The Importance of Early Exposure?

[m1469]

A 12-year old child prodigy of music (composer):

https://www.wimp.com/musicprodigy/

He's 12 and has written 4 full symphonies ... I saw/went to/(was introduced to the concept of) my first symphony when I was 19 (and living with a different family).  I went to my first Ballet that same year.  

He also studies at Julliard, and that along with being at an age where his daily needs are cared for by somebody else, he seems to be getting all the attention he needs to be able to focus on his music and to really develop.  It is said that "we" have objectively and factually not seen this kind of talent for about 200 years.  His compositions, yes, perhaps they are great (I don't know but I won't argue).  

I was composing when I was a child, but nobody really knew nor cared - not in the same ways.  I wonder what difference that makes in a person's career and/or musical development?  I wonder if it's actually objectively true that we have not seen this kind of talent in 200 years, or if it *seems* so because here we have somebody from Julliard saying it is so, along with a seeming setup of all the right things for this person who accepts what's being given to him?

Here is Rebecca Black at about the same age:

&ob=av3e

hmmmm ....


Am I less worthy of something that these two are getting (though they are not getting the same things as each other)?  Are you?  Can we seriously objectively and factually say things and think things like "we haven't seen this kind of talent in 200 years?" ... as though everybody else is dog meat?  Somehow I don't think we can.  

I don't know what to think, but I find myself thinking, nonetheless  .  What do we wish to be amazed at, exactly?  What do we wish to be enthralled with, exactly?  It seems we want that from our race ...  I am not going to "go away" or step aside or aim to stop developing musically or fall into believing it's too late for me (I can't) ... I am not going to "grow out" of the music inside of me and finally just grow up one day and be normal.  Are you?  To whom does it matter when somebody like me feels and thinks this way?

[Derek]

I feel like part of the reason there were so few genius composers and performers back then was a simple matter of economic conditions. Few people were privileged enough to even have enough spare time to develop musicianship very far. Today, perhaps millions of people can develop talent at music and many of those are probably geniuses in their own ways. The reason none of them rise to the top as a Beethoven or a Mozart is the lack of coherence in our society. We live in a globalized, noisy culture. But, we have memories of Beethoven or Mozart, so when a kid comes along who has freakish cognitive abilities, we get all hyped up about it. But does that make him as great as those men? I don't think so. not until he writes something that tingles my spine anyway.

Put it another way, I've heard plenty of musicians that the vast majority would not say are as great as Beethoven, but for me and my ears, they definitely are. But I'm just one of many millions of individuals with individual taste.

I think today more people have the power to be "their own Beethoven" than ever before. What I'd like to see happen is more and more people believing in their own creative ability and enjoying it for themselves. I'd much rather see that than see more prodigies held up with godlike abilities.

[m1469]

I think today more people have the power to be "their own Beethoven" than ever before. What I'd like to see happen is more and more people believing in their own creative ability and enjoying it for themselves. I'd much rather see that than see more prodigies held up with godlike abilities.

Well, there are more than prodigies who are being held up as with godlike abilities, and while I certainly don't wish to curse the youngster, I don't imagine his whole life will be supported in exactly the same way and will at some point become a different kind of challenge than *just* putting musical puzzles together.  

I think the thing for me is that I truly do feel that I would have developed much differently should I have had a similar upbringing as either one of the two I've mentioned here - but at this point I don't feel it's bad.  I am very grateful for my current teachers who I feel are honestly working with me and helping me to gain the tools that I need while I plug along in a life much different than the world has typically thought of as the ideal for musical development in the earlyish stages (if I compare it to these two).  I am also grateful for this forum as a means for musical interaction and this has helped me to progress in ways I can't otherwise imagine, considering where my life has "gone."  I certainly don't curse these things in my life and they have enriched it and continue to do so.

What I feel lately more than ever is the need to keep standing up for what I feel inside, and to not back off just because I can see that my own life looks very very different than many other musical lives, and just because other people merrily support musical lives which look different than mine.  Does that mean I'm being my own Beethoven?  Really, I just don't know, I have no idea, and in some way I don't care ... I can't care ... what happens is that what I feel inside just pushes it's way out and I find I simply must cope with that.  I have questions upon questions and one post and one question has often developed from certain lines of reasoning and other questions ... as is this thread.

I feel it's necessary to recognize differences in circumstance, while at the same time not allow oneself to use them as excuses to stop being oneself.  But, it can be frustrating.  Lately a new view of my potential life has come upon the horizon, and I find myself kicking against it.  Does it help to kick against it or is it just something I will in the end have to accept as my only possibility?  I don't know.  

