James Buswell IV

The Many Faces of Musical Talent

“What a great talent! Such a pity that he has never been taught anything about music.”

“This woman has some talent, but she has such difficulty in expressing what she feels.”

“Now that is a wonderful natural talent, but there seems to be very little sensitivity.”

“Here is a very hard worker who is an intelligent musician, but unfortunately he has no talent.”

“This fellow has a lot of talent but seemingly no desire.”

As comments such as these are bandied about by professionals and laymen, teachers and students—indeed by those who think of themselves as “talented” and by those who wish they were—the word talent becomes so hopelessly muddled that I feel inclined to dispense with it entirely. But then a new face emerges, with a musical utterance of peculiar strength, coherence, and beauty. Caught up in the fresh musical vision, and quite unconcerned with semantics, I find myself turning to a colleague and speaking of “talent.” We all are guilty of forcing this vast, noble, and complex idea into our cramped mental sets and into our stale and convenient dichotomies.

Members of the musical fraternity are especially presumptuous in drawing sharp lines between what can and what cannot be taught, while students of early child development struggle to distinguish between innate and acquired skills, and the science that attempts to deal with these questions is in its own infancy. And who is to say that talent by definition must refer only to qualities that are inborn? It would seem that all our skills, even those we are most proud of having strenuously “acquired,” are gifts bestowed by the Creator with or without human assistance.

It is decidedly not my intention here to deal with the age-old enigma of heredity versus environment as it pertains to musical talent. Rather I would like to share a few impressions, received during two decades of music making and only a very few years of teaching, that may serve to broaden and enrich the popular notions of musical talent. Surveying the fundamental areas of musical performance ability in a basically clinical manner, I find that as a teacher I can see each student’s profile of assets and deficiencies more clearly, and therefore teach more effectively.

It would seem self-evident that musical talent appears in three distinct modes: the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual. Yet it always astonishes me to discover that many musicians habitually, and usually only semiconsciously, think of talent as belonging chiefly to only one of these areas. Let me introduce you somewhat humorously to three contrasting musical personalities. Partly because of their early training (musical and otherwise), their dramatic youthful impressions of genius, and the later development of their artistic identities (not necessarily self-imposed), each one has allowed his perception of talent to become warped in a different way. When such a bias announces itself only in casual conversation it is harmless enough. Too often, however, our biases influence and limit the clarity of our judgment when we attempt to perceive and evaluate talent in others.

Meet first a musician who may have spent some years teaching students of very modest technical abilities. Each time he has the pleasure of instructing a physically more responsive student, he is overwhelmed by the far greater ease with which this pupil acquires mechanical skills. He is a little impatient with colleagues whose pedagogical priorities emphasize understanding before doing. Very likely he will put enormous stock in the age at which a student commenced study and will discourage an older student who is trying to catch up. To his mind facility is always an asset and is in itself glorious. Often such a teacher suffers from some physical shortcoming in his own art; it may be serious or inconsequential, but he is acutely aware of it. We are always most impressed by those qualities we think we do not possess. We tend to presume that our own deficiencies are in the area of talent rather than effort.

Our second musician subscribes often and loudly to the conviction that to be moved is really all that matters in art. One of my earliest teachers used to put it very beautifully. “If I pay my five dollars for a concert, I will sit down in my seat and appreciate many things about an artist and admire what he can do. Or I may disapprove very much of his sense of style, find his musical taste offensive, and question his breeding. But if just once I do this . . . ,” and at this point he would brush away an imaginary tear from his eye, “then I know that I have gotten my money’s worth.”

This musician rarely finds it possible to awaken a musical imagination. He tends to decide very early what are the emotional sensibilities of a student. If he finds them deficient he will try to paste on to the pupil’s personality a collage of expressive gestures that he hopes will masquerade as genuine expression and hide what he considers a basic emptiness. He is always attracted by a sort of expressive chutzpah that he feels must be at the core of musical talent. If a student possesses this, he will be uncommonly indulgent with him and tolerate massive lapses in discipline, energy, or taste.

