In his review, Sloboda concluded that demonstrations of exceptional musical skill tend to follow, rather than precede, attempts to encourage it.Winner believes the opposite, that talent engenders motivation. "You can't take an ordinary kid and make him so motivated that he will work in the intense way that a prodigy or gifted child would," she says. "A 'rage to master' comes with the talent."Early childhood experience is clearly important Most parents sing to their infants. Music psychologists have established that very young children "understand" music - in other words, they have an appreciation of some of its basic rules. They react to the repetition of themes and to certain rhythms and harmonies Problems begin to creep in as children get older. Sloboda reports that children learn to reject discords and unfinished cadences in their primary school years, but a discord in one culture may be sweet music in another.
Perhaps there are two sets of rules, a lenient innate set that frames the diverse musical conventions of different cultures around the world; and the more specific rules that are taught, either through music classes or implicitly through hearing particular kinds of music.If musical talent appears to be unusually heritable there may - literally - be a sound reason for it. The foetal hearing system is sufficiently developed by the middle months of pregnancy that an unborn baby will react to loud music.For performers, innate talent may be important, but so are physical attributes. Sloboda mentions the vocal tract characteristics required by opera singers, and the hand-span required by pianists to play certain works.But it is curious that some researchers are prepared to accept that these physical qualities, and even particular facilities such as perfect pitch, could be genetic, while claiming that the mental attributes must be learned. This may simply indicate that we tend to neglect the effect of that which we cannot see. In fact, differences in brain development have been observed in "talented" people, but it is not clear whether these are caused by the genes or by particular mental activity during brain development.Looking at composers may clear up some of the confusion Composers don't need to be any special size or shape. They don't practise, at least not in the way that performers do, according to Dean Simonton, psychology professor at the University of California Davis "It's not that composers don't have to learn their trade. But the correspondence between years of practise and virtuosity is relatively very high for performers."Contrary to what one might expect, Simonton has found that "the most famous composers actually had fewer years of formal music training before they began composition, and were composing for fewer years before they began producing masterpieces." Berkeley's case would also seem to argue for genetic disposition to musical ability: "I knew that I would write music, but I was unable to focus my mind and start until my mid-20s." How did he know? "Because everything I felt profoundly about, things that moved me, emotions, manifested themselves as sounds in my head.
I concocted wonderful musical landscapes in my mind."The Matthews' experience, perversely, seems to disown both nature and nurture "With us it's very odd indeed," says Colin Matthews "We come from a pretty unmusical family. We didn't have a distinctly musical upbringing, although we were both reasonable pianists. Suddenly, both of us were struck by a bug, the conviction of wanting to become composers." Composition is notoriously difficult to teach, Matthews adds "No two composers really learn or work in the same way. I sometimes think you're either a composer or you're not."Anecdotes aside, proper studies are now needed. General cognitive ability (shortened to g), is conventionally, if inadequately, measured by IQ tests, and is thought to be heritable. Earlier this year, a group led by Professor Robert Plomin at the Maudsley's Institute of Psychiatry published the results of DNA marker studies (a means of tagging genes in order to establish their influence on attributes) which suggest that a gene is associated with high IQ. The gene also correlates with mathematical and verbal precocity But this is not the whole story.