What I know is that I have a desire to keep seeking and finding those individuals with whom I can relate inwardly on some level, even if outwardly our lives are and have been much different.  And, I just want the chance to continue developing ... I just want that chance, but I don't even understand what it's supposed to look like or be or what.  I just recognize the need to continue developing and I just more than anything regarding this, hope that I can do that.  It is different to consider it as though I'm talking about a child, when I am that person I am considering it for and equally responsible as an adult for the entire life-circumstances surrounding it.  Honestly, I can't say that I know exactly what other way I'd prefer it - but I do have some fight and wild in me about it and sometimes that's a little uncomfortable.

[Derek]

I'm having difficulty discerning from your post whether you're unhappy on some level with your present path in life or if you ARE happy but have this intense feeling you ought to be striving for something else or something more? From what I've seen of you on this forum, I think you've got a lot of things to be intensely grateful for. Your improvisations being a particularly good example. How many people dare to do that, and as intensely? For me, so far, enjoying that sort of outlet internally has been more than enough. I've struggled to some degree with whether or not I'd want to go back and do music professionally, but I think it has the power to make me happy either way.

I've bumped in to a lot of people for whom it APPEARS to be important that their lives impact or inspire a certain number of other people, but for myself I've always kind of taken it for granted that if I just do what I love and enjoy it internally, anyone else who might be inspired by it will just come along and share it with me without my having to push and shove my way to them. Does that make any sense? Or did I completely miss your point(s)?

[m1469]

Does that make any sense? Or did I completely miss your point(s)?

Yes, it does make sense.  Yes, I do seek to find others with whom I can relate - but this is not just a sense of wishing to impact other people's lives.  Though, in a very broad sense of course my mind and heart wonder just what impact each of us really do have on each other, but as I indicated in my last post I normally have questions upon questions and you could say that is a peripheral question at the moment.  

I know that it could seem like I'm being selfish or indulgent about this, and maybe I don't have perspective enough to see that I am and instead think that I'm not.  All I can say is that I'm not aiming to be.  What it feels like is a gnarly kind of beast inside of me who's trying desperately to just push its way right out of me and have a life.  I don't know how else to explain it, but it's not like "well, little m1469, if you could have any dream in the world, what would you wish it to be" and me saying "oh, I'd like to be a musician!  That seems magical so why not??" and then there I go living my life.  It's something different which sometimes feels as though it possesses me, and it's sometimes not a bit comfortable, bringing me to tears just to relieve the pressure.  This, I believe, not everybody experiences, or admits to whether they do ... I don't know.  But, "it" needs a life, I know that much, and I certainly can't just live with it all bottled up in there - it seems like it would kill me if I tried to do that.  So, indulgent?  I don't know.  It seems like a form of survival for me.

But, to talk about your first thoughts, I sometimes myself don't know.  If I could pinpoint it a bit, I'd say that what I want about anything regarding this, is to feel a sense of authenticity about my life.  I feel that with my teachers, and I feel that when I get to spend some nice time developing musically.  When a view comes on the horizon where it appears that I might just be stuck with this "thing" inside of me, not having a way out in a truly fitting way, then I get very concerned and scared.  That begins to translate to a sensation of gnawing and clawing from within.  Whether I am pursuing this as a "professional" or as an "amateur" or any of that seems like a surface kind of arrangement or label - and doesn't really mean much to the inner musician who's just doing everything possible to be heard.  

So, I am experiencing that a little in my life right now and it seems to push me into posts like this, and intense thoughts and feelings, and sometimes in a way that seems like a reaction to items I started this thread with.  

From my perspective now, I can't say that I feel like my life would feel authentic to me should it have gone the way I see these two people's lives going.  But, maybe it feels perfectly authentic to them (in whatever way they can perceive the meaning of that word).  But, yes, anytime I start feeling like I'm being put into a box, there goes that beast in me again, fighting like never before.

At this point in my life, even though there have been some pretty big challenges these past few years, I have learned through these years that how I feel right now is normally a kind of good sign and that I am probably not getting cornered in the way it feels I might be.  But, I have a responsibility to respond to what I feel inside if I'm going to see it through to whatever is next.  My life feels like steps and I feel as though I have to earn every single step of graduating from one phase to the next - whatever those are.  And I just know I can't "stay" in one place inwardly, however I don't know what the next step looks like outwardly.  I'm just trying to find that and this seems to be the process.  That is what my life has been like.

I do indeed feel grateful for the desire and ability (to whatever it is considered an ability by others, I don't know) to express myself (when I truly can) through improvisation.  But, yes, my inner musician certainly doesn't stop there - if she did, she'd never have stepped beyond the house at all.  I am forced to acknowledge that I also sing and I also play the piano, interpreting other people's works.  These, including the last one, especially, are very intensely part of me - what do I do about that?