Finally, we must make the acquaintance of a musician who prizes most highly the student who thinks. He is unimpressed by strength or agility when it is uninformed. He is turned off by expressive urgency when it is not molded by a sense of style. He teaches largely by abstract principles and is impatient with the student who fails to grasp them. He may actually become suspicious of facility as an indication of shallowness. This type of musician has often become intellectually oriented later in life and has forgotten what he owes in his own art to his earlier, more intuitive training. He may be in fact or in self-image a “redeemed virtuoso,” who stresses ad nauseam the supremacy of the composer and the selflessness of the performer.

I have intentionally exaggerated the idiosyncrasies of these three personalities for greater clarity and contrast. For pedagogical reasons it is important to differentiate the three areas in which talent manifests itself. When a teacher perceives a deficiency in a student’s natural ability, it is crucial that the teacher decide where to focus his energies—on the mind, the body, or the spirit. Often we associate an ability with only one of these areas, when in fact it has physical, emotional, ami mental components. For example, a student may be rich in one ability in its intellectual mode but be quite unable to demonstrate the corresponding emotional manifestation of this talent. It seems to me wrong to dismiss such a student as “untalented.” Some weaknesses will respond tp remediation much more willingly than others. But I refuse to allow the word talent to be defined as “that special composite of abilities that can never be taught.” Too often we make no attempt to teach because although we appreciate the outward signs of a talent, we do not understand the inner workings of that gift. In the following pages I should like to go into some detail in dissecting and outlining some of the discrete strands of musical talent.

Excellent coordination is almost invariably thought of as a purely physical virtue. Even from a mechanical standpoint, coordination is compound in nature. Someone with good physical coordination is expected to learn quickly how to execute simultaneously two or more motions that ordinarily occur separately. Conversely, we may expect such a person to have little difficulty in separating motions that habitually occur together and perform them at different times and under different circumstances. These connecting and disconnecting aptitudes are not necessarily equal in one student’s bag of “talents.”

Many violin students struggle to develop the high degree of independence demanded of the two hands. A string player’s hands usually do very different things, and at times they must feel exactly opposite sensations. If a student is very slow to learn such things, I may in exasperation come to regard him as uncoordinated. Then I will be surprised to discover that it is very natural for him to coordinate the unity of vibrato acceleration and increased bow speed in a good musical accent, and I find myself guilty of having made a hasty decision in just one small area of musical talent.

There are many other types of coordination crucial to the development of a performing artist. The precise coordination of ear perception, for example, wanders into a shadowy area between the physical and the mental. Many musical relatives such as velocity, volume, and amplitude or frequency of vibrato are mechanically or psychologically coupled in habitual combinations that must be uncoupled in order to realize artistic freedom and variety of color. Before this uncoupling procedure can take place, the ear must be able to distinguish subtle changes in these variables.

The performer’s mind has another complex coordinational responsibility in the heat of action. It must report on past events, monitor the present, and mold the future simultaneously. It has often been said that the musician with excellent intonation makes no fewer mistakes than one with just passable intonation. He simply reacts so quickly to his errors that he corrects them before most ears have noticed them. The greatest artist reacts also to the pleasing aspects of the past and responds with depth of feeling not only to what he has just done but also to what he has just heard. The performing musician must be both chef and gourmet. Reaction plays a variable role in, but is not the entirety of, the present in the ongoing musical stream. Superb attention and alertness join forces with carefully trained reflexes in the execution of each detail in the present.

Then there is the problem of anticipation. Many well-meaning conductors or accompanists seek to soothe or at least to impress the soloist with the words, “Now, please, be perfectly free, and whatever you do, I will follow you.” I have gotten into the habit of replying, “If you follow me, that means you will be behind me, and that is not good enough.”

Anticipation is more than a matter of ensemble with another musician. It is the total vision of the proportion and peculiar symmetries and asymmetries of each composition that a performer should enjoy, whether he plays alone or as a very small unit of an orchestra. I have worked with students who have outstanding reactive coordination but who anticipate poorly and are constantly being “blind-sided” by problems they never suspected. Peripheral vision is vital to the athlete; an important skill for the musician to cultivate is “peripheral hearing.”

