievably fun piece to play (especially the bit that starts around 7:50)—that’s the thing about technically demanding virtuosic works: if you’ve got the chops, playing them is some of the most goddamn fun you will ever have in your life, 10/10 would recommend. (Like, when I played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, I opted for the harder version, partly so I could say I did, but also because the harder it is to play, the funner it is. It’s science.)
I do get a little FOMO about the fact that I have never been and likely never will be good enough on violin to saw it up on Zigeunerweisen (those left hand pizzicatos, man!), so I guess I’ll just have to suck it up and accept that I will only ever know what “fingers go brr” feels like on the piano. (Oh, woe is me.) 🎹