Back to piano.  

[Derek]

What better way than to unleash one's inner musical beast than through improvisation? Maybe you just need to do it way more often than you have in the past! (but, I'm only going on what I see on the forum, for all I know it's 80% of what you do at the piano or more) Not that that'd change your introspective tendencies one bit, of course. Nothing wrong with that.

I believe I experience some of the same feeling you described, though possibly not to quite the same level of magnitude that you describe (the way I interpreted it). You turn it up to 11. I'm at maybe um...8 or 9? When I feel like music has to push out of me and I improvise. Hehe. It kind of oscillates, for me. "It" comes and goes. It's probably different for everyone. But it's really rare and wonderful to have an "it," where most people seem to just go through a daily grind, even as musicians. Having an "it" makes the journey of being a musician so much more rewarding. I actually think most people probably have an it, they just don't acknowledge...it. Or don't realize it is there. I guess yours just has sharp claws, or something. Maybe mine's a frog.

[pianowolfi]

There are composers like Mozart and Schubert who have the whole thing in themselves like a picture (or a huge score, or a huge pile of sounds) however, it's there and it's complete and finished and just needs to be written down. They have it there, finished, complete.
There are other composers like Beethoven, who fight for every single step, they work very hard for every little single achievement, sometimes fighting almost to the death. What is the difference between them?

For me there are more or less clear answers to this question. But I don't feel like posting about how I explain these things to myself, this forum isn't the right place to do so, I think. I'll just mention shortly that I think it can't be explained from our limited perspective, from that limited little perspective we are all used to be trained to think in, which is summed up in the words "Living in the here and now" or "living in the moment". Rebecca Black is one of the results of this mentality. Her only message (as she has perhaps been told by somebody): Live in the Here and Now, forget the past and the future, forget what you are as an individuality, don't worry about it, and don't bother, just live within the moment.
Of course nothing can be explained anyhow and anywhen, if the human being is treated as a mere coincidence of material factors, if the access to the past and future is denied by a dogmatic science, religion, or another system. Of course nothing ever, ever can be explained by anybody if we are still sticking to a point of view that does per se negotiate the value of experience, individual development and the value of knowledge.
Of course we as humans can not live up to our true potential if the voices that suggest our incapacity of knowing the truth shout loudly and noisefully (and unmusically:P )from every corner. But we can stop to listen to them and instead listen to the voices of our true potential.

I think you, m1469, are sometimes already something like a master at this, at listening to the voices of truth in you, and your true individual potential, at least I often felt so.

[m1469]

Many good points, Derek and Wolfi.

I think you, m1469, are sometimes already something like a master at this, at listening to the voices of truth in you, and your true individual potential, at least I often felt so.

I think this is true in the sense that I certainly strive, and when I'm not striving, I am certainly reminded by life to strive again.  The extremely tricky part is that I haven't got the foggiest sense of where in the world I'm going or am.  And perhaps that's what's so hard about it in general for people, because maybe inevitably it's a path untrod, or seemingly untrod, and I do find myself sometimes looking at the landscape around me thinking "where in the world is this?  What am I doing here?  How did I get here?"  of course, humanly it has a story.  But, inwardly, why did my navigations lead me here?

I feel like when we look at people these ways as with the two individuals in this thread, we are looking at their lives in a bit of a microscope and we focus in on one aspect, and let that decide who they are and who they will be from that little glimpse.  OK, sometimes lifetimes of wisdom can be caught within a glimpse , but if you look at somebody like Kissin, for example, who I read on here was expected to surpass any pianist before him and now is not considered to have done so.  Why did we ever want to put him in that box?  Why do I have to go in a box if somebody looks at my life right this moment in a microscope, which says I will never do this or I will never do that ... or that I will?  

I mean, there is a lot of life to live, despite the shortness of it humanly  .  

PS - there is an awefully good chance I am in the middle of changing dimensions in preparation for performing this coming weekend ... it kind of feels like that's what's happening ... so, don't look at me in a micropscope too much because there's somethin' funny goin' on  .

[m1469]

What better way than to unleash one's inner musical beast than through improvisation?