Often the psychological timing required in the training of fine mechanical coordination is very delicate. I will draw again on the omnipresent problem of playing in tune. As nearly as I can perceive it, the mind must perform the following gymnastics within an instant: A new note is about to be played. The mind’s ear calls forth a precise image of what the new pitch should be, and the finger or hand sets up its own image of what the new note will feel like. At this point the mind dare not entertain the slightest doubt that the approaching maneuver will be successful, and the finger comes down or the hand moves with the utmost authority. Now the new note begins to sound, and the mind must execute a 180° turn in attitude. Complete confidence is replaced by deep suspicion. Before the mind is allowed to begin anticipating the next note, it must scrutinize intensely the note now sounding. If it proves even slightly false, the finger must react as violently as if it had touched the proverbial hot stove. But the reaction must not be one of repulsion but of a very specific directional attraction to a tonal center. Many quite sensitive students react to faulty intonation with a general vibrato, which creates a sort of smoke screen but no ultimate correction.

Like physical coordination, emotional coordination presents a compound problem. There are obviously times when an artist’s emotions must flow quite directly into the physical execution of the composition he is performing. A short, accentuated chord such as that at the end of the Paganini Fifth Caprice provides a natural release of emotions that have built up and, we hope, have been carefully controlled throughout the piece. If the performance has gone well, the feeling of triumph and exhilaration can be channeled directly into the muscles to produce an appropriately aggressive exclamation point. If the performance has “bombed” (rarely are there mediocre renditions of this work), the accompanying sentiments of anger and frustration will cause the muscles to produce a very similar kind of chord.

There are many other occasions, however, in which the natural physical responses called forth by a certain highly appropriate emotion must be intercepted and cast aside in favor of a very different set of sensations. The desired sound will be produced although the emotion and the motion may seem strangely incongruous. Again, some students have a wonderful natural emotional flow but have great difficulty when the flow must be diverted. Others are very good at compartmentalizing the spirit and the body, but when the two are called upon to pull together, they seem quite baffled. Very often a poverty of emotion is mistaken for great physical control. The struggle between body and spirit is intrinsic to certain styles of art, and operates on both the physical and the metaphysical level.

Most laypersons find it very difficult to conceive of the amount of energy expended by the musical performer. In scholarly pursuits a consistently high level of mental energy is expected, but the physical and emotional energy levels may remain quite low. In athletics the physical energy put forth is very high, but only a very few sports demand the level of mental and emotional intensity required of the artist in the heat of performance. The combination of energies expended during a two-hour recital add up to more than the equivalent of a full day’s work.

The energy output is not always obvious. Somewhere deep in the laws of esthetics lies the principle that a difficult task made to appear easy is in itself beautiful. This is decidedly not the highest form of beauty, although certain periods of art have seemed to think so. To appear godlike is not nearly as beautiful as to reflect God’s beauty. Still, most great artists do attempt to disguise to some degree the physical effort that goes into the execution of their designs. This disguise requires great control, and control requires additional energy.

Energy potential is definitely a significant part of talent. The physical energy demanded in musical performance can be thought of as the proper use of tension. Tension becomes an evil only when it turns mindlessly against itself and prevents action. This will be discussed further when we consider agility.

One facet of physical energy in performance that must be carefully cultivated in most students is the ability very suddenly to augment or diminish the amount of local muscular power being applied. On any instrument it is difficult to control the sudden release of tension required in a subito piano. A real sforzando on a sustained note is more complex. The muscles must wait until the last possible instant to build up the high level of energy needed for the sforzando event. If the tension increases too soon, a self-destructive tightness occurs because the tension is static. After the sforzando itself, in order for the note to endure beautifully, there must be an equally sudden reduction of energy in the musculature. Many students who have plenty of natural physical energy are totally unaccustomed to the discipline of using it in sudden, precise bursts.

Great physical energy does not presuppose great mental energy. When I observe a musician possessed of superior mental energy, I am always struck by his or her inventiveness and imagination. The mind of such an artist keeps poking around in the mass of experiential data and comes up with the most extraordinary parallels of idea and of sensation. A piece of music springs to life in his mind, animated by all manner of imagery, some of it useful in teaching, and some of it very private and communicable only through the medium of the music itself. If imagination and mental energy are not synonymous, they certainly are closely related.

The energetic musical mind is always eager to perceive and to illuminate connecting fibers between the musical and the extramusical worlds. Some musicians would have it that these fibers are of only coincidental interest, and do not lie close to the heart of musical experience. I would dispute that. Art must spring from both the theoretical and the visceral, from idea and from sensation; it must create new worlds while reflecting the world around it if it is to be more than just an exclusive intellectual game. But then, if the phenomenon of human life is presumed to be an intriguing and rather perverse accident, the lines of the argument must be drawn much farther back into the areas of metaphysics and religion. The reader may puzzle over the conceit of even mentioning such heavy subjects within the context of a discussion of talent. I am only bent on indicating here that one’s view of the nature of musical talent and, indeed, the nature of music itself ultimately depends on how one sees human nature—what it is and why it is. What for one person is a tangent is for another a root.

A high level of emotional energy is crucial for the performing artist. I often remind my students that it is not enough that they feel something deeply. They must also be able to project that feeling to every member of the audience. A performer is really a very peculiar fellow, in that he is not satisfied until he has laid bare his deepest feelings to perfect strangers, in the hope that they will experience them also.

It is partly for this reason that most artists have an intense desire to be alone or to be with only their closest friends immediately following a performance. The need for privacy is very strong in the wake of the extreme openness that is essential to a powerful musical utterance. The usual post-concert reception comes as a flagrant violation of this need. A leisurely meal after the concert with a few friends is so much more salutary, not only because it helps to replenish the body’s depleted resources but also because the artist can gradually restore and compose himself behind the more impersonal formality of eating.

We are always impressed by individuals who seem to have an almost boundless capacity for work. We marvel at their “energy” and use the word loosely. But this kind of energy is also a legitimate form of talent. It is useless and absurd to keep wondering why “exceptionally talented” people often seem to be lazy. It seems natural to me that gifted young people develop many skills with relatively little effort and have little reason to acquire the additional qualities of perseverance and endurance. Those who must struggle to mine and refine their talents soon develop an enormous capacity for work, which may become their greatest talent.

Agility is more difficult to define than energy, even in the physical realm. The word is often used to mean simply quickness of reflex. As such, agility is a gift that has certainly been distributed among humankind in very unequal portions. Still, one’s natural reflexes can be seriously hampered by several factors. Nervous tension and fatigue have well-known, detrimental effects on the reflexes. Whereas alertness properly understood is a virtue, some students’ attempts at alertness bring on physical tension that actually increases reaction time. Alertness is a mental quality that can be studiously cultivated. But to be physically alert is to be totally relaxed. I have observed quite a few eager students under pressure to do their best whose reflexes appear to be very slow only because their attempts at readiness and poise create great physical and psychic tension, binding the muscles and prohibiting quick response.

The physical agility demanded of the musical performer requires more than just quickness of reflex. A broader definition is “the ability to achieve maximum effect with minimum effort.” Many string players bemoan their lack of left-hand velocity and quickness and assume that it stems from some inborn sluggishness, or look in vain for some magical exercise that will increase fluency. Often they mindlessly expect their fingers to perform superfluous activities and to exaggerate many simple motions, thus creating useless labor.

Economy of effort is basic to the performing arts, both practically and esthetically, and native awareness of this principle is an important aspect of talent. Precisely for this reason the gifted musician often appears nonchalant or excessively casual. It may be years before such a performer realizes that economy of effort on stage must be coupled with thorough preparation and total emotional commitment. Sometimes a young artist already realizes this, and the teacher may be guilty of confusing a legitimate mark of talent with a lack of seriousness.

Alertness is only one aspect of mental agility. An alert musician notices things. To notice intelligently is to discriminate between subtle shades of color. An agile mind will then be able to decide quickly which shade to choose. Finally, if new circumstances render the earlier decision inappropriate, agility manifests itself in the ability to adjust quickly.

Let us suppose that in a performance of chamber music a collaborator executes an exquisite diminuendo. First, I must be listening with sufficient intensity and depth to notice that a diminuendo is taking place. Then I must be discriminating enough to perceive the slope of this nuance and other characteristics, such as subtle accompanying changes in vibrato and bow speed. Instantly I should be able to decide just what nuance on my part will complement the ongoing diminuendo of my colleague. Merely to mirror him is often not sufficient or even appropriate. During these musical maneuvers I may discover that because of the peculiar acoustics of the auditorium the proper balance among voices has been disrupted, and I must adjust my level of volume accordingly—but smoothly, not abruptly. Among artists of great and well-cultivated talent, these subtle sensitivities and nuances take place with incredible swiftness. The intimacy of communication that exists is really quite startling.

Musical talent commands the attention of the listener from the very first note. The mood of the composition is projected immediately, and emotional agility allows the performer to lose himself totally and unself-consciously in the music. And when the mood suddenly changes in the course of the composition, that talent permits him to reflect and project that change with gusto. Happily such agility of spirit is not found only in people of volatile temperament. In fact, the disciplined indulgence of emotions in a musical recital provides the healthy artistic spirit with a kind of release that may reinforce a calm and even-tempered disposition.

One of the most obvious manifestations of musical talent is a good sense of rhythm. This means much more than accuracy in reproducing the notation in a musical score. What is really meant is a good sense of timing, a sensitivity to the creative relationship of time to sound.

It has been observed many times that the body’s mechanisms of circulation and respiration give to every creature a certain sense of rhythm. One unmistakable sign of musical talent is the early development of a comfortable synchronization of the rhythm of breathing with the rhythm of the music being played. For the singer or wind player, this facility should develop regardless of talent. But even among these musicians, for whom the breath is the very conveyor of their art, talented students will quickly discover breathing patterns that enhance the musical line, while their less fortunate colleagues need to be coached phrase by phrase. Whereas the latter breathe because they must, gifted students breathe when the music must breathe.

Unhappily many students of the keyboard or stringed instruments may study for years before discovering that breathing has anything to do with musical rhythm. A despairing teacher may plead with such a student to “sing on your instrument.” The teacher knows exactly what he means. But the student may be unable to translate the teacher’s words into, “Breathe when you play, and allow your music to breathe freely and with regular pulsation.”

Without ever developing a sensitivity to meter or beat, most people develop a sense of rhythm within the fabric of their daily lives. Certain kinds of routines are powerful tools for getting a long task accomplished, just as a repetitive cadence in music can build a great climax. But the same routine or rhythmic gesture, if carried out mindlessly and past the point of its usefulness, turns into tedium or annoyance. In some cultures more than in others the way a person walks and the cadence of his speech grow out of a very personal sense of rhythm. In midwestern American English the prevailing spoken language patterns seem to avoid rhythmic vitality at all costs.

The young musician who cultivates a talent for rhythmic expression begins by learning to measure time. He then learns to relate measured time to sound. At some point he becomes powerfully aware that time is never suspended in music—not during rests or fermatas, or between movements, or even, in a sense, between compositions on a program. He may develop special skills for handling complex subdivisions of meter. Or he may acquire an exceptionally fine tempo memory. But these are auxiliary talents, useful but secondary. It is the continuous awareness of ongoing time and the need to organize it in some meaningful way that lies at the bottom of rhythmic talent.

Nature provides within us and outside us a means of organization in the alternation of strong and weak beats within the flow of time. An immature musician will perceive these beats as the essence of rhythm just as anyone may equate the ticks of a clock with time itself. But the great artist always feels the flow of time in between and through the beats, and he molds this flow to create a line. Then the musical event becomes a living thing, accurate in its structure, flexible in its development, and inventive in its proportions.

The musician gifted with a good sense of timing will also become a bit of a psychologist. He will learn to put himself in the shoes of his listeners, and to become acutely aware of how their perception of the sequence of events will differ from his. For the listener the composition is always being created as it is being played, and it must contain a range of events from the quite predictable to the totally unexpected. As an artisan the performer must practice the execution of each composition exhaustively to assure that everything will be more than predictable, almost automatic. Then as an artist he has the spiritually difficult task of recapturing his naivete by literally pretending that he is creating the work for the first time as he is playing it. The musical gestures that surprise the audience must also surprise him at the same instant, or the performance will be unconvincing and stillborn. It must become impossible for the audience to imagine that this piece of art has ever happened before. In the same way, the performer should feel that each performance is the first one, unrelated and quite incomparable to any other.

A young musician who enjoys this capacity will show little or no nervousness or stage fright. It is not just that he is self-assured or that he mercifully lacks self-consciousness. He actually perceives himself as a part of the audience looking on at the unfolding of a masterpiece. Since the performance is unique, there is nothing to compare it with, not even the ideal in the mind of the performer, because the ideal and the reality have become one. There is then no fear of falling short of a norm or an ideal, and therefore no cause for nervousness. After the performance, the ideal and the reality will often diverge in the artist’s memory, and he can then become his own best critic.

It is the last of the five quotations at the opening of this essay that appears to me the most absurd. I suppose that it would be possible for a person to possess all the talents discussed to this point and still not demonstrate the quality we call “desire.” But such a person has never crossed my path. In my experience desire is usually the foundation of the richly talented musician. It would seem to me that in any vocation the love of what one is doing and the need to do it are the greatest of all talents. The student who is accused of having “talent” without “desire” may possess some physical skills that are spectacular in themselves but are rarely integrated with corresponding intellectual and emotional strengths.

The love of one’s metier is ideally nourished by the growth of ability and proficiency. The mastery of a stringed instrument involves an unusually long gestation period even for the student of many talents. Desire that is not intense or not fortified by patience can be extinguished easily. But when desire burns brightly and accelerates the development of all skills, it is a beautiful thing to observe. It inspires the teacher and makes his task much simpler. On the occasions when I have had the pleasure of working with a student who has such a high level of desire, I have been convinced that this quality is talent in its purest form, capable of rising above a multitude of handicaps.

As with the other varieties of musical talent looked at earlier, this gift seems to have physical, intellectual, and spiritual manifestations that need to be distinguished. They do not necessarily appear in equal proportions in each personality. The two sensations—one tactile, the other aural—of producing free and open vibration and of receiving beauty of sound in the ear are quite separate delights. The very simple physical desire to produce and to hear a beautiful sound can be aroused early in a student’s development, but if it is stimulated late it always seems to suffer from an accompanying self-consciousness. For a violinist the sensation of feeling the vibrations of wood against shoulder or of horsehair against gut may become a source of pleasure at any level of consciousness. If this love of sonority becomes narcissistic, full artistic maturity is impossible. Quite a few famous singers blessed with outstanding natural instruments provide ample illustration.

Intellectually, the student of great desire is eager to comprehend and control all possible variables of musical expression. It is fascinating just to watch such a student listening to a concert. He may or may not be enjoying the performance, but he constantly scrutinizes and analyzes every musical gesture of the performer and of the composer, adding each piece of information to his own artistic personality. His face reflects first the instantaneous recognition and appreciation of something beautiful, but this is immediately followed by a questioning expression: “How did he do that (performer or composer)? What variable did he manipulate to achieve that effect? Under what circumstances would that be appropriate?” And most important, “How can I make that happen on my instrument?” For such a talent the musical imagination is not limited by the instrument the student plays. He listens to all forms of his art with equal curiosity, recognizing that the possibility of inspiration is as universal as the language of music itself.

The emotional component of desire is usually described as the need for self-expression. Certainly this need is present in every sincere artist. Performing musicians, like many of their fellow human beings, find the kaleidoscope of their experiences powerfully stimulating, and the emotions aroused find natural outlet in their profession. I have already referred to the peculiar proclivity of performers to share the full intensity of their feelings with anyone who will listen. Other people may feel this urge on isolated occasions but rarely feel free to indulge themselves. Artists are driven by this urge day after day, and society sanctions their self-indulgence.

But the greatest artists are consumed by a desire for expression whose object is more than self. The concert musician must submerge himself deeply in the formal principles and the implied emotions of the composition he is about to illuminate. (I scrupulously avoid the highly misleading word interpret.) He may dig into the mind of the composer. Sometimes this birthplace of a composition turns out to be a palace full of treasures, or it may prove to be a vulgar and tawdry hovel. A lovely flower may be carefully cultivated in one or rise from the debris of the other. Still, a performer’s immediate responsibility is to the flower.

One hopes that both the creation and the re-creation will be greater than either the creator or the re-creator. The progression of “desire” in a talented performing musician grows naturally from the affection for the instrument that is his tool (physical manifestation), through an affection for the composition that constitutes his medium (intellectual manifestation), and culminates in an affection for God Himself, who is in full the Creator (spiritual manifestation). Natural affections for composers and for fellow performers provide rich inspiration for this process, but these affections are by their very nature secondhand.

The true artist will choose his composition because it in turn illuminates something that is true. As he stands on stage, he will not be pointing at himself, or at the composer, or even directly at the composition. He will use his own hand unashamedly to point through the transparency of the composition to what he sees of permanent value beyond.