I think this is true for some individuals as well as for me sometimes, and it will be for me again in my life.  As it turns out, I am using this intense experience to more fully digest, organize and begin to utilize an enormous amount of information that was needing to move in this way.  I had felt a little bit stumped or resting for about a week or so, and yesterday after I posted here I found a path and now I'm moving again.  If I went to the piano to improvise yesterday, I think only pounding would have come out ... which, perhaps, has its place, but I needed something more than that.  Ultimately, what I am working on should help me with improvisation in the future, as well, so I have faith that there is more improvisation on the horizon.  This is a step of progress for me because it is a very new experience, just within this last month, to very consciously be able to organize intense thoughts (even an uncountable amount of them) and feelings and to consciously be putting them to use in a progressive and developmental way.  For now only my teachers will know more about it, but I think sometime that will not be the case.  I am grateful for this step (even if it doesn't make the news  ), though it's a learning process, for sure.

Thanks for your thoughts .

[ted]

If the title question is taken to ask if the musical exposure of our childhood is important to how we develop as musical adults, then the answer is obviously and simply yes; I fail to see how anybody could argue to the contrary.

The content of most of the thread seems to be about deeper philosophical aspects of music, which thankfully I have never troubled myself with. I say that not in order to appear iconoclastic for effect, but to state a fact. In the end I really do follow Aleister Crowley's maxim in music: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" Hence I have never been troubled by these issues. Put even more simply, I just create the sounds I enjoy. If this implies I am a happy pig and not a wretched Socrates, then so be it, it suits me down to the ground.

I concede, however, that professional musicians must, by the pragmatic functioning of society and economics, concern themselves with these things. Many people on the forum, and those in this thread with the exception of Derek and me, are to some degree professional musicians. Therefore it is disarmingly easy for me adopt a cavalier stance when I don't have to put food on the table through music.

The links between exceptional measurable abilities, prodigies and so on, and creative drive seem to me unclear enough to refrain from drawing any conclusions, other than that the lack of any specific talent or talents ought not to discourage anybody from creating music with whatever means he or she does possess.

[m1469]

Hi Ted,

Thanks for your thoughts and time in response to this thread.  I was feeling a bit intense when I posted and I know the subject is a little bit all over the map.  I'm still working things out when it comes to all of it ... sometimes I feel some form of settlement in my life, sometimes I really don't.  These days I tend not to, and I deal with that better on some days than others.  When I feel settled, it's really for moments and/or when I happen upon the mindset of turning my life over completely to a higher intelligence, and lately I feel so busy it's difficult to settle myself that way.


I think though, that all of this for me and what I am perceiving about the world, is centered around AN idea on what types of circumstances create ideal musicianship.  These two individuals strike me as different than one another, though both having certain opportunities to thrive in particular ways.  I know they are obviously not the only ones in the world with what may seem to be ideal circumstances.  My thoughts about that are always in the form of some equation in measuring my own life and my own upbringing, and even though that may be selfish to some degree, I often am thinking about this as it relates to how I relate to my students, other people in general, and how I would raise potential children of my own.

What I think I am realizing afterall, just this very morning, is that in fact there are not ideal circumstances -as like a template- to "create" nor manifest as a product, what could be considered as "ideal" music and musicianship.  This is a newish kind of concept for me and it is still growing.  This doesn't mean I feel inclined to go without particular aspects which I think promote growth and development in needed ways, but I feel yet another, deeper sense of not accepting an idea in the world that I can't ever reach something meaningful, or that I can't keep developing in the right ways.  Granted, I think my life just won't look like many others who are seemingly pursuing similar endeavors.  I am grateful for every, single gain, though, and more and more I value education and individuals who are willing to share their thoughts, ideas, experiences, with others.  It is important to value these things.  

I once talked with an individual who, musically speaking, had pretty much everything "lined up" as a child - you could say.  This person, at the time, felt as though if it weren't for the particular way in which s/he were raised, s/he probably would not have pursued a musical path at all (or at least not to the same degree).  Whether that means anything on a Greater level or not, who knows?  These days I don't feel intensely about stopping people from quitting, unless I see something very in particular about why they should instead keep walking forward and get through a bump in the path.  But, perhaps still, there are very, very good reasons my path has gone the way it has and is going the way it is going (whichever way that actually is).  As I have expressed before, I feel I was "meant" to meet my current teachers and probably a number of other people I have come into contact with.  Also, I am ... "happy" ... about some of the gains I've been having in the last three years ... to the point that I feel a sense of having items of true substance to be growing with and developing upon.

In the case with the 12 yr. old prodigy, being considered a talent that we haven't seen for ages ... while there is obviously something functioning in particular ways that is not witnessed everyday, this doesn't mean his destiny is carved out in stone.  Nor does it mean that even if he were "changing" the world, that others within the world are lessened by it.  It might be ... encouraging to learn about this person, but I don't believe that we as a race even understand what it really means to our race, nor do I believe we have a full enough scope anymore to think we understand the far reaches and corners of the world, and of each person's next step in life.  I believe there are many surprises, in many ways, still to